According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is, “The process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” I find this definition a bit vague and something that I would like to provide a perspective on, in the pursuit of clarity.
Throughout my 50+ years on this planet, my life has been marked with opportunities to practice resilience. At an early age I was expelled from my home and had to quickly adjust to a “new normal” as I navigated my way through becoming an “adult” at aged sixteen. I wouldn’t say it was perfect, but I did quickly figure out how to come to terms with what life was now like – and I was able to leave my past life in the past.
Fast forward a bit and I ended up marrying my high school sweetheart where we embarked on a ten-year adventure that included having a son but ultimately ended in divorce. Enter the chance to be resilient one more time – and that, I was. I said goodbye once again to the prior life and walked into the new normal. No, it wasn’t perfect, and it was certainly filled with a lot of tears and sleepless nights as I grappled with actually moving on, but once I did have that internal resolve – that inner peace that basically told me I could do this and I just needed to move forward – resilience was able to thrive again.
And, in 50 years, I have quite a few more stories of resilience. Thanks to all of those events – whether it was job loss, loss of a love, betrayals, financial challenges, my environment feeling out of control, or eventually the loss of my son (a tragedy I’d wish on no one) – I’ve learned that resilience has been one of my very best friends.
But here is what resilience isn’t. It isn’t adapting to a standard lower than the one you intrinsically know you need. It isn’t considering an abusive or toxic environment acceptable – even if it’s at work and “that’s just how the boss behaves…” It isn’t quitting on your own dreams and goals because the path just doesn’t seem to be opening up for you. And, it most certainly isn’t a talking yourself into “being okay” with some type of trauma that happened to you.
Resilience is none of those things – and while I’m certainly no doctor or psychiatrist – I have lived everyday in my own mind and have found the line between being truly resilient and being overly compromising (or co-dependent, or whatever) somewhat blurred. That is until I was at work one day and I was speaking with a former colleague who happened to work for me at the time. The subject was basically the way she had been treated prior to my arrival in the company. She was describing her role in the company as basically a thankless job (she regularly referred to herself as an “n of 1”) where she was alone to try to carry the heavy responsibilities that truly required a team if it were to be done successfully. She had been failing in silence for years, losing sleep, and being forced to operate against her own ethical code for so long that she couldn’t even see a different option. During the conversation I’d asked how she had been able to manage for so long under those conditions and to that, her answer was, “I’m resilient.”
I had to tell her – no, that is not resilience. That was an unhealthy situation to the point of being abusive at times. Thankfully she is no longer in that unhealthy environment and has gone on to live a much more balanced and peaceful life – and I am happy I could be a part of bringing her out of that space. I know at this point, some might be thinking, “why didn’t she just quit that job?” And to that, I know from personal experience that it was likely really difficult to even detect that the situation was unhealthy and that the behavior shouldn’t have been tolerated.
So, how do you detect the difference?
I used to operate in a co-dependent manner in my relationships for many years – yep, my therapist told me so and worked me through how to change that, thankfully. But, for many years, I consistently ended up attracting the same kind of person – someone that was inconsistent and ultimately untrustworthy. And although it really didn’t sit well with me, I kept thinking that the compromise for the relationship was normal (umm, it’s not) and that my ability to deal with the disappointment and lack of met needs was considered being ‘resilient.’ I couldn’t be more wrong, and I was in the process of learning that when I suddenly lost my son.
He was 25 years old, just two weeks before my 50th birthday and I was starting to formulate potential birthday plans with him when I got the panicked call from his wife who was crying and telling me that he wasn’t breathing. I raced to their home to find several emergency vehicles parked in front of the house and no sign of flurry at all. I walked in and the sounds of medical equipment were all I could hear – his wife was crying in their living room, and as I held her, she just kept sobbing and saying, “he wasn’t breathing…” until I heard one of the EMT’s say that it had been 20 minutes and they needed to call it. Everything went silent until we received confirmation from the lead EMT that he was gone.
And our lives forever changed.
Shock set in, and for anyone who has never experienced trauma to that level, that shock lasts for a very long time. By that, I mean that for weeks to months I either felt nothing – or I felt sadness and helplessness for not being able to prevent such a thing from happening. I lived with a pit in my stomach and was emotionally numb except when I was having nightmares and flashbacks during the day (the post-traumatic stress events) and when I was trying to figure out how to process all that had happened.
