Show Notes:

Today, I want us to talk about resilience, and how we work at retaining the resilience we have cultivated so that we don’t find ourselves in over our heads again. This piggybacks on what we talked about last week – we can’t know what we need to do for resilience if we can’t see the forest for the trees and know what’s going on for us. Awareness is ALWAYS the first and most important step – everything else works from there. 

Now, resilience is a word that I find has some cultural impressions and even stigma around. I was actually scrolling through social media recently and a past colleague who I respect and admire, had posted on his page a meme that said something to the effect of “I hope to never be called resilient ever again, don’t praise me for surviving things I had no choice but to survive and pretend that made me stronger.” I get it. Resilience has connotations of meaning things like “bouncing back”, being unaffected by hardship, somehow being stronger than the hardships that hit us. I wish I could tell you where all of that bullshit came from…I blame extreme versions of positive psychology and tendencies toward toxic positivity where being positive is used as a mechanism to retreat from facing what’s hard, calling shit what it is and rather uses positivity to ignore and avoid under the guise of “healthy”. Those definitions of resilience are total crap. And I get to say that because I literally created a training program all about resilience and not once do we talk about “bouncing back” other than to recognize that it’s a lie we’re sold about resilience. 

In my training program, Beating the Breaking Point, we actually go into detail defining what resilience is. I start the lesson on resilience with a quote by Leon Megginson that says, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Hear that? It isn’t about being strong, it’s about being adaptive. Here is the working definition we use in the program to talk about resilience, are you ready?:

“An ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, stress or change in a way that accepts the truth of the suffering, acknowledges the depth of impact the suffering has (note the tense, the impacts of suffering may be a continuing state to some extent or degree), and seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative.”

In the course we spend time breaking this definition down and if your interest is piqued, I am going to encourage you to find the link in the show notes and check out the training. What I am going to say about it here for our purposes today is that resilience isn’t about bouncing back and being fine, it’s about adapting to what has hit us which includes incorporating the impact it has had into how we think about and know ourselves, and how we choose to carry this forward with us. The meaning-making process we use to engage with the things that happen to us informs our capacity to be resilient. And if you have really engaged in the work of healing, you have already done so much of this. 

Healing and processing trauma, stress and other pieces like this involves making meaning of it. It means embodying a story about what happened to us and what we believe that then means about us - who we are as a result of what we’ve been through. If you have worked through processing and healing, you have already developed and embraced resilience as a part of who you are, because you made the uncomfortable choice to work at how you make meaning and considered changing how you made meaning of things that happened to you. 

So now, the work after having done the hardest parts of healing, is to keep what you’ve worked so hard to gain. To work at retaining the resilience you fought so hard for. How do we do that? Well…let’s go back to our working definition but from the lens of retaining resilience. To recap, resilience is:

“An ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, stress or change in a way that accepts the truth of the suffering, acknowledges the depth of impact the suffering has (note the tense, the impacts of suffering may be a continuing state to some extent or degree), and seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative.”

So let’s break it down…

1.      An ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, stress or change in a way that accepts the truth of the suffering. What does this mean for us practically when we’re working to retain the resilience we’ve invested so much into accomplishing? Well, I am actually going to suggest that this breaks down into a few ways and that it’s best to start backward.

a.      First, we have to start by being aware of and acknowledging that suffering exists. We’re back to square one from last week, assessing. We have to have our eyes open to what’s going on for us and where we are experiencing suffering. You may not name it suffering, it may be called something else, but if we don’t see it and name it, we can’t do anything with it and we’re back to ignoring or avoiding until it builds up enough to bite us in the ass.

b.      Second, we have to be honest about the suffering. This means telling a full story about what is going on for us, not just the easiest or default version of the story. Here’s an example, when my husband and I get in a disagreement, I can tell a story about how he’s a jerk…or I can step back and be aware that I haven’t been sleeping well lately, I’ve been feeling more on edge and am probably more sensitive to him. While he may still be a jerk, I can also own that I am contributing to some amount of the suffering I’m experiencing by not supporting my needs more effectively. It’s not an either/or, it’s working at describing the fullness of what’s happening. 

c.      And third, we have to accept this as the starting point. To recover from something, we have to own that it is what it is. 

2.      Let’s tackle the next part of the definition: Resilience acknowledges the depth of impact the suffering has. Resilience doesn’t just pay lip service to what is happening, it looks closely at the impact that is playing out in and around me. It works to recognize the impact in the past, present and what I may carry forward into the future. When you have done work on processing your experiences and you are working to retain resilience, this is about continuing to acknowledge the ongoing impacts some of your experiences may have on you. I have shared before a story from my childhood about a teacher who yelled at me and told me I was stupid and would never amount to anything. The impacts of this have been far reaching in my life, in hard ways that impacted my self-esteem and confidence for a long time and undermined my sense of my own intelligence, but also in ways that pushed me to prove otherwise – leading to a Master’s degree that I am grateful for. To this day I have moments where her voice creeps into my head. They are often in really silly moments and the feeling connected to it is usually embarrassment and shame. I am familiar with them and can often see them coming. While I have done the work of healing my trauma around this experience, it doesn’t erase that it happened or completely nullify all of the impacts. That said, when it shows up, now instead of becoming embroiled in the impacts, feeling the complete depth of embarrassment or shame, I can usually giggle at it. I’ll say things to myself like, “hey you, I see you there, I know what you’re about. I can understand why that’s coming up right now, but we’re ok, we don’t have to go to that place, we get to...