Here's the Bright Side

'Tis the season to be jolly, merry, happy, grateful and it turns out that you have a better shot at all of the above if something awful has happened to you.

I know this to be true because of personal experience and science. I'll get to the science in a minute, but first the personal part: I woke up one morning and realized I was happy. This struck me as weird. Not that I didn't have all kinds of things to be happy about--love, work, good health, enough money, the usual happy-making stuff. The weird part is, when I thought about it, I realized that the source of my happiness was, of all things, cancer--that cancer had everything to do with how good the good parts of my life were.

When I thought about it more--and looked into it and started talking to other people--survivors, not only of cancer but of various other of life's infinite variety of bum raps--failure, divorce, illnesses and reversals of all kinds--it turned out I was not alone. It turns out there is often--it seems very often--an astonishingly bright side within darkness. People more than survive bum raps: they often thrive on them. There are even studies, scientific studies (who knew?) which show that people often say they have benefited from the terrible things that have happened to them.

My favorite personal benefit is that cancer improved my taste in men. Having been one of those women who found un-nice men attractive, cancer caused a psychological flip-flop. Now that life had given me a kick in the pants, I found myself gravitating towards men who could win prizes at being nice. (Having married one of them twenty-eight years ago, by the way, I have been living happily ever after.)

But the benefits from bum raps don't stop with better husbands. According to a recent UCLA study of breast cancer survivors, women reported having closer family relationships, a new appreciation of life, a sunnier outlook on just about everything, a feeling, perhaps for the first time of being entitled to put one's own needs first.

Other researchers--to their surprise--have found similar results with other catastrophes, ranging from natural disasters to chronic illness. Susan Folkman at the University of California, San Francisco, found in her studies of AIDS patients that there was "a far more positive mood than negative." And "Youngsters who experienced Hurricane Floyd emerged feeling better about their own competency than they had before."

Not to be confused with the power of positive thinking, the bright side that I'm talking about has to do with finding the good--whether it's as big as a barn or as small as a pea--within the bad and proceeding from there. And as they proceed from there, "people grow resources and gain skills, wisdom, strength they didn't know they had," Folkman says. "They review priorities; they have new meaningful goals; they live more in the moment."

I do suspect the ability to find the prize--the bright side--has at least partly to do with one's nature. And one's nature has partly to do with one's parents' natures. In my own case, for example, I happened to have a mother whose glass was chronically half full. It wasn't that she was an optimist. She didn't expect things to turn out well. She thought they had turned out well.

But even if you don't start out with a positive nature, it's still mighty pleasant to have escaped from what might have been The End. As in: the end of marriage equals the end of happiness; the end of a job means the end of self-esteem. Cancer means The End, period. NOT!

So for all of us lucky folks who have had bricks drop on our heads and lived to tell the tale, it's the season to be jolly. And then some.