HOW TO CREATE THE META-PERSPECTIVE ESSENTIAL FOR RESILIENCE

You now know that if the only perspective you have when life falls apart, when you experience a set- back or a knock-down, you will have difficulty seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.” Instead, all you will be able to see is the distress, pain, frustration, confusion, shock, etc. immediately before you. You will lack perspective. The tunnel-vision of your immediate experience will define everything —you, life, the future, meaningfulness, etc. And in addition to whatever problem the set-back gives you, you now have a secondary problem— you feel stuck because you can’t see beyond today.

Question: How do you get the needed meta-perspective so that you can keep things in proportion and not become reactive and destructive to yourself and others? How can you raise your eyes up and see beyond the darkness and confusion of this moment? People may be trying to help you and they may be saying things like: “You’ll get through this.” “One of these days you’ll look back on this and laugh.” “Don’t take yourself so serious.” “This isn’t the end of the world.”

The problem is that in the middle of the set-back or in the lowest pit of your life, all of that sounds like childish mumbo-jumbo unrealistic non-sense. “Yeah, sure,” you may say, but you know that none of that advice is going to help. So what will?

The Meta-Perspective To attain a meta-perspective you first have to know what it is and then actually and experientially access it. If what it is describes a bigger, larger, broader, and more extensive perspective about life, yourself, time, relationships, etc., then a meta-perspective refers to the ability to hold these many aspects in mind at the same time. The term meta refers to moving to a position (literally or mentally) where you can think and feel about the first experience.

A meta-perspective is then a layered consciousness or perhaps better, as we say today, a systemic consciousness. It can see and hold in mind the relationships between the parts and the dimensions without over-simplifying by reducing to a linear perspective only or treating different factors as polar opposites. Opposite to a meta-perspective is the tunnel-vision perspective. This arises when we zoom in so close on something that we can no longer get enough distance to see the context.

As a result, a meta-perspective tends to enable us to develop what the ancients called “wisdom.” Gregory Bateson said that wisdom is the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. It is the ability to take first perceptual position (seeing from your own eyes), second (imagining how things look

from another person’s perspective), and third (seeing things from the larger system). And as we all know, such wisdom arises from experience, and experience is what shoves us around into different places so that we get a chance to experience life from multiple perspectives. And when we bring them all together without dichotomizing or over-simplifying, wisdom emerges.

Accessing the Meta-Perspective If what we need is distance from the immediate, then if you step back in your mind and start noticing the context, you begin to access a larger perspective. “What is the context in which X is occurring?” “And this context Y, what is the context in which it is operating?” “And these contexts X and Y, what is the larger system of activities, energies, meanings, etc. in which all of this is operating?” Asking these layered questions and answering them takes you to out of the immediate tunnel vision and enables you to begin to create a meta-perspective.

Then you won’t feel stuck in a narrow tunnel vision. Seeing the larger picture, you will almost inevitably see areas and variables that you could use to make a difference. You begin seeing processes and recognize how you can influence the system. One of the classical studies that Bateson engaged in was the structure of schizophrenia. In the end he analyzed it as a double-bind situation wherein a person is locked into a no-choice system which he cannot escape. And how could he escape? How do some people escape? By meta-commenting about the double-bind. That takes a person above and beyond the conflicting frames, giving him perspective about the situation: “You say you love me and you want me to express my emotions, but when I do you stiffen up and reject my hug. So I’m confused, which do you want me to do?”

Similarly, to be able to step back and gain perceptual distance on ourselves and our situation. To see the set-back as an event occurring in time, one event in a series of thousands of events, enables us to not over-load that one event with too much meaning and importance. What about the meaning and importance of the other tens-of-thousands of events?

Resilient people do this—they keep perspective. That’s why they bounce back quicker and with less semantic damage. To create this for yourself, use a series of questions to help you: The set-back event occurred in what domain? (Health, career, money, relationships, etc.) How much importance have I or am I giving to that event? Is endowing the event with that much meaning helping me to be resilient? How much of a tunnel-vision is this perspective creating for me? While I’m seeing that one thing, what else am I not seeing? If you go forward in time ten years and look back, what do you notice? When you step back, what parts of your life are okay or fine?

What are your Resilience Question?

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