Resilience

Greetings Friends,

Just what, exactly, is resilience? Well, resilience is the ability to recover from difficulty. It is how we cope with the challenges in our lives. Our individual resilience is determined by a combination of genetics, environment, personal history and situational context. Current research has found the genetic component to be relatively small. Karestan Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health says “The way I think about it is that there are temperamental or personality characteristics that are genetically influenced, like risk-taking or whether you are an introvert or extrovert.” According to Professor Koenen, it isn’t true that some of us are born more resilient than others. Almost any trait can be a positive one or a negative one depending on the situation. Our personal history, it seems, is much more important to our resilience. Almost every study or review of resilience in the last fifty years has determined the quality of our relationships with those close to us, especially parents and primary caregivers, significantly determines our resilience. Bessel van der Kolk, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine has been researching post-traumatic stress since the 1970s and is the founder of the Trauma Research Foundation in Boston. Dr. van der Kolk says long term studies show the first twenty years of our lives are especially critical. “How loved you felt as a child is a great predictor of how you manage all kinds of difficult situations later in life.” “Different traumas at different ages have their own impacts on our perceptions, interpretations and expectations; these early experiences sculpt the brain, because it is a use dependent organ,” he said. We can think of resilience as a set of skills that can be learned. This can come from our exposure to difficult situations. How we cope with the difficulty depends on what we have in our toolbox. For some of us it might be avoidance, using drugs, gambling, drinking or food. Avoidance is not resilience! Those of us that have developed more resilience tend to be more optimistic, possess strong religious or spiritual beliefs, be socially connected, have emotional flexibility and a moral compass. We don’t dwell too long on the negative and look for opportunities that might occur even in the dark times. We learn to accept what we can’t change in a situation and look for what we can. It is natural to feel overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated and worried. Once we learn to focus on what we can actually do something about, let go of the worry about what we can’t change and live in our present moment – today, we will be able to not only survive, but thrive. We will have become resilient. Stay happy and healthy.

Best Regards

Misty and Dawn