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Today, on this special Valentine's Day, I'm going to tell you a special love story.
The heroine of the story is Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer.
She was a successful woman — Facebook's chief operating officer, who became the first woman to serve on Facebook's board of directors; appeared on the cover of Time Magazine magazine and was named "one of the world's most influential people."
She was also an unfortunate woman – married in 1993 and divorced in 1994; didn't find true love until 10 years later; but after 11 years together, during a sweet vacation, her beloved husband died of a heart attack, leaving her and a pair of children behind.
"Ten years of life and death are two unknowns", love is about ten years as a cycle, repeatedly mocking her.
But she's also a lucky woman — just last week, Feb. 3, she announced her engagement on Instagram.
She finally heard someone say to her again, "I love you very much."
Mark Zuckerberg heard the news and left a message of congratulations: "You two are a good match, I am happy for you!" ”
Experiencing suffering and cultivating positive results, such a love story, no matter how many times you have heard it, can still touch our hearts.
· 01 ·
She curled up in the bed,
There was a gun under the bed
When it comes to Cheryl Sandberg, many people will say that she is a "strong woman".
But no one knows that whenever it gets dark and there is only herself in the family, this "strong woman" is scared to death.
In fact, she has always been afraid of loneliness, and loneliness will come every night. Loneliness was like a big python, crawling out slowly with the night, crawling onto her bed and wrapping itself around her.
Sandberg had to put a loaded gun under the bed before he could fall asleep.
Until the appearance of a person, that changed the situation.
That was the story of many years ago. At that time, Sandberg had just moved to Los Angeles, was still working at Google, and her career was just beginning.
It was then that she met a man named David Goldberg.
The man, afraid that she was alone, afraid that she would be bored, introduced her to a series of interesting websites, and found her music that she had never heard before.
He took her on outings, took her to a Jewish temple, and participated in traditional Jewish festivals. With this man, Sandberg's world became different and he was no longer alone.
Later, Sandberg married David and became a happy woman. But after becoming pregnant, she and her husband began to live separately.
At the time, her husband, David, founded Launch Media in Los Angeles, while Sandberg lived and worked in Northern California. They decided to live together in the San Francisco Bay Area.
David also frequently travels back and forth between two places: Monday through Thursday in Los Angeles, southern California, and flying to northern California on weekends to spend time with his wife. For some time after marriage, they continued this lifestyle.
Soon after, their child was born. Because he had worked too hard during childbirth, Sandberg strained his tendons and spent a week on crutches.
During that time, it was mainly the husband David who was taking care of the children. As soon as the child cried, he got up, carried the baby to his wife to feed, changed the diaper, and then coaxed the child to sleep. Every day.
Normally, Sandberg is supposed to be the "parenting expert" who deals with all kinds of situations, but in their family, David is the expert. David would teach Sandberg how to change the diaper of his 8-day-old son.
A colleague of David once boasted, "I was playing football on the afternoon of my first child's birth. David was very dismissive, and he said loudly: "I think there is nothing to show off in doing this." ”
· 02 ·
"I'm going to sleep"
In May 2015, the Sandbergs were invited to Mexico for a friend's birthday party. It would have been a relaxing and sweet holiday trip.
One afternoon, Sandberg and David were playing by the pool for a while, and before long she felt a pang of fatigue and said to David, "I'm going to sleep." ”
Then she went to bed alone.
An hour later, Sandberg woke up to find David missing.
She knew that David liked to go to the gym every afternoon, so she thought her husband must be working out at the gym. At this thought, she did not do much, but went to a friend and swam for a while.
When she returned to the room, she found that David still hadn't returned.
Sandberg turned on the computer, checked the email while waiting for her husband to return, and when it was time for dinner, David was still missing.
At this time, she felt: something had happened. She hurriedly called her friends and began to look around.
Finally, they found David in the gym—lying next to the treadmill, blue in the face and a pool of blood next to his head.
Sandberg was terrified. By the time David was taken to the hospital, it was already too late.
A subsequent autopsy proved that David had died of a heart arrhythmia caused by coronary heart disease.
How Sandberg wished that the last words she said to her husband were not "I'm going to sleep" but "I love you, I really love you" She's willing to trade him back with the whole of Facebook, and she's willing to go back in time and find him all over the world.
But he couldn't come back. He went to sleep, and never woke up.
