What Doesn’t Kill You…
Recap: Last week we talked about bandaid encouragements, referring to the quotes, verses, and cliches that people love to slap on our suffering in an attempt to make us feel better. Things like “God won’t give you more than you can handle” or “God works all things together for good”.
We believe Scripture is true and we know these phrases are offered as encouragements, but they don’t ever seem to be helpful to hear in our pain.
This week is Part 1 of the Bandaid Encouragements Series- a series where we will work through some of the most common verses and cliches that we hear.
Our goal is not to throw out verses we don’t like, ignore hopeful and positive thinking, or be able to get righteously offended when we hear these phrases.
Our goal is to critically think through them all to determine whether they are accurate reflections of real life, and to shift our perspective in how we interpret them.
So let’s start this series off with one of the most popular cliches we hear: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Ah yes, I can hear Kelly Clarkson belting it out now! (Not that she created the phrase, but she sure did give grander recognition to it.)
While we love to crank the volume when this song plays, it’s not really a song we turn to for comfort when we’re in the deepest, most painful moments of our suffering. In those moments that we feel overwhelmingly weak and hopeless, a peppy song about strength doesn’t quite make the connection we need to feel better.
After enduring a physical or emotional beatdown we only feel weaker. Any form of strength feels foreign and impossible to attain.
Much like with the phrase “God won’t give you more than you can handle”, hearing “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” sends us into a shame spiral. It has us believing that we should feel stronger, but our reality is that we feel much, much weaker. We spiral deeper and deeper, feeling weak and then feeling worthless for not being strong.
The reason for this shame spiral is because we take this phrase as a factual statement. We interpret it to mean that any, and all, things that harm us will auto-convert our weakness into strength in the same natural way that our body converts food into energy.
This just isn’t a true reflection of how hardships play out though.
There are people who would say that they are a stronger person now than before their painful circumstances. Then there are other people who would say that they are weaker as a result of their circumstances.
In the “Understanding Trauma” post I mentioned that two people can go through the same, or very similar, experiences and be affected in entirely different ways.
Why is this? Because it is not the circumstance that makes or breaks a person. A situation does not ultimately have the power to determine whether we will become a stronger or weaker person.
Oh it will definitely harm us, overwhelm us, and weaken us in the moment. It can alter the way we trust others and see the world. An experience can transform the way our body holds trauma and painful memories.
The initial, and even lasting, effects from adversity weaken us and can no doubt be powerful; but every person has within them a greater power to determine how they will move forward and what kind of person they will become. Therefore:
It is our response to adversity that ultimately determines our ability to become stronger, or our reluctancy to become weaker.
Let’s take a trip to the gym for an example. I go over to the bench press machine and I load a bunch of weight on the bar. I lay down on the bench, I lift the bar off the rack and I bring the weight down to my chest. My arms are bent low and I have all this weight threatening to crush my chest if I don’t push it back up, and I realize in this moment that I can’t push this weight back up. I’m now in danger if I don’t get this weight away. I can throw the bar off to the side or a friend can help me lift it up and back on the rack.
There is nothing about that dangerous, life threatening moment that made me one ounce stronger. But the way I respond to that adversity is what makes all the difference.
I could see a weak moment and shame myself into believing that I am a failure. This might cause me to never try the bench press, or any exercise, ever again. I could even be so stubborn in that moment, believing that I should be stronger, that I refuse to throw the weight off. The weight would only continue to push down on me until it crushes me.
Or, I could see a weak moment as an opportunity to learn from it and work on building my strength up for the next time I get on the bench press. I would recognize what my current limits are and it would help me set a goal for where I want to see growth and expanded capabilities.
As with the gym example, our resiliency to any adversity in life is dependent on our responses.
Resiliency does not mean we auto-respond to hardships with strength. It means we choose to see our hardship as a part of our story, rather than as the end of our story.
We still have to take time to grieve, to feel our sadness, and to reflect on our pain. But we make sure that we never get stuck there in the long-term. We allow ourselves to feel and we then challenge ourselves to grow.
So, why do we even say “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”? It dates back to 1888.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger”. In the linked article, we’re told that “Nietzsche does not seem to think that all suffering will result in strength, but rather that he is suggesting one should take suffering as an opportunity to build strength, and that those who are already strong are those who can do so.”
The original phrase did not mean that all suffering produces in us a strength we never had before, as we interpret it today. Rather, the phrase is a mindset shift. It is the ability to determine how we will respond in hard seasons.
THIS is how we need to understand the phrase. Because it’s not really “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” in the way we believe it today. It’s more like: “what we don’t allow to destroy us gives us opportunity to become stronger through the pain”.
-Stephanie Lauren Auman
