Why are life events troubling?
Life happens. In Kipling’s words, the twin impostors of ‘triumph and disaster’, the best and worst the world can throw at us. Not all ‘life events’ are life-changing. At face value, many appear benign (leaving school, getting a job, moving in with a partner); whilst others seem inherently damaging (the death of someone close, a life-threatening illness, relationship break-up). Yet the extent to which a life event is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not necessarily intuitive, and it may surprise you to know that psychologists often continue to act as if it is.
This matters. Negative life events are critical in understanding psychological disorder. Clinicians look to life events as the precipitating factor when creating formulations of client symptoms. ‘Ask not what is wrong with a person, ask them what happened’ has become something of a mantra for psychologists. Likewise, life-events research is based on the idea that severe (very negative) life events coupled with prior vulnerabilities (e.g. childhood experiences, genetic predispositions, negative cognitions of self or the world) are important in explaining the onset of mental health problems.
So what is it that makes an event negative? Given the rich volume of research around life events, that question should be easy to answer. Yet when you move beyond events that are obviously tragic – and even here there’s room for some subjectivity – most people falter in explaining why something is negative or troubling. Looking at the way life events have been studied can help explain the complexity involved.
From checklists to context
Traditionally, life events have been measured by checklists, which take an event category, such as a divorce, and give everyone who endorses it the same rating. The stress experienced is then calculated by adding together the number of life events that have occurred. A good example of this is the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, from 1967.
But not everyone experiences life events similarly. Let’s use the example of a divorce – most people will agree this will usually be negative. Reflecting this, it gets a whopping 73 out of 100 from Holmes and Rahe. But what if the formal divorce proceedings happen after a long separation? Or after a short marriage? With or without children? In a traditional cultural or religious setting? What if the relationship was abusive? Given the variety of factors that could be involved, can all divorce events really be rated in the same way? Whilst there would always be some negative element of loss, some divorce situations could clearly be far more troubling than others. Or consider pregnancy. It might indeed be very positive if the pregnancy is planned and wanted, and in the context of a good relationship. But if the context is changed, the valence can immediately become stressful, negative and troubling.
We believe all these contextual issues influence the severity of the event, sometimes radically. When checklist measures ignore what is going on around the life event, they are actually ignoring key factors in what it is that makes it negative. They miss the clues to how it is damaging to psychological wellbeing. The life impact of a life event helps define what makes it negative. This has been borne out by studies that use in-depth interviews of life events, such as the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule (LEDS: Brown & Harris, 1978). Events measured in such detail predict psychological disorder such as depression with far more precision than self-report checklists.
Based on the analysis of numerous narrative accounts of life events and their surrounding contexts, we have developed a conceptual model that explains why life events may be experienced as more or less severe and troubling. We uncovered four key areas of psychological need that, when threatened, tend to make an event negative:
- Attachment – events that involve negative changes in close relationships often involving loss or rejection.
- Achievement – events that prevent or hinder reaching a desired goal.
- Security – events that jeopardise ph