This reminds me of Laurence Gonzales’ book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. Much of survival is based on perception of the situation, and taking responsibility for it rather than placing blame and complaining about life being unfair. Can one become mentally strong? I would guess that some people sometimes can, but I’ll resist being anecdotal about that. 

What I find in her article is that a person without useful tools coming into this will likely founder badly. One needs to be already limiting 24-hour news, have a history of managing emotions and trauma, be able to discern truth from fantasy, and so on. I am unsure though if I agree these things are proof of the concept of ‘mental strength”. I don’t know what mental strength is. 

As we progress into worse days with this pandemic it will be telling to see what happens as numerous false narratives become just to obviously untrue for people to continue feigning faith in; can our president keep rewriting his weekly failings fast enough to maintain his illusion of truth? Well, for some, probably. I am still trying to figure out how guns and cammo on the steps of capitals can fight a war against people isolating at home, or shoot a virus dead. Is mental weakness the norm?
Peter


Peter Lloyd Jones
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Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart. 



On Apr 22, 2020, at 10:27 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi List,
 
 FYI, here is the most popular blog on PT. 
 
As those who know the Unified Framework know, I tend to have mixed feelings about positive psychology and prescriptions for happiness. But I do think that the recent framing that is evident in this blog in terms of character adaptation that tends to be associate with anti-fragile resilience is reasonable. That is, I am generally fine with the basic frame of trying to teach people what “mentally strong” (i.e., resilient, anti-fragile, not overly reactive or easily overwhelmed). As such, I am sharing it here and welcome considerations.

Best,
Gregg 
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