This is what resilience is – it is the processing of what happened until the event itself has lost the intensity of its emotional effect, but it isn’t becoming positive about or forgetting the experience. It’s figuring out how to live with memories that never cease, while disarming the corresponding emotional trigger that occurred when the trauma originally did.
I do believe that resilience is a superpower that can defeat all wrongs against us – whether abuse, betrayal, loss of a loved one – it is the superpower that keeps us positive, growing and thriving. It allows us to let grief reside in our hearts simultaneously with joy – and somehow be okay with it. It is acknowledging that the pain of an event will never fully disappear – nor will the random memories stop cropping up about it – and that’s okay. Our stories are what make each of us unique and what we’ve learned is there to help us as we continue our individual journeys.
How to Practice Resilience
- Don’t run from your feelings. Whatever the trauma has been – whether grief, loss, betrayal, abuse, or a toxic environment – don’t minimize your feelings in an effort to accept what has happened to you. We should never be in a state of mind where we feel we must accept inappropriate behavior, that we must accept the loss of a loved one, or that “this event” is what the universe had planned for us. It is not true that that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ so don’t accept trauma as something that should be tolerated and accepted. That said, trauma does happen to everyone at some point in time, so when it does, spend the time feeling how you feel about it, but also recognize when it is time to do the work to move past the initial stages of grief and loss. You will know when it is time to move forward.
Note: If you are in a toxic situation and are still engaged in traumatic behavior, please seek counseling and always keep your safety and health at the forefront of your mind and actions. - Spend time alone. To further support understanding your feelings, it is my belief that we should spend time alone. It’s important to ensure that we can understand all of the aspects of the situation and have time to think through what the new normal is, how we could do things differently in the future, how to recognize certain signs, what part we may have played in the event, etc., and we can’t do this in an environment where we are always with friends or are always giving ourselves distractions, such as television, social media, or anything that doesn’t allow quiet thinking. One slight caveat to this would be that in your alone time, I do feel it is extremely beneficial to begin an education process to help directly address the issue you’re dealing with.
- Get Educated (Do Not Skip this Step). When I lost my son, I immediately engaged in counseling to try and understand what I should be expecting for the grief process so I could recognize when something was not right or where I might need additional help. This event also happened to coincide with an exit from a very unhealthy relationship, so I also discussed that topic with my counselor who gave me enough information to help identify what I needed to educate myself on (I had been in therapy for several years while in the relationship, but had more recent revelations that I needed to address after exiting the relationship). While alone, I spent time educating myself about both situations (education can be through books, classes, YouTube videos, counseling, or any number of sources that you find specific to your needs – whatever you choose, it is essential to complete this step). Through education I was able to contextualize the events, learn “what healthy looks like and how it behaves” for the future, and ultimately come through the experience a much stronger individual. I now recognize that certain trauma can happen to all of us and sometimes there is simply no rhyme or reason for it. I’ve been able to embrace the new normal even though I will never believe that losing my son is something that was supposed to happen. Through education, I understand that these two seemingly conflicting beliefs can coexist – and they need to if I am to move forward in a healthy way.
- Embrace the New Normal. The new normal isn’t the one that you had planned (it’s certainly not the one I had planned), but it can be one that is good. Once you have processed your initial feelings, you should be in a state where you aren’t numb to how you feel, you aren’t accepting the situation as “Okay,” you aren’t necessarily forgiving someone for hurting you, but you also aren’t angry or ruminating at high speed on the events that happened. The memories are still cropping up – probably daily – but instead of pulling them into your active thoughts, you have figured out how to acknowledge them and set them aside. For me, the fine line is knowing that if I focus on the above three steps, then the process can happen rather quickly. However, my goal is never to get through the process quickly – it’s to get through it correctly – so that I am not living in a state of distress, attempting to fast track a process that is individual to the trauma itself. My hope is you will allow yourself the time to process your feelings, no matter how long it takes, and in doing so you will find yourself moving swiftly down the road to recovery.
Final Thoughts
A lot of people want to know how long it will take to get through the pain (none of us like the pain…) and to that I say that on some level we will always have a degree of pain present. These things shape us and add to our perspectives – they never 100% disappear. But if you do the work – sit with your feelings, spend that time alone, educate yourself – I believe you will be able to, step-by-step, walk into your new normal much quicker than you expect and your new normal will be multiple times better than you ever expected it could be.
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
Love & Health,
