Jack Laurence
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
He may have survived the fire and the fall, but the next fight had only just begun.
Next time on What I Survived.
there's a question that sits beneath every story like this one a question that most of us will never have to answer personally but one we can't help to think as we listen how does a human mind hold on
Not for a day, not for a week, not through a single traumatic event that passes and leaves a scar, but day after day after day.
For months that bleed into more months, in a small room, in chains, in a country where nobody is coming to rescue you, where every morning you wake up not knowing if this is the day it ends, or if ending would even be a mercy.
15 months, 462 days, how does a person endure that without simply stopping?
The science of human resilience has been studied extensively.
Researchers who have examined prisoners of war, hostages and long-term captives have found something that might seem surprising.
The key to long-term survival is not the will to fight, it's the ability to adapt, to mould oneself psychologically to new conditions.
Those who perish are frequently those who are unable to do this.
And somewhere around the 12-month mark, Nigel Brennan found something that looked from the outside like giving up, but was in fact the opposite.
He stopped fighting the reality of where he was.
Psychologists have a name for this.
They call it radical acceptance.
It's the practice of letting go of the need to control, to judge and to wish things were different from what they are.
The psychologist who developed the concept put it, radical acceptance rests on letting go of the illusion of control and a willingness to notice and accept things as they are right now without judging.
When you stop resisting or denying reality, you free up mental resources rather than staying stuck in why is this happening or this shouldn't be happening.
You can move to what can I do about this or how can I cope?
Crucially, and this is the part that matters, radical acceptance is not resignation.