Joseph V. Russo, PhD

Somewhere in my Internet surfing, I came across the above graphic on resilience. I love the way it puts the skills into six simple domains. I especially like the part about composure and the skill of remaining calm and in control.

You might ask, “Control of what? Haven’t you always said, Dr. Russo, that we should relax and know that nothing is under control?” Well, yes dear reader, I have said that. The point is to remain calm and in control of yourself.

Following last week’s post on Resilience and The Little Engine that Could, a client of mine sent this along. It is from a daily email entitled the Christian Relationship Devotional. It was written by Karla Downing.

Resilience is being able to competently meet life’s challenges. It makes you able to adjust to life’s demands and weather the difficulties.

Resilient people have good support systems, good stress-management skills, a positive viewpoint, and high self-confidence.

What are some of the skills resilient people have learned? Well …

• They have learned how to reach out to people that are supportive. This gives them additional support when they need it which helps them to respond to more effectively to problems. Cut out the life-suckers and surround yourself with life-givers!
• They look at things optimistically rather than pessimistically. Looking at the positive gives them confidence when facing difficulties. Moreover, they know, instinctively, that it is HOW you look at events in life that matters.
• They know how to problem solve. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by problems, they hit them head on and figure out what can be done rather than focusing on what they have no power over. Remember that to be overwhelmed is to be fearful. And we have learned from the wonderful Dr. David Rast, to be grateful is not to be fearful.
• They know themselves. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses gives you an advantage because you can maximize the things you do well and then get additional support for the things that are hard. Remember the words of Dirty Harry Callahan, “A man has GOT to know his limitations!”
• They are adaptable. They adjust to things by making necessary changes rather than wasting time upset about the things that they cannot change.
• They know how to feel their emotions and yet manage how they express them, so they don’t create more problems by emotional reactivity. In other words, they know how to respond and not to react.
• They know how to take care of themselves. They recognize their needs and proactively find ways to meet them. This isn’t ego. This isn’t a me-first approach to life. It is simply the knowledge that without self-care they can be of no help to anyone.
• They have good self-control. This gives them confidence in meeting challenges and for doing what it takes to take care of themselves. My clients and readers will know that I am not a big fan of that notion of “self-esteem.” Instead, I have always labeled it as a function of self-control.
• They trust themselves to know what they need and to respond to problems wisely. Go ahead – try it. TRUST YOURSELF to do right.

The moral of the story is this: If you don’t have resilience, begin working on the skills in the six domains that you need to develop to become resilient. The list above is a great starting point.

Thank you, Karla!

— Dr. Russo

If we can love deeply, and most of us can, then why shouldn’t a break-up take months or even years to get over? And, for that matter, what does “get over” really mean?  Maybe we never get over it, but rather somehow incorporate it into our collection of experiences, all of which leads to a kind of wisdom about loving and living.

“I regret that we are born with two lives,” said Karen Blixen (author, Out of Africa), “the life we are born with, and the life we learn with.”

If you are living, then you are learning. Simple as that. And some of us learn how to live differently from others. That knowledge about living, and the concomitant faculties that develop within us , is otherwise known as “resilience.” It is the certainty that whatever may happen has happened to us, or to someone else, at some other point in time.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

There is nothing new under the sun. This stoical ability to live with what happens in life, and to “make do” – that’s resilience.

I have been reading a new book by Megan Jay, PhD, entitled Super Normal. You may have seen an article about it in The Daily Mail. Put simply, the book is a nice survey of what we have come to know as that oddly enviable ability to not let very much bother you – not in any deep semi-permanent way. “Enviable” in the sense that (it seems) everyone else can get through life without getting bothered, but not us.

Dr. Jay argues that resilience is not a trait we’re born with, per se. It is probably true that some children are socialized early on to self-soothe in ways that other children are not, but that does not mean that that ability to soothe cannot be learned.

“Working through grief is an internal struggle for everyone,” she says, and indeed it is. And grief is precisely what we feel when a loving relationship has somehow, inexplicable gone terribly wrong. When we see others seemingly bounce back after adversity, it is not that they are somehow superhuman, but rather, that they have learned how to coach themselves.

For example, why was it that in a year-2000 study on East German political prisoners, some developed post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), while others did not?

The answer, according to the study’s author, Dr. Anke Ehlers of Oxford University, was simple: “those who did not develop PTSD were mentally coaching themselves through the ordeal.”

