Researchers have located a new tribe! People who find themselves in very tough places in life, yet they don’t just survive. They actually thrive!

Who are these folks? Maybe they’re like that woman we sing about in “Delta Dawn,” sweet but addled… “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you’ve got on?” Or like Forest Gump with his “life is a box of chocolates”? Or maybe like one of the Sisters of Mercy carrying on Mother Teresa’s work around the world? No, this tribe are just normal folk who are sensible, awake, uncompromisingly honest. So what makes them different?

Well, let’s start with how thrivers approach life: as students and philosophers, not as patients, victims or even warriors. If thrivers are students, what are they studying? If they are philosophers, what do they philosophize about? 

Thrivers come up with new ways to view a situation they have found themselves in during difficult times. They learn to apply a new explanatory system to what happens to them, creatively disputing default ways of thinking and inventing new views of the situation. They think like philosophers, asking questions such as, “How can I make sense of this? What can now, in this circumstance, give my life meaning?” Thrivers reflect on where they find themselves at this present moment. They know absolutely that it is in their power to construe-explain, interpret, translate, define-what happens to them in life. And only in their power.

• Flight
• Fight
• Relax, think, and wait
• Connect and relate

Thrivers know that they don’t have just the typical fight and flight responses available to them, but also a third kind of response: relax, wait, think, listen, focus. Many of them also know about and practice a fourth response: connect and relate. Thrivers know they can create a context for their situation by using their innate talents (which researchers assert are available to everyone) for framing, evaluating and interpreting. They come to know through experience that they can count on their strengths: the ability to wait, think, imagine, tolerate, forgive, learn, and change. In researchers’ terms, thrivers have (a) comprehensibility-being able finally to make some sense of what happens even though life is chaotic and unpredictable (b) manageability-being able to find a way to think that is an appropriate match for the event that is impacting them (c) meaningfulness-realizing that investing energy in really engaging with a tough transition is a worthy thing to do because from this work you are able to add new meaning to your life. Thriving is reconstructing life’s meaning in response to life’s most destructive occurrences.

How can we spot a member of this thrivers’ tribe? I think back into my own experience. When did I know a thriver? When did I know someone afflicted with the “failure to thrive”? 

I met a woman once who clearly was failing to thrive.  On business in another city, I had dinner with a woman who was a widow. This woman cried all through dinner. At the end of the evening, as we were walking out of the restaurant, I said, “I’m sorry about the death of your husband. How long has it been?” When she answered, “Eighteen years,” I knew something was wrong. Now it isn’t that we can’t feel grief years after a loss (”shadow grief” people call it-like the sun going behind a cloud when you’re on a picnic); but instinctively I knew this was different. Here was a woman who had chosen to make a lifestyle of being a griever. Here was a woman who had chosen not to re-plan her life consistent with what had happened to her. Who had no current and active interchange with life.

Here was a person who was not a thriver. Instead she had chosen a lifestyle of a perpetual “person who had lost” and a victim. She had, sadly, failed to thrive.

Then I think about my dear friend who at fifty has found herself chronically ill. “Catastrophe living,” she call her situation, resonating the title of a book she has found invaluable. “How do I live well even while I have to live differently?” she asked herself. Of course, she railed against the illness. Of course, she spent time feeling down and even depressed. But mixed in with these reactions were new ways of thinking. I was having coffee with her once cold morning when someone called from her church. Could she take the lead this week in organizing Freeze Night, a program that brought homeless people in to eat and spend the night in the church when the temperature fell below 32 degrees? She considered and knew that she didn’t have the strength and reserves to take on the project. But I heard my friend make an alternative offer: “Do give me something to do,” she said, “that I can do from home, even from my bed.” A bit more conversation and she was set to email and call everyone on the Freeze Night team to alert them that tomorrow the standing plan would go into operation and they would be needed.

For the long-term my friend has made other thriver-type decisions. “Since I can’t work in the corporate world [where she had been a very successful senior vice president], “I’ve asked, ‘What kind of work can I do?’ “What can I do in this situation that satisfies and even excites me?’” She has now decided to return to school and get her certification in adolescent counseling. She has also made some new friends, she says, who talk about things more meaningful to her than weight loss and business competition. She recognizes the power she has to say what her life is going to be like, albeit in a different-and unwanted-circumstance. My friend is without question a thriver. (Adapted from Tough Transitions by Elizabeth Harper Neeld.)

Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.