· 03 ·
Triple "Psychological Trap" After Bereavement
Psychologist Martin Seligman said that after encountering misfortune and blows, people fall into three negative emotional traps, namely Personalization, Pervasiveness and Permanence.
All three initials begin with a P, so this is also known as the "3P theory".
Sandberg is simply a living specimen of this "3P theory". After the death of her husband, Sandberg fell into the first emotional trap: self-blame.
David's initial autopsy report revealed that he had died of a head trauma after falling from a fitness machine. Seeing the autopsy report, Sandberg began to blame himself: If I had found David earlier, he might not have died.
However, a later autopsy report corrected the original statement: David actually died of a heart arrhythmia caused by coronary heart disease.
Sandberg began to blame himself again: Why didn't I find out earlier that David had coronary heart disease?
In fact, all of David's previous medical reports did not find any signs of coronary heart disease, and she could not find out at all.
In fact, this is the typical feature of "self-ization", which is also called "self-ization trap" in psychology. The concrete manifestation of the self-inflicted trap is that people think that the misfortunes that occur to others are all their own fault.
Soon, Sandberg fell into the second emotional trap, which was "generalization."
Typical manifestations of generalization are the perception that the misfortune encountered in one aspect affects all aspects of life.
After the burial of her husband, David, Sandberg returned to work at Facebook.
On the first day of work, during a meeting, she turned to a supervisor and said, "Do you remember?" We've explored this before when we were working at Google. ”
But in reality, the executive never stepped through the door at Google, where he used to work.
Originally, Sandberg said this in order to appear close to her colleagues, but she was not in a good state, misremembered the professional experience of her colleagues, and made it very embarrassing.
The next day at work, someone raised a question at the morning meeting, which originally had nothing to do with Sandberg, but she jumped out to "grab the answer" and chattered and talked non-stop.
At this time, she suddenly realized that it was David's death that made her lose her self-confidence, feel that every aspect of her life had collapsed, and her behavior had become very abnormal.
For Sandberg, however, the hardest thing to overcome is the third emotional trap: "perpetuation." Permanence means that people who encounter misfortune will think that those misfortunes and pains will last a lifetime and will never disappear.
A few months after her husband's death, Sandberg tried various methods, such as trying not to think about the accident, doing things that made her happy, or hanging out with friends, but it still did not alleviate her bereavement.
Every time the child cried, she would think of her husband David, who had come with the child to feed and change diapers; every holiday and anniversary, she would think: My life is over, and I will never be able to walk out of the shadows.
Sandberg used to think "forever" was very far away, but now she felt "forever" very close.
· 04 ·
What's worse than the death of a husband?
Grief-stricken, Sandberg found a professor at the Wharton school named Adam Grant.
Professor Grant's method of "comforting" Sandberg is unique. He saw that she was very sad and said to her: David died of coronary heart disease caused by irregular heart rhythm, have you ever thought that your two children may also inherit this disease?
When Sandberg heard this, he really took a cold breath. But the reality made her feel relieved, after all, the two children are not only alive and well, but also very healthy, and there are no genetic diseases.
At the thought of this, Sandberg's heart was filled with gratitude, which helped alleviate some of her sadness.
In fact, Professor Grant deliberately "frightened" Sandberg so much. He used a psychological theory called "social comparison theory."
This theory generally means that in the absence of objective criteria, people usually use others as a measure of comparison and self-evaluation.
If you are often compared with people who are better than yourself, or compared with more ideal situations, that is, "upward comparison", the heart will inevitably be unbalanced; if you compare with people with worse conditions than yourself, or compared with worse situations, that is, "downward comparison", the heart will often be full of superiority and comfort.
For Sandberg, losing a husband is already bad, but losing a husband and then losing a child is the worst case. But that didn't happen, and both of her children were still growing up healthy and lively. In this comparison, she is actually happy.
A similar thing happened later. After her husband's death, Sandberg found a suspicious dot in her breast during a routine X-ray. The doctor told her that it might be a tumor and would come back tomorrow for further examination.
Upon hearing the news, Sandberg's emotions instantly changed from sadness to fear. During those ten hours, she thought that death was near, that fate had sounded a death knell for her, and that her heart had experienced many complicated emotions.
The next day, an ultrasound test proved that there was nothing wrong with her body.
At that moment, she seemed to be greatly comforted and relieved. The grief that had been overflowing was suddenly replaced by the gratitude of escaping death—as if fate still had some mercy and care for her.
· 05 ·
She picked up her pen and wrote down 106338 words
After her husband left, Sandberg developed the habit of writing journals.
