Increasing Resiliency, or The Art of Trampolining

The concept of resiliency, or the ability to return to health after a stressor or hardship, has been popping up a lot lately in articles and studies about how to be happier. But although it sounds like a buzzword, resilience is more than just a trendy idea—it’s a key factor in how we cope with the world. Over and over in trauma studies, it’s been shown that people can not only recover from brutal circumstances, but thrive from them. It turns out that what matters is not how hard or how often we fall, but whether we’re willing to get back up.

The fall we’re recovering from can range from serious trauma such as war to everyday struggles like relationship breakups. And sometimes crises are like a trampoline: the farther down you fall, the higher you can bounce back up. In David B. Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz’s book Supersurvivors, the authors list people who have lived through ordeals, then gone on to extraordinary accomplishments, such as man who ran a triathlon within a year of being struck by a drunk driver and losing his leg.

Although it’s tempting to think only exceptional people have a talent for bouncing back, it’s actually within all of us. As humans, we have a natural tendency toward healing. Just as when we cut our finger, our body immediately sends platelets to clot the blood and white blood cells to fight infection, when we go through a traumatic experience, the brain immediately begins to look for ways to make sense of it and feel better. We don’t have to be “super” survivors to be good at growing from struggle. We can just tune in to our own innate predisposition for well-being, and cultivate it.

So how do we become more resilient? There are a few key conditions that help this strength grow. The first is faith. To be able to withstand something bad happening and not feel devastated and frozen by it, we have to believe in something positive. Sometimes this faith is religious, but it doesn’t have to be. My brilliant mentor talks about feeling a confidence in “a friendly future,” or a general optimistic belief that things will work out.

Feldman and Kravetz don’t adhere to the idea of optimism, which they state is not always helpful after a crisis in which it’s obvious that things won’t simply work out well. Instead, they assert the concept of “grounded hope,” which combines positivity with realism. We don’t just wake up from overwhelming loss and sprinkle sunshine on it, Pollyanna-style. Instead we can gradually learn to accept that bad things happen, come to terms with the unfairness of life, and THEN move forward, often with new skills such as better coping techniques, more frustration tolerance, and increased compassion for other people in tough circumstances.

It turns out that the majority of trauma survivors recover and recuperate. I’ve heard from clients who were abused for years; conscripted into cults; or lost not just their spouses but also their children in wars. Despite the horrors they have endured, struggles I look at and wonder if I could live through, most of them pick themselves back up. They start new families, find things to laugh about. And many of them say the same thing: “What other choice do I have?” They somehow found the strength and faith to continue forward movement, instead of giving in permanently to grief.

Another condition of resiliency is to combine thinking about it with not thinking about it. To progress from something takes both leaning in and feeling the difficult feelings from it, as well as leaning away and distracting from it. I call it “touch and release.” When anxiety or sadness or overwhelm come up, we spend a little time “touching” them, or acknowledging and experiencing them, despite how painful this can be. Then we let them go, momentarily, by focusing on things that are more pleasant or calming. What we choose to distract ourselves with can be sensory, such as a warm bath or massage, or it can be active, such as a walk in the park or a workout. It can be large (a trip to Australia) or small (Jamoca Almond Fudge). The important thing is to find what soothes you, and practice it regularly.

A final important factor is relationships. Over and over, in research and in life experience, it has been proven that human connectedness is what promotes healing. Isolating ourselves, a common urge when we’re feeling lousy, and not talking things out, is a quick path toward fear and pain.

Connection works best if it goes both ways—we take support from friends and family, then we give back to our community. Find activities that increase your feeling of being meaningful in the world, and help you stay attached to the larger world. Volunteer activities, reaching out to others who are struggling in support groups, and nonprofit work make us feel useful. In addition, they perform the sweet alchemy of turning sadness into empathy—I understand your pain, because I’ve felt mine so acutely.

So go ahead, fall off the bike. You don’t have to learn a great lesson from it, and you don’t have to use your experience to become the greatest bike rider who ever lived. Sometimes it’s enough to just get back on the bike, and pedal onward.

If You Want To Be Heard, Quiet Down

In couples therapy, much of the time in the first several meetings is taken up with each partner venting his or her frustration. They’re telling their side of the story, partly in the hopes of convincing the therapist that they have it tougher than their partner does (which sometimes is true, but that’s beside the point). There’s nothing wrong with this process, and indeed it can be very productive, to have a safe place to get feelings out.

Then the trouble begins. Because for many of us, it’s hard to move past the anger. We have nothing new to say, but our feelings are still raw and insistent, so we think we still need to spew them. At this point, the anger moves from being necessary and assertive to being hurtful and harmful.

The truth is, this happens with any two people in a confrontation, from siblings to a parent and child to coworkers to people standing in line for a chai latte. In the heat of our anger, it feels so important to hold onto it, defend it, and voice it.

