Reframing, Part I: Eulogy for a "One-Armed Dwarf"

Looking at a situation from a wholly new angle is a powerful technique for change—something psychologists call cognitive reframing. I’ve seen many examples. One that sticks with me came from Paul Miller. In this post, I’ll give one piece of his story, the part that I witnessed. In the next post, I’ll explore some reframing Paul seemed to do so effortlessly that I didn’t really understand it was happening until much later.

Paul Miller

The first time I met Paul was at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC. Paul, who was a little over 4 feet tall, was wearing khakis and a maroon knit shirt with one empty sleeve. He seemed like an inquisitive, upbeat guy who happened to be working crazy hours at the White House while staying in my cousin’s guest room. (Paul’s wife and kids were in Seattle, where had been working as a law professor.) He also fumbled with his food, just a bit. He talked about the foibles of working in the White House office that deals with job vacancies and political appointees—a dicey and complicated business. One day was the day to look for possible Hispanic appointees, another day was African Americans. But he didn’t seem too impressed with himself. Neither his dwarfism nor his missing limb came up at all. (He did talk about the convoluted process he needed to go through to give his daughters, when they came to visit from Seattle, access to the White House playground built for the Obama girls.)

What I didn’t learn until later was that Paul’s arm had been amputated only two weeks before.

Paul was learning to redo everything in his life one-handed without betraying any frustration or changing hi demeanor. He didn’t miss work. He’d been flying home to Seattle every few weeks to get chemotherapy to treat the tumor in his arm. And until the amputation, most colleagues had no idea what was going on.

Later on, when I knew a bit more, Paul joked that he now could be the only member of a critical minority—the league of one-armed Jewish dwarves—and that it might get him an ambassadorship. He also mentioned the time he spent fumbling around on the floor of his room trying to figure out how to put on a dress sock with only one hand. The process sounded like one of those hard-to-do carnival contests. (“Get the sock on all five toes and you win a prize!”) In this case he was interrupted by a call: President Obama on the line. Obama was in Cairo preparing a major address to the Muslim world but wanted to know how Paul was doing after his operation. Paul looked at his foot, paused, and almost started talking about socks...then simply said everything was going fine.

Paul was born with dwarfism as well as a genetic condition that predisposed him to cancer, and he had fought the disease numerous times over the past decade. Losing the arm wasn’t a big emotional blow to him. It had become diseased multiple times, and it needed to go. “He doesn’t concentrate on the life of the body, he’s always concentrated on the life of the mind,” one of Paul’s friends told me.

As I later learned, Paul came out of law school at a time when disability rights didn’t really exist. After graduating from law school, he received rejection letters from more than 40 law firms. One time, he was told the firm feared that hiring him would make them look like a “circus freak show.” Ultimately he did find a job and became a big-time lawyer in disability rights. But to me, his basic attitude and light disposition in the face of all sorts of adversity are what set him apart.

Last year, when the cancer reoccurred, Paul couldn’t beat it.

Webster’s Dictionary defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Psychologists have made resilience a major area of study. Paul has to be one of the most resilient people I’ve ever met.