Roles of Courage

I hope this website will add to the things and people in your life that encourage you. Having more courage can help you expand the possibilities in your life. It can make a difference, in fact, in whether you let yourself truly experience your life or go through the motions.

I will adopt as my working definition of courage the definition found in Webster's dictionary. It says that courage is" the attitude or response of facing and dealing with anything recognized as dangerous, difficult, or painful, instead of withdrawing from it."

On the role of courage in life:

The popular view of courage tends to confine it to special situations like the battlefield or the playing field. Courage is called for in everyday living. In the thirty years I have spent as a psychiatrist, I have seen my patients be courageous in widely different everyday situations.

As Harry Stack Sullivan once said, we are all more simply human that otherwise. My patients are really not out of the ordinary. So, if they can learn to have courage and persist at risky, painful or difficult situations, there is nothing so different about you that you can't learn also. You can learn not to run away. Courage is not as rare as you might think. For example:

I have seen people routinely face and deal with life situations that can be either physically or emotionally risky. Heart patients in cardiac rehabilitation have fear their exercising will bring on another heart attack but trust their physical therapists enough still to do the prescribed exercises. Workers stand up to the workplace bully or blow the whistle on unsafe work practices despite risking their health or job. Parents stand up to school authorities on behalf of their kids. Abuse survivors take out restraining orders despite threats from their abuser. Rape survivors take steps eventually to date again.

Emotionally risky life situations are no less frequent. Veterans, having been traumatized as they risked their lives to defend our freedom and protect their buddies, persist at their attempts to rejoin a country that seems at times not to understand or appreciate them or what they have sacrificed.

I am amazed that survivors of infidelity risk dating again knowing it could happen all over again. These survivors take the risk of again trying sincerely and wholeheartedly in another relationship and choosing to believe that there are still people who are sincere in their motivation and true in their speech. They work hard to avoid adopting an ironic attitude.

Jedediah Purdy said that "The point of irony is a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech-especially earnest speech. In place of the romantic idea that each of us harbors a true self struggling for expression, the ironist offers the suspicion that we are all just quantum selves-all spin, all the way down. "Survivors of infidelity persist at this risky situation and don't give in to irony.

If you stop and think about it, you can recall people, just like you, facing and dealing with situations that are both difficult and on-going.

I suspect you have seen empty nesters move to another part of the country to start over having the courage to begin again in a regional culture unfamiliar to them. Or you have heard of grandmothers who push their tired bodies through the process of raising their grandchildren because their children aren't.

I have seen caretakers of dementia patients keep on hour after hour answering the same questions while watching the person they loved slip away in front of them. Seventy and eighty year old women show wit and humor as they put up with their grumpy husbands and fulfill their mothers philosophy of staying the marital course in spite of their daughter's not understanding why they haven't left him. Mothers exercise tough love even though their teenagers scare them half to death with their attempts to manipulate them with obligation, fear, and guilt. I have watched people who are wrongly accused none the less persist at doing the right thing even when the good things they do are being ignored.

Think about the ordinary people who face and deal with painful situations. Physically disabled patients struggle to find new ways to create a meaningful purpose in their life after a disability. Older people with back injuries, fibromyalgia, or arthritis persist at looking to find something outside themselves that they can be interested in enough to get out of bed in the morning despite the chronic pain they know they will experience.

Have you met someone suffering from cancer who knows the end is near for them but puts that fear aside because they are more concerned with making plans for how their spouse can get by without them?

Sometimes emotionally painful situations occur not because something happens but because it does not happen. In the absence of emotional support some girls believe enough in themselves and persist at leaving home to go to college when no one around them really cares whether they go or not.

Sometimes courage is about persisting in the face of undeserved personal tragedy.Dawna Markova said "It is not the events in your life that determine who you are, it's how you choose to respond to them." As Gerald Mann often says, "No matter who you are or what you have done, you can begin again. "People do. People who are no different than you. For example, women rebuild their identities after losing not only their husband, but how they felt about themselves when they were with him. I have witnessed people repeatedly showing courage so that they don't give in to that wish to end all the suffering. They have the courage to choose to believe, even when they don't know exactly why, that God is not punishing them and in fact has something better in store for them.

Sometimes courage is about your willingness to have a relationship with the unknown .It manifests itself as an ability to have faith and to use that faith to act. In the Episcopal church where I go, in the benediction the congregation at the end of the service together asks God to "Send us now into the world in peace and grant us courage and strength to love and serve You with gladness and single-mindedness of heart ". There is a recognition that everyday life calls for courage. People have the courage to risk having faith that God forgives them even when they can't forgive themselves and believes in them when they can't imagine why. Paul Tillich said, "The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself in spite of being unacceptable."