But watch what happens when one person feels attacked. They immediately either defend or withdraw (fight or flight). Either way, the path to communication has been pretty much shut down at that moment. You might feel better telling your spouse or child or fellow driver exactly why you have a right to your reaction. But if your goal is to work things out and gain greater connection—as almost all couples state when they come into counseling—then what you’re doing is accomplishing exactly the opposite. Congratulations, you have a right to be mad. Now what?

The answer is, we have to put aside the anger, or at least the expression of it. We can still be mad, but we have to be able to take care of those feelings on our own in order to dial down the emotional temperature. We do this by walking away, take a time out, doing breathing exercises, shooting hoops, whatever works for you. Then we can come back together more calmly in order to talk it out. We put aside those behaviors that don’t help—blaming, yelling and defending—in favor of the cool, composed, thoughtful tones that encourage the other person to hear us.

Pretty boring stuff. No one really wants to hear about “active listening techniques” and “using ‘I’ statements,” and talking to each other in these stilted ways can feel fake. But what’s the alternative? We’re grown-ups (unless you’re kids, in which case kudos to you for learning this early on, imagine what you’ll accomplish in life), so we have to control ourselves. And as with everything important in life, this is really hard to do. It takes a lot of practice and self-control to master the art of communication, and especially with family members, who press all of our buttons and often leave us feeling like hotheaded teens.

So the lesson is difficult, but clear: if you want to be heard, talk more softly. And if you want to win, you’re bound to lose.

Just Thinking About Life is Life-Changing

How many industries run on the promise of quick changes? The weight loss complex, self-help books, financial advice, tutoring courses, parenting programs, the list goes on. “Get six-pack abs in ten days,” one video promises. “Learn Spanish in your sleep,” another company swears.

The proliferation of quick-fix products keeps up the illusion that other people around us are getting what they want without having to work very hard for it. We’ve become trained to want instant gratification and miracle cures. Throwing money at a problem, hiring an expert to guide us or looking to the latest fad is highly seductive. It feels motivating to believe that something can happen, in only days, to change years of habits and thought processes. This is despite the proof we have showing over and over that quick fixes rarely work on a long-term basis. For instance, according to studies, 95% of diets fail and most dieters will regain their lost weight within five years.

The same holds true in therapy. Some changes come easily and some growth happens overnight, but real, gut-level, permanent differences in how we think and act take time and effort. There are two problems that clients often have with this realization: first, the difficulty of settling in for the long haul and second, the energy it takes to get excited about small—sometimes almost invisible—steps.

I hear the same question all the time. “Why isn’t my life changing yet? I’m doing all this talking and thinking about it, but I stay exactly the same.”

The truth is, they aren’t the same at all, even if their outer circumstances still look the same. They’re changing from the inside out, from the bottom up, from the molecules. If your molecules were morphing, would you expect to see anything on the outside? Would you expect to look and feel different right away? No, you’d know that that level of growth was a slow process, but one that would last forever.

A speaker at my clinic gave the most wonderful analogy a few weeks ago. She said that long-held bad habits or negative thought spirals are like an eighteen-wheeler driving down the same muddy road, day after day. After a few years, the ruts in the road would be so deep that it would feel impossible to move that truck onto another pathway. It might even take two people to tug the steering wheel over. But over enough time, a new path could be forged. That’s how connections in the brain work, too. You’ve had years upon years of the same neural pathways, the same messages (“you’re lazy”) or behaviors (chocolate every afternoon) or strategies (martinis to medicate stress). Those repetitions take time to change. It can’t happen overnight.

The coolest part—which is often the most annoying to my clients—is that a lot of the work is done before you even realize it’s happened. It starts the minute you begin to think about your life in a different way, and to hope for change. At that point, you still haven’t changed much externally. You’re still sitting on the couch too much, or putting yourself down too often. But on that molecular level, you’re already on the journey to health. Some people take moments to enact change, and others take decades. But the first steps are just as valid and just as life-changing as the last ones. So take a deep breath, and let yourself learn at the speed that’s comfortable to you now. And be proud of what you’ve already accomplished, just reading this blog and thinking about change.

The Goodness of Anger

I don’t usually share cute animal videos, but this one really spoke to me:

http://www.wimp.com/stopnightmare/

I mean, it’s insanely adorable, sure. But I keep thinking about it in terms of parenting, friendships and therapy. I guess it fits into my philosophy that what we all most need is unconditional love, whether it comes from a parent, ourselves or a therapist. If we weren’t lucky enough to get the right parenting—and who was?—then as adults we have a strong need to fix that. And the term “parenting” comprises both guidance (right vs. wrong, boundaries, tough love) and simple, pure, mushy warmth. It makes me rethink my own parenting style, which focuses a lot on helping my kids be independent and hardy, when a lot of times what they want is what that kitten has—someone to hold them just a little tighter.

