Right out of the gate, let’s proclaim that resilience is not the stiff-upper lip “strength” image that has been jammed into our brains by popular media.
In fact, resilience is all about feeling what we need to feel, feel what is real, in the face of the difficulty in our lives. We need to understand that expressing grief, despair, and all their uncomfortable feelings are a central part of resilience.
I cannot manage what I do not acknowledge. If we focus exclusively on the eternal predicament, we drain our capacity to adapt over time.
Respond, not react.
Cope Fist, Solve Later.
Researchers and clinicians such as Dr. Bruce Perry and Dr. Dan Siegel have started a very meaningful conversation about the impact of stress on our brain functioning. The central feature is that as stress increases, brain functioning decreases so that our long-term thinking, problem solving, social face-saving, brain regions go ‘off-line’ to allow for instinctual life saving impulsivity.
Let’s repeat that, as stress increases, brain functioning decreases. This causes important parts of our brain to go OFF-LINE.
In extremes, it leaves us with the equivalent of a reptilian brain. If we don’t recognize this is happening, then we are left trying to adapt without these faculties available to us. This is what reacting looks like and we’ve all been there.
If we can recognize it, then we can deploy our personal strategies to get perspective and bring our full embodied brain to the situation. This is what responding looks like. Cope first with our biology (turn our brains on), and then respond to what is happening (solving really means adapting because no matter how clever we are we generally are not in direct control of most of the stressful predicaments in life).
Cope first, then respond.
Growing our Internal Reserve.
Feeling matters.
They’re important information that your body intuitively knows is important for you to acknowledge. Sadly, many of us learn to live in our ‘logical’ left-brain mode and our brain helps us to block out the signals from our body (the basis for emotions), but the signals are being sent, even if you don’t pay attention.
Neuroscientists have coined the phrase “Feel it to Heal it”. Resilience is about being able to respond, not react, to situations in a way that allow you to adapt. That’s such a good sentence, read it again.
Feelings, like a child that wants attention, will increase in volume and persistence if attention is not given no matter how much of an adult we believe ourselves to be. You don’t outgrow this need.
When recognition is given, the child will often settle. Similarly, the entire emotional system quiets down, and becomes more manageable. We allow and face what we feel, we learn and we figure out what we need. In short, resilience sits on holding space to recognize where you are in a difficult situation, and therapy in Calgary can help you listen to your intuition about who to connect with or how you will respond to what is (not to what you imagine will happen next).
Adaptation is at the center of resilience.
The second battle is learning how to ask others for help, which is an entirely different issue. For now, just know that we’re not the separate entity that we are socialized to believe we are.
Resilience and adaptation are built on connection to ourselves, others, and our world.
