Tend and Befriend

"The dominant model of human responses to stress has been the fight or flight response.... From the standpoint of human beings, however, this analysis of stress responses is incomplete." - Wikipedia

It's been an eventful couple of weeks. Yours truly found out that her company has fallen prey to the economy, and will be closing by the end of this year. She shares this stressful state of job loss with a cohort of coworkers.

There's a part of me that tries to remain a detached observer with regard to group dynamics, and this situation is no exception. As we all move closer to unemployment, it's been interesting to see how we, individually and collectively, respond to the stress of having our jobs/income ripped away. As hinted at in the quote above, the traditional model of stress response - fight or flight - seems inadequate to describe the observed responses to this particular threat.

Indeed, the nature of the threat is such that neither fighting nor flight are really possible. There is nothing any of us can do to make the jobs come back (fight), nor can we successfully escape the threat of a lost income (flight). If I wanted to argue that the fight or flight response did explain my response to this stressful situation, I might do so in the following way... Initially, the fight response prompted me to question our right to severance. (We have none, due to the nature of our company and the reasons for its closing.) I might also say that the fight response prompted me to mobilize my resources for a campaign to regain an income. (Alternative stress response: use humor to offset tension. We are now on 'a campaign to regain our income.')

But this line of reasoning seems to me to be too much of a stretch from the original observations that led to a 'fight or flight' theory of stress response. (I generally hate overgeneralizations.) Much about our current situation and the behaviors that I have observed in myself and others reminds me of an alternative model of stress response that I only recently learned about - tend and befriend.

Tend and befriend has been presented as a predominantly female response to stress. The model was developed after Shelley Taylor, a health psychologist, realized that most of the studies leading to the fight or flight model had been conducted on male animals. I don't particularly like that overgeneralization, but I can't really use observations from my current situation to argue with it either.

The more critical difference between how the two models might be applied to the situation of job loss seems to be in the nature of the threat. Job loss may represent a range of stresses - from losing a critical component of one's identity, to losing one's friends/associates, to losing food/shelter as a result of losing income - rather than the single, immediate threat of a predator. The things that you stand to lose when you lose a job are things that come from interaction and exchange with other people. Regaining what you've lost requires setting up a replacement network of interaction and exchange. (Hello again, Facebook!)

Additionally, regaining an income requires information about potential new jobs. Surviving the threat of job loss requires interaction with other people. Whether you choose to call engaging in this interaction 'fighting' or 'befriending' probably reflects aspects of your personality/worldview more so than it reflects the actual behavior and the reasons for it. Or maybe it reflects actual gender differences in preference for a particular worldview. I have to wonder - Is there a measurable difference in success and/or personal happiness, independent of gender, that comes from internalizing one of these models over the other? "I wondered which one is right. Or, are they both right?" (q)

As to my personal application of the tend and befriend response... I believe I'll spend the better part of today 'tending' my humble abode, which is in dire need of such. I generally ignore this particular chore, but somehow I find it oddly soothing right now. Likewise, I'll probably attempt to tend/befriend coworkers and friends alike with the application of baked goods. ;)