In other words, they were like the little engine that could:

A little railroad engine was employed about a station yard for such work as it was built for, pulling a few cars on and off the switches. One morning it was waiting for the next call when a long train of freight-cars asked a large engine in the roundhouse to take it over the hill. “I can’t; that is too much a pull for me”, said the great engine built for hard work. Then the train asked another engine, and another, only to hear excuses and be refused. In desperation, the train asked the little switch engine to draw it up the grade and down on the other side. “I think I can”, puffed the little locomotive, and put itself in front of the great heavy train. As it went on the little engine kept bravely puffing faster and faster, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

As it neared the top of the grade, which had so discouraged the larger engines, it went more slowly. However, it still kept saying, “I—think—I—can, I—think—I—can.” It reached the top by drawing on bravery and then went on down the grade, congratulating itself by saying, “I thought I could, I thought I could.”

Those prisoners thought they could, and they did. They had, to put it simply, a positive mindset. Where that positive mindset came from is anyone’s guess, but you too can develop it. In the words of Dr. Jay,

We do not know why some political prisoners can steel themselves through the torture – or, at the other extreme, some people can motivate themselves to get out of bed an hour earlier for a run in 50-degree cold. But it can be learned!

Here are five (5) concrete things we can do to bolster that positive mindset:

1. DO NOT THINK OF YOURSELF AS ‘NOT RESILIENT’ – EVEN IF YOU FEEL HELPLESS!

   We do not “bounce back” after adversity. Instead, we “battle back.” Without question, it is a struggle up the hill, like The Little Engine that Could. You must fight back against the bad feelings that come at you. And that fight takes time. In other words, resilience needs time to sharpen its saw, to be able to cut through the pain. It does NOT mean you aren’t resilient if you don’t feel better the next day. It only means that you are capable of deep abiding love. And digging out will take time. Handling bad situations well is not natural and emotionless.

2. MAKE A LIST OF HOW YOU MADE IT THROUGH TOUGH TIMES IN THE PAST. REALIZE YOU ARE NOT ‘DOOMED’ IF YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH MULTIPLE BREAK-UPS!

   You are not unlucky at love. Luck has nothing to do with it. Or, I suppose it does, if you define luck (as I do) as that which resides at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Past performance is NOT an indicator of the future, unless you are incapable of reflection and learning (which I doubt that you are).

   That said, you must recognize that your past cuts both ways. Dr. Jay says,

   “For people who go through a lot of break-ups, they might think, “why does this keep happening to me? What’s wrong with me?”

   Or, if you grow up with an unstable family, you might think you will never find happiness*.

   That doesn’t have to be the case, and it’s important to look at how your past is casting a shadow over your present. Oftentimes when people go through hard times – and I think break-ups are a perfect example of this – people don’t remember or recognize how they got through it before. We don’t give ourselves credit for those times!

   Therefore, when life delivers adversity, stop and think how you made it through adversities in the past. How did you get through it when you lost your job? Or after your other break-ups?

   My belief is that all people are far more resilient than they realize. They get sucked into the woe-is-me syndrome that Facebook and other social media sites seem to encourage. There is a tendency to focus on only the bad things that happened, and not on how you made it out.

   Stop and think: I have done this before. What was it that I did that got me out?

3. FORCE YOURSELF TO STICK TO PLANS

   Quite frankly, this is all about avoiding the woe-is-me reaction. Period. But, it takes work.

   There is ALWAYS someone far worse off than you, and in those moments of self-pity, stop to think about those people.

   Then, stick to whatever plans you’d made for the day, or the week, or the coming month. Dr. Jay calls this “the steeling effect.” Sticking to plans, or even making new ones, steels your psyche. In other words, summon up whatever determination has gotten you through similar circumstances in the past.

   That combination – avoiding self-pity and sticking to plans – is powerful. You will STILL go through the pain (remember, loving deeply means hurting deeply) but the combination is like a light at the end of the tunnel.

4. JOIN A CLASS OR ENGAGE IN SOME OTHER NON-EMOTIONAL ACTIVITY

   Something, anything, that does not involve emotion. Maybe it’s your run in the morning; or, cleaning the house; or, changing the oil in the pickup. Whatever is it, just make sure that it is something that can leave you feeling satisfied and accomplished. It will take your mind off of feeling defeated. You are strong – period. Keep thinking that.

5. FIND PEOPLE TO LEAN ON, GET A THERAPIST, TALK TO SOMEONE WORSE OFF THAN YOU

   Resilience is fighting back against what’s gone wrong – it doesn’t mean you have to do that alone. Strong people who got through tough times successfully always have at least one person that they say helped them through it. Being strong means letting others help you be strong. And talking to someone worse off than you will remind you that we’ve all encountered adversity.

