Resilience

Thanks for sticking with me despite my sporadic posting.  While I knew that starting my Masters in Creative Writing would reduce the amount of spare time I would have to write on Substack, I’d hoped I’d be able to reduce from weekly posts to monthly ones, but it seems that every other month is a more realistic target for me.

Today I wanted to explore the topic of resilience.  It came up in my business coaching group this week, and I was surprised at how viscerally I reacted to the word.  The definition of resilience is the ability of people to recover quickly after something unpleasant or the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it has been bent, stretched or pressed.  I wasn’t the only one in the group who felt uncomfortable with the word and we discussed how its connection to endurance, putting up with things, hiding our emotions and not showing our struggles had made us view it negatively. 

On delving into my own resistance to the word my immediate, and I’ll be honest with you, pretty angry response was,

Why is resilience seen as a positive thing? Why should we be expected to recover at all, let alone quickly?  We are not like a substance, and maybe there’s a bloody good reason why we can’t return to our original shape.  Maybe the trauma we have experienced makes that impossible, and maybe we don’t even want to return to how we were before, because we are changed, and to be resilient, to appear as if we have bounced back and the thing has not changed us, is denying the magnitude of a life altering event in our lives.

In her Heart Centered Course in 2020 Danielle La Porte wrote,

We tend to associate being resilient with being able to “take it,” with getting stronger. But that’s not the essence of it. Resilience isn’t a muscle that needs to be developed. It’s not about toughening up or growing a thicker skin. Resiliency is about adaptability…..Resiliency is our capacity to respond from the heart.  We are adaptable to what is, to what’s emerging. And that is resiliency. No force, no enduring, no sucking it up. Rather adapting.

Unfortunately, there is also a more literal connection between resilience and the heart, as I know from personal experience.  Those of you have read my previous Substacks will know that I have done some research on the impact of grief on our nervous system.  From this perspective the ability to return to regulation after periods of stress is the sign of a resilient nervous system, and this is something I still struggle with.  One of the many health metrics the Fitbit measures is Heart rate variability, and mine is always low, which shows my body is less resilient and struggles to handle changing situations.  It’s annoying when you feel you have done so much work to improve something about yourself, and yet the statistics tell you otherwise.  Perhaps that partly explains why I don’t like the word resilience.

I love this poem, How to be strong, by Nikita Gill in her book Where Hope Comes From: Healing poetry for the heart, mind and soul.

There are no rules.

You are already strong.

Even when you fall apart in the most public place you know.

Even when your knees hit the floor and your trauma meets you in floods.

Even when your body wracks with sobs fashioned in the belly of a tsunami.

Even when the sorrow feels like the endless nature of drowning,

your grit is right there inside you.

Your strength is within you always

to call up when you want to.

And besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you

that endurance, that resilience,

that strength

looks so different on us all?

On some it looks like still waters and on others it looks like a dam bursting as the water falls.

I used to be more resilient, and I can tell you that officially!  In 2020 I was part of a research project by Kings College London, looking at the mental health and wellbeing of entrepreneurs and how we had coped with the challenges of the pandemic, and had a score of 4.7 out of 6 for resilience, along with high scores for the other psychological strengths of Hope, Self-efficacy and Optimism.  I doubt I would score so highly if I was retested now.  

I’d like to end with this amazing quote by Richard Wagamese in the book Embers.  It might not be quite where I’m at, but I think it’s something I’d prefer to aim for than resilience.

I no longer want to be resilient. I don’t want to simply bounce back from things that hurt me or cause me pain. Bouncing back means returning to where I stood before. Instead, I want to go beyond the hurts and the darkness. The first step toward genuine healing from my mental illness was when I came to trust and believe that there was a beyond. Now I reach for beyond every day, in every encounter, in every circumstance. I seek to go where I have never travelled. I wake with the vision of a purposeful day, filled with adventure and teachings. Then I take the first step and try to make it Beyond.