Redding School District

Partnership Educators,

Nineteen-year-old JR was a proud American soldier who had signed up to serve after the 9-11 attacks.  His mother had brought him from El Salvador and this Arkansas man wanted to give back to the country that had given him so much.

One month after basic training his unit was deployed to Karbala, Iraq, and JR found himself driving a Humvee through the city streets when the left front tire hit a roadside bomb.   Three of the soldiers in the vehicle were thrown clear but JR was trapped inside.  He remembers screaming as the fire burnt his skin.  Eventually, he was pulled from the vehicle after suffering third-degree burns over 34% of his body.  This consisted of his head, face, arms, hands, portion of is back and legs.  He describes the pain as indescribable but also relates that the part of your body that isn’t burnt is also hurting because they use those portions for grafting skin for the burnt parts.

Deep burns and thick scars over your entire body with dozens of surgeries and years of your young life spent in the hospital along with loss of a good-looking self-image are some of the most profound and tragic events a person can endure.  “What happened to me is a blessing,” JR states.  “Considering that I was trapped in a burning car for five minutes, I am fortunate to have what I have,” he continues. 

Jose Rene Martinez is an American actor, motivational speaker, author, and former U.S. Army soldier.  He played a role on the daytime drama All My Children, wrote a New York Times best-selling book Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit, and is the winner of Dancing with the Stars.  JR says, “I have this incredible ability to get people’s attention.  With those fifteen seconds of curiosity that people have of ‘who is that guy and what happened to him,’ it is my job to take that fifteen seconds and turn it into thirty seconds and into forty-five seconds and into five minutes and ten minutes and then a lifetime of educated dialog.  This is who I am.  I wouldn’t change anything.  The life I have with a beautiful wife and daughter and the life I have is a blessing and so I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Dan Gilbert, Ph.D., Social Psychology, Harvard University is a researcher on affective forecasting as it relates to happiness.  He says, “The good things will not be as good and the bad things will not be as bad as your mind will lead you to believe.”  He says that our emotional predictions are usually very incomplete and only focus on the good or bad aspects and leave out the complete picture of an event.  He calls this impact bias.   In psychology terms, it is our tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future emotional states.    We think our good times are going to be really good and our bad times will be very bad.  When in most cases, on average, they are both mostly neutral in how they affect us.  We always go back to this neutral state of satisfaction if we allow ourselves to see the other side of the event.   “People often think that happiness is a place or destination and if they could just get there they could build a house there and live in it.  It is really a vacation destination and you can stay longer if you do the right things but your brain will always bring you back to neutral feelings.  You aren’t doing anything wrong that is all of our natural states. With bad events, we don’t often know that good can come out of them.” Dr. Dan Gilbert.

There certainly are awful events that will cause us to feel pain, hurt and loss but humans are natural fighters.  When push comes to shove, we are resilient.  The problems are that we don’t realize it.  If you realize the remarkable ability of our emotional immune system, it makes us all braver.  We will make mistakes and it will be okay.  This is the lesson that we need for ourselves so that we can then help our children learn by our example.   Hedonic Adaptation says our lows aren’t going to be as awful as we imagine them to be and our highs will be more temporary then we hope.  I don’t know about you but I am going to work on being a bit braver and stop worrying so much since I have a built-in superpower that can get me through some of the worst of situations.

 https://youtu.be/2hpUNH77Iik

Rob Adams