And stop feeling sorry for yourself.

* The Founding Fathers of our Country saw it as the “pursuit of happiness,” thinking that happiness is subjective and at all times, fleeting. For more about that pursuit, for having loved and lost, see this wonderful article.

In my work as a Distance Counselor (using the precepts of tele-mental health), I am often asked by my clients if they e-mail me too much. My answer is always, no. I make it clear that they are free to email me at any time about any subject whatsoever! The fact is, I enjoy reading their mails. Moreover, I believe writing is astoundingly therapetutic.

In the late 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker developed a form of writing therapy called expressive writing. When you engage in expressive writing, you write about your deepest thoughts and feelings without concern for spelling, grammar, or sentence construction. It is free-flowing and unfocused self-expression.

Although not everybody benefits from expressive writing, recent studies have shown that expressive writing helps anxious individuals perform better on tests. We’re not sure exactly why this is, but one leading theory is that writing about test anxiety “offloads” worrisome thoughts, thereby freeing up mental resources to concentrate on the test.

Moreover, my clients often ask whether their words and expressions are repetitious. No, I reply, they are not. And I ask them not to worry about repetition – this is not a class where there’s a right or wrong answer, or points taken off for verbosity.

Therapy is all about getting things OFF your mind and into the “therapeutic space” between counselor and client. We do that so we can examine them in an analytical way; holding them up to the light of day, so to speak. Often, our concerns, problems, etc., will seem somewhat irrelevant in the process. Or, they may be truly significant. Only in that way can we begin to re-story our lives.

They will invariably ask if the are annoying me, to which I reply, “You cannot annoy me. At age 60, I am way beyond that. My clients interest me and only rarely do they give me pause. I am all about listening.”

Just as invariable is the notion (in their writings and through their spoken words) that they, my clients, feel as if they will “never move beyond [their] problem.” Frankly, my conclusion is that that we rarely move beyond our problems in any sort of geographic or philosophic way. In other words, we cannot “move” physically and hope that our problems won’t somehow follow us.

And, philosophically-speaking, the best we can hope for is a categorization and some sort of psychic compartmentalization of our problems. For example, the tremendous heartache, which I felt at age 30 when my then-girlfriend, Cheryl, announced that she was moving on to another man and getting married, is still with me. But it has been categorized, if you will, into one of those “life events” that taught me innumerable lessons about myself and the world. She and I can and do reminisce about our experiences some 30 years ago and can laugh about them now. I tell my clients, “You too will get there.”

“I regret that we are born with two lives,” said the wonderful author, Baroness Karen von Blixen (“Out of Africa”), “the one we are born with, and the one that we learn with.”

That has always seemed to me to be one of those Capital-T Truths, in the sense that we cannot avoid it. Learning is therefore all about repetition and the development of neural pathways, some of which can result in a kind of mental scar-tissue that hurts when touched. But better that we feel the pain in a mental sort of way (thinking here of what we have learned about having touched a hot stove) than to repeat ourselves (thinking here of the definition of insanity: Doing something the same way over and over again, hoping for a different outcome).

People are not stove-tops. We cannot turn them off and hope they will cool down. We must live with whatever personality quirks and attractions they come with, and aim for either a proper dovetailing of both with our own, or side-step such people altogether.

The right relationship amounts to a calculus that delivers a result of 3 out of 1+1. Does that make sense?

Since the only behavior we can control is our own, when we try to control someone else and turn them into something they are not, we are trying to force a 3 out of 1+1. And it will never work. We need to side-step that person and engage with someone else. It is a life-long process and is why, at age 60, I have perhaps 5 truly close friends (one of which is my wife) who have been additive to my life and who have given me 3s, 4s, and 5s (and more!) out of that basic 1+1 equation.

Nota bene: Even our enemies, or those whom we have elected to side-step, will teach us something and deliver a result of 3 out of 1+1. I think back to people who are no longer in my life but who managed to teach me something of such incredible value that I cannot and will not ever forget.

Remember Epictetus here, in the sense that we are charged with adjusting our view of events if we hope to grow. Hard work though it maybe, I have elected to view their impact on my life as a positive one, even if the learnings were delivered negatively, and even though it resulted in the aforementioned side-step.

Those are my thoughts on this blustery Sunday in October in Laramie, Wyoming. Agree? Disagree? I would love to hear from you.