Living well despite...

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You probably don’t remember the experience of learning to walk, of falling down and getting back up again, until you mastered the art of placing one foot in front of the other successfully. And we all managed it. The ineffable quality that means that life can bring us to our knees but we can get up and come back stronger and more able than ever. And it’s called Resilience.

As an active listener, I am exposed to a large variety of clients and it leaves me wondering why some people go through personal or professional crises only to come out the other side stronger and more at peace with themselves, while others fall apart and struggle to carry on? It’s hard to predict who will rise from tragedy like a phoenix from the ashes and who will need all of their strength just to keep their heads above water. So when it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others? In other words, what is the secret that some of us bounce back whilst others stay on the floor?

George Bonanno, has been studying resilience for nearly 25 years. His theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using this system to deal with stress. But the critical element of resilience that he found is our Perception. And I do believe this to be the fundamental difference between bouncing back and relapsing.

“The thing is we are all innately mental and emotionally resilient and the only thing that prevents us from experiencing life in this way are layers of insecure thinking that we build as a barrier to that experience. They are all a construct, none of it is real!” Alison Heather Sutton, Transformational Coach

Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? Bonnano, has coined a different term: PTE or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it.

Many years ago I lost one of my best friend to suicide. It was shocking to say the least, not only because it was an unexpected, earth-shattering loss for me, but also because she had made a choice that I could never come to terms with. In other words, I didn’t get closure. All I was left with was a profound sense of sadness, regret and guilt. That is when I found a way to try and make sense of her irreversible decision and greater awareness about mental health issues. It helped me move from a position of ignorance about suicide as a senseless act to a position of empathy and compassion. It was a traumatic event but one that I began to construe as a lesson to put emotional well being on top of my list of priorities. In other words, this awful experience changed my perception about the tragedy of suicide.

While it may sound easy, it is far from that. But the good news is that we can learn to become resilient. And like always, I present to you the two most feasible ways that you can think about, if you want to use your experience as a springboard and not quicksand.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist, found that training people to change their explanatory style – the techniques we use to explain events - from internal to external (Bad events aren’t my fault or now popularly called “internalizing”), from global to specific (This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life or popularly called “generalization”), and from permanent to impermanent (I can change the situation, rather than assuming its fixed or more popularly called “learned helplessness”) make people more psychologically successful and less prone to depression.

Another development psychologist named Emmy Werner followed a group of 198 children over a 32-year longitudinal project, from before birth through a few decades of their life. She had a trove of data at her disposal that she published in 1989. She found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a bond with a parent or teacher or a supportive role model. But another had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms”. They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively.” Perhaps most importantly, resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. They saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates.

So it appears that re-framing a trauma as a challenge and changing your locus from external to internal can lead to resilience. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things.” Bonanno says.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected. Secondly, learning to believe in your ability to influence events and outcomes rather than blaming outside forces can lend to moving from a state of helplessness to unbeatable. For example, you may not be able to control rain when hosting a grand party. But it is still possible to splash about and provide a fun experience for your guests by dominating the external weather with your mental weather.

Of course, I don’t ever wish that you have to face a tragedy of massive proportions, but we can’t predict what life has in store for us. However, certain events are excellent catalyst for change and set us off on a philosophical journey to find out how we can make the most of it and bounce back stronger and wiser.

Personally, I can't recall a single phase of my life that didn't have its share of adversities. But somehow, I always managed to rise above. I attribute it in part to genetics and environment but mainly my attitude that has been so accurately put in words by Hagrid of the Harry Potter series; "What's coming will come and we'll meet it when it does."

Needless to say, that a lot has come in the shape of raising two young kids as a single mom for many years, helping them with school work while pursuing my MBA, finding a job while settling one child in boarding and the other in a new city, making sense of the chaos of working in an advertising agency and then re-inventing myself as a counselor, learning to deal with two young adults of which one continues to be a moody over-achiever and the other continues to show specks of emotional maturity for short periods of time. But I chug along despite the setbacks, challenges, hardships with the mantra of, "what's coming will come and I'll meet it when it does" and always count my blessings.