She recalls the first time she and her husband met 20 years ago; she recalls the happy days and nights of her 11 years with her husband; she remembers the gun hidden under the bed, the music, the temples, the festivals, the travels, and of course she can't forget the day when she found her husband lying motionless on the ground... She wrote down those happy and unfortunate experiences, as well as her own emotions, into words.
In the five months since her husband's burial, she has written 106338 words, equivalent to a book. Inadvertently, Sandberg accomplished one thing: healing writing.
In fact, words are one of the best tools to overcome psychological trauma. Many people believe that after encountering misfortune, we should try to avoid mentioning that misfortune, and "let time heal everything", and after a long time, the pain may gradually fade.
But the problem is that even if we choose to turn a blind eye to pain, it doesn't mean that pain doesn't really exist.
Sometimes, the more you ignore the sad things, the deeper the pain is buried, from psychological trauma to physical trauma, and even cause cancer and other pathologies that are difficult to reverse.
Therefore, instead of deliberately avoiding the negative emotions after the trauma, it is better to record the emotions in words.
Matthew Lieberman, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes that when we convert emotions into words, the forehead area of the brain will be stimulated, and the response of the amygdala will be weakened; and the amygdala is the brain tissue that produces emotions, recognizes emotions, and regulates emotions.
To put it simply, when we are driving, when we see a red light, we will subconsciously step on the brakes; in the same way, when we convert negative emotions into words, the brain will light up red lights, and we will subconsciously step on the brakes on negative emotions.
Turning emotions into words actually controls emotions. After Sandberg finished writing those words, he felt as if something had been put down, and the feeling of sadness was not so strong.
In her own words: "In the face of pain, we must also learn to take a step forward and reach the pain." "
At that time, her late husband's brother advised her: You have to start a new life. She said: I'm not ready.
· 06 ·
Five years later, she found love again
And so, another five years passed.
Five years later, Sandberg met another man named Tom Bernthal.
He is the 46-year-old founder of Kelton Global, a strategy consulting firm who specializes in journalism and has won three Emmy Awards.
Tom Bornser divorced his ex-wife with 3 children; Sandberg lost her ex-husband with 2 children.
One day, at a place called "Wemeho Park Ranch," Sandberg and Tom Bornser climbed the mountain and had a picnic together. It was there that Tom Bornser, 46, proposed to Sandberg, 50.
Sandberg spent five years dispelling the haze in her heart, but what she really needed was a strong ray of sunshine. She agreed to the other's marriage proposal, because the Mr. Tom in front of her had made herself find the taste of love again.
Soon after, we saw news of their engagement on social networking sites. In that black-and-white photo, Sandberg and Tom Bornser look at each other affectionately.
Sandberg wrote: "Engaged! You are all I have. I couldn't have loved you more. Tom replied below, "I'm excited to spend the rest of my life with you." ”
Sandberg's close friend, Marn Levine, Facebook's vice president of global partners and business development, wrote these words to good friend Sandberg:
"Very happy for you and Tom. You have the perfect love built on love, appreciation, respect, shared values, and fun. I believe you will build a good life and marriage together. I am very happy that you have found each other and wish you infinite love and joy in the days to come. ”
Many years ago, Sandberg wrote a book called "One Step Forward." In this book, she wrote these words to all readers:
"I want you to find true meaning, fulfillment, and passion in your life. I hope that you will be able to survive the difficult times ahead and gain more strength and determination. ”
I take this sentence as the end of this special and twisted love story.
Love is a big lesson, and the bumps and downs in life are our teachers and coaches.
Love is a right that follows us and breathes with us until we disappear into the distance.
Remember, "Love Never Dies. ”
This year's Valentine's Day is perhaps the most special Valentine's Day. The epidemic is raging, and the "love in the new crown virus period" is also particularly special.
Some lovers, either separated by two places, or close to each other but are isolated hard, can not meet for a long time, can only send messages to each other every day;
Some lovers, one side is a medical worker, the other party is proud at the same time, but also can't help but worry about the heart and stomach all day;
There are many more people who, while being able to spend every day with someone they love, spend their days in boredom and anxiety because there are so few things they can do together.
No matter what kind of person you are, you must have accumulated a stomach full of things you want to say.
On this special Valentine's Day, share with us the words you want to say to your lovers the most!
Feel free to leave a message in the comments section and forward this article to her/him so that she/he knows what you want to say most!
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