Dr Dick Tibbits has worked as an Adventist pastor, mental health counsellor and hospital administrator. In retirement, he lives in Tennessee and continues to lead workshops in forgiveness and stress. He talked recently about his books on these topics.
You can continue to lead workshops in forgiveness. How are people’s responses to this topic changing over time?
The message of forgiveness is universal and timeless. So, in some ways, the responses of attendees are similar today to what they were a decade ago. What has changed is the anxiety caused by the perceived and real injustices that people are experiencing in their lives today, at ever-increasing levels. Life seems to make even less sense today with all the uncertainties and tensions around the world. I have also observed a clear increase in the number of people who want help forgiving themselves. A lot of people suffer with this all alone, not knowing where to turn or who to trust.
How did you and Dr Hall go about writing The Stress Recovery Effect together?
Nick was the researcher who dedicated his career to understanding the links between disease and the mind. I was the practitioner who was always looking for ways to translate research into practical cognitive/behavioural approaches to change and life improvements. So we jointly developed a stress recovery program to test our ideas and refine how well they communicated and how practical they were to those attending our programs. Once we tested the outcomes, we wrote the book. So our book has been tested in real life with ordinary people and extraordinary athletes and people who have to function in stressful environments.
What unique experiences did you bring to this book?
At the time I co-authored this book, I was doing executive coaching with healthcare professionals and performance coaching with world class athletes. What I noticed was that high performers actually sought out stress to improve performance. But if the stress became too intense, it would decrease performance. What I observed in these athletes was it was not stress that was the problem, but the athletes’ ability to quickly recover from stress. The better they could manage recovery, the better they dealt with stress. The Stress Recovery teaches you how to do that.
Why do we need to think differently about stress?
The lack of stress can cause muscles to atrophy. So stress is necessary. And often stress happens outside of my control, so wishing I had less stress was nothing more than a wish. Also stress is used in education, the workplace, sports and many other areas of human interaction to actually improve performance. So rather than making the mistake of viewing stress as bad, we needed to shift our thinking to how to embrace stress and then quickly recover from it. This is important for it gives us capacity to handle stress and it reduces the changes of the stress becoming accumulative and thus chronic and debilitating.
When confronting situations of stress and forgiveness, how do we move beyond merely reacting?
We all need to learn to control the things we can and let go of those things we cannot control. I do not have control over all those things that stress my life. But I do have the ability to add recovery to my life. The goal is to bring balance into my life so my body can find its natural state rather than being in a constant state of stimulation.
How do the messages of these books fit with your understanding of Adventist faith?
Our health message from Ellen White states that the majority of illness from which we suffer have their origin in the mind. The worries and anxieties we carry with us are a real form of stress. And this can weaken our immune system giving occasion for a wide variety of physical ailments to take hold in our bodies. Thus our treatments need to address the whole person: body, mind and spirit. That is why in our book we address physical, mental and spiritual interventions that all work together to aid in our recovery from stress.
The Stress Recovery Effect and Forgive to Live are available from Adventist bookshops in Australia and New Zealand, or online at https://adventistbookcentre.com.au/catalogsearch/result/?cat=0&q=tibbits.
Nathan Brown is a book editor at Signs Publishing
