Ossorio: See, here's one that says formulations of stress, e.g. good stress/bad stress seem awkward. Does Descriptive Psychology offer a way of formulating stress that is damaging?

You already have a prominent example in Ralph Wechsler's analysis of psychological trauma. There's stress that is damaging. Now if you wanted to start from scratch, you would probably start by either defining or at least clarifying "What is stress?" It's one of those words that everybody uses and when you come right down to it, what is it? What is it to be under stress? Well, I have come up with something that's probably not a definition but will serve in place of one until we have a good one. And that is that stress depends on uncertainty. When there is some kind of outcome that's important to you and the outcome is uncertain, then you are under stress. Now a special case of that is if you are in danger and you don't succeed in escaping, you are under stress. Because that fits the picture of something that's important but the outcome is uncertain.

Now what happens when that's the case? What do people do when they are under stress? What happens to them? Well one possibility is that they do what they can. And that may be bad. An apparent example goes back to when the lion comes into the room, and I see the lion and in this example, there is no window or door for me to run out of. He came in through the only door there is. So what I do is simply tip over the table and hide behind it. Now if you look at that behavior and judge it by normal standards you say "That's stupid. That's not going to save you." But on the other hand, if you look at it from my point of view, you say "He's doing the best that he could. It's about as much as he can do in that situation. And it's not of much help but that's as much as he can do." Well, you can see that in a situation where you are simply out of desperation doing what you can, you may do things that are inadvisable. You may do things that are foolish. You may do things that are destructive.

Member of Audience: So would stress be a state?

Ossorio: No, I'd follow the physical model because that's where this came from. In the physical model you have a wire with a thing attached to the end. And you twist the thing. Twisting it is the stress. What the stress does is put strain on the wire. So the condition that the person is in is strain, not stress. Now in the physical model, if you twist it too much it won't come back. It won't recover. And that has been used as a metaphor for too much stress and you won't recover from that. But that's just a metaphor. It works very well but if you ask "Why is it that too much psychological stress and you don't recover?" you don't have an easy answer the way you have an easy answer for the wire. Now that's a mark that it's a metaphor for you. Even if there is an explanation, you don't have it and so for you it's simply a metaphor. But suppose you try thinking along those lines. Why is it that if you have too much stress, you may not recover or recover fully? And what would qualify as too much stress? It's almost a tautology: too much stress means you don't recover from it. What does recovery depend on? Well, presumably it depends on the removal of the stress.

Member of Audience: The what?

Ossorio: The removal of the stress. As long as you keep twisting that wire, it is not going to recover. It's only after you let go that then it can recover.

Member of Audience: It seems to me, thinking about The Face in the Wall, another way of recovering from stress is changing your world view in a way that absorbs whatever is stressing you to the point that you can go on.

Ossorio: Yeah, and when people do that in clinically relevant ways, we call it a distortion of reality and that's bad. But that's one of the destructive things people can do when they are doing the best they can out of sheer desperation. Well think about that one. If I distort reality and under my new view of things I am no longer in danger, then I am not under stress any more. The only stress, if there is any, is in maintaining that view given evidence to the contrary. If I'm good at it that stress will be minimal. If I'm not then that's a different source of stress. It's a different stress.

Member of Audience: Why are all of the bite marks appearing on my arm?

Ossorio: Out of hypnosis. I need to have faith. [laughter]

Member of Audience: But aren't there also some types of stress that you can go on in a different way and it's not that sort of thing.

Ossorio: Yeah, but that's the point: Too much stress and you don't recover. If it is not too much, you just go ahead and recover. And if you just go your way in spite of it, then it wasn't much stress to being with.

Member of Audience: Yeah but if you change your world view, you are not...

Ossorio: Okay. Yeah, that's what I meant. If you change your world view and that makes life easy, then the one remaining stress is maintaining that new world view in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

Member of Audience: Although it could be something like changing your Type A outlook or something like that where it wouldn't be a distortion of reality.

Member of Audience: Or accepting a loss. Accepting a loss and discovering you can go on even with a loss. It may not be as great a loss as you thought it was going to be...

Ossorio: That's not a change of world view. That's simply finding out that it wasn't as bad as you thought. The lion has all of his teeth pulled. So I am not in quite the same kind of danger as I thought I was. Well, changes in world view though provide one kind of example of a kind of adaptation that can be destructive. And it's easy to think of it being maintained for a long time.

Member of Audience: Is it possible that the stress itself could create the kind of situation where people could do more, that their behavior potential was more limited than until the stress occurred at which point they have more behavior potential. It was a stress at the time that it was a stress, but by virtue of it happening it becomes not a stress. Because I think of people with cancer, for instance, what is a stress at the time of diagnosis is not a stress maybe a year or two years down, because they've found behavior potential they didn't have.

Ossorio: I would put it that they didn't realize the potential that they did have. In general, people's notion of their possibilities is too narrow rather than too broad. Just routinely it's too narrow rather than too broad. And in part that's predictable because you learn about your possibilities by what you do and what you experience, and you can't experience all of your possibilities. So you know you are going to have possibilities that you don't know about, until and unless something brings it out in you. Well, a stressful situation may be exactly what brings out something that you never knew you had. If you can do that, then even though you are acting out of desperation you have discovered something, you have that increased your behavior potential, and if you're effective, you have removed the danger of whatever it was and you are okay. That's known as trial by fire.

Member of Audience: I heard something else now with diagnosis. That diagnosis is partly the outcome you are uncertain about and once you have got the diagnosis, that bad thing already happened and you have...

Ossorio: How about an example.

Member of Audience: ...The state of the unknown. But once you know this has happened you can figure out...

Ossorio: Yeah, and therapeutically one of things I do with people who are facing some negative things is what I call a disaster scenario. "Think of the worst that could happen. What would you do if that happened?" If you can anchor on that, the whole thing becomes much more manageable because now it has a structure, now it has a limit. Whereas before it's just like a black cloud over you with indefinite scope and extent and you just sort of adapt.

Member of Audience: Seems like there's a maxim about uncertainty and stress, that a person requires the world to be...

Ossorio: One of the relevant maxims is: "If you don't know what the answer is, don't do anything that depends on what the answer is." In the kind of case we are talking about, you can't be that noncommittal. And that's where the uncertainty kills you.

Member of Audience: In the interest of eliminating stress...

Ossorio: I think it's a good time to stop.