Parenting is a constant struggle for balance, and for re-balancing when you realize you’ve gone too far in one direction or another, or you figure out that at this moment, your child needs something different from what you’re giving. Therapy is often similar. The relationship there is nothing like parent and child, and the client is the guide of the work, but the therapist has to be aware of the two needs of the client—to grow and understand herself, and to be held emotionally. Does anyone have enough warmth? Enough acceptance? Sometimes what we really need is just to have someone who believes in us and sits with us through our struggles.

That’s a lot to read from a kitten video. But when I look at it, I think (in a tone of pure contentment), “Aaaaahhhh.” That’s pure warmth. That’s pure love.

Keeping Your Mouth Shut Might Make You Sick

Therapists know that talking about something, over and over, is almost always more helpful than harmful. It turns out that this is even true when it comes to talking about things that are incredibly painful, scary and upsetting. New findings on the reactions of people who have PTSD and are in research studies shows this. So whether your trauma is major or minor, sitting on your story might make you feel safer, but in the long run you’re really missing out.

Here’s what the studies show: Over the past twenty years or so, researchers have been worried about the potential downside of doing studies with people with PTSD. Most trauma studies ask participants to remember seriously terrifying memories, and some deliberately provoke the memories, then measure reactions. For a long time, investigators guessed that this process would re-traumatize people, and took steps to minimize the possible consequences.

But over the past ten years, studies have gauged the actual effect of this research, and have found that the opposite is often true. Overall, participants had positive experiences with research studies. Most felt minimally distressed. And the suffering they did feel often didn’t even last until the end of the study.

Looking more closely at the distress itself, one thing in these studies became clear: pain isn’t always seen as negative. This is counter to everything we’re taught in Western society, but anyone who’s been through a hard time knows that it’s part awful, part kind of amazing.

Although there clearly are risks involved in asking people to recount painful experiences, the pain felt by some was not the same as the pain that came from the traumatic experiences themselves. Instead of being victimized, now participants were in control of when to tell their stories and how. It turns out that direct questions don’t tend to bring up painful memories the way that more subtle reminders can. Plus, the benefit outweighed the pain: remembering the past was cited as both upsetting, and insightful. Subjects learned more about themselves and their past experiences from recounting them during the study. Another advantage was altruistic, in that subjects were happy to know they were helping others with the same issues.

Most people studied found it useful to reflect on their experiences, and some, even those who felt distressed during the questioning, reported several days’ worth of relief afterward. It’s simple, really. Talking through the memories makes them less powerful. Research shows that people with emotional traumas long to talk about it, and that opening up and sharing their stories is a way to alleviate the pain. In their essay “How Can We Research Human Suffering?” Maria Arman and Arne Rehnsfeldt even give a name to the phenomenon of living through trauma and then not having a chance to talk it through: doubled suffering.

Stress Relief

I’m currently leading an unemployment support group with my co-leader, the excellent Jennifer Saunders. We do one-hour seminars on relieving the stress that unemployment can bring. While preparing a recent presentation, it occurred to me that—once again—I needed to take my own advice. Stress is stress, whether it’s from looking for work or from the fear of standing in front of people and trying to sound like an expert. Because of that, the tools that we’re offering can be used in any situation, and for any reason.

In January, we’ll be retooling the presentation for our biggest audience yet, 50 people. So we’ll add some new pieces, about the physical effects of stress (headaches, stomach aches, muscle aches, back aches; lack of sleep, constant exhaustion, slowed thought processes; increased heart rate and increased risk of all sorts of illnesses and diseases), to the parts we already have about all the emotional risks of stress (depression, panic attacks, anger, irritability, etc. etc.).

And after we’ve thoroughly bummed everyone out with all the negatives, we’ll discuss specific tools to combat stress. We all know how to “fight” against our stress by digging in and working harder. But Jennifer and I focus less on motivation for the task at hand, which can often just cause more of the same anxiety, and focus more on changing your whole point of view, if only for half an hour a day. You can do this through social outlets like support groups or picking up the phone to call a friend. Or by keeping yourself calm through listening to music, petting an animal or journaling. Or by escaping into reading, going to the movies or getting a massage.

And then there’s my favorite tactic: the research-backed, evidence-supported technique called mindfulness. This can be as simple as bringing yourself back to this very moment, enjoying the sounds, tastes, smells and sights around you so that the scurrying monkey mind is temporarily quieted. Or it can mean serious meditation, with a mantra; or guided imagery, both of which take time and practice but are oh-so-worth the effort, since they often lead to long-term improvements in health.

Either way (or in many other ways), mindfulness helps to slow the heartbeat and clear the mind. It teaches us that we have some control over our bodies and our stress levels. And it forces us to take time away from what we’re supposed to be accomplishing and instead spend that time on our most important accomplishments—ourselves.