Resilience Shimmers
Resilience shimmers
like aspen leaves before the fall.
Something greater is releasing.
Believing
in them-selves, the leaves let go.
The ground receives, descends,
and nourishes the seed.
There is a weathered old bristlecone pine forever changed by the winds of time. Highly resilient to bad soil and the harsh weather that has buffeted and challenged it, the bristlecone is one of the oldest living trees on earth. Its branches and needles are like the circumstances and stories of our life. The winds of time have changed us, too.
Storms require flexibility, so we may bend and not break. They help us to develop coping skills, teach us how to regulate our emotions, and see opportunity in difficulty. Resilience is what will find us still standing after the deluge. With strong roots to support us, the ancestral stories will bend and change and yeild to a new story of resilience. There is great strength in yielding.
By its very nature, the resilience of life requires a certain kind of toughness. The most delicate among us are strong in ways both seen and unseen, illustrated by the fact that we are here and we exist. Resilience requires strength and flexibility.
Most of us will literally or figuratively experience a wildfire at some point. It is only after a wildfire has moved through that we see many ecosystems bloom. The ashes of our lives can be used much the same way in a conscious process of creating beauty. When we burn away the old dead wood, proclaim the new, and seed for the future we become like the forest - resilient.
I have taken my journey on the road to resilience through loss and tragedy, failed relationships, serious health problems, financial disasters, and emotional distress. The good news is that resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that may be learned and developed by anyone.
I am a woman of resilience. And as such, I can testify to the strength of a long line of resilient women who stand behind me. Women who remade themselves and learned how to bend.
While resilience may have a genetic foundation, it can also be cultivated, not unlike the gardens and families that our grandmothers once tended. Theirs, as well as our responses to adversity repeated over time, become integrated into ourselves as lasting inner strength.
In my attempt to maintain self-esteem in a family that made me feel bad about myself, I developed a capacity for resilience. Psychiatrist Steven Wolin, M.D., of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, defines resilience as the capacity to rise above adversity. In my spiritual quest for this ascension, I discovered Eastern religion and meditation, which restored my connection to the divine.
Wolin also found that one of the ways we can be resilient is to maintain independence. I sought freedom from a troubled family by leaving home at age fifteen and keeping a safe emotional distance. I hung out with my untroubled friends’ families and eventually married into a stable, loving family.
Ground-breaking resilience researcher and sociologist Emmy Werner, Ph.D., showed that most troubled teens had pulled themselves together by their 30s and 40s. They were determined not to repeat their parents’ lives. I am one of those teenagers who may not have escaped unharmed but was determined to end the cycle of abuse and legacy of shame.
Shame is not unfamiliar territory. As an adoptee partially raised in a traditional Seminole Indian Village, my family had secrets they took with them to their graves. I had been looking into the eyes of shame my entire life.
Resilience requires discerning between guilt and shame. Guilt says, I made a mistake, while shame expects failure and says, I am a mistake. Resiliency tells us that we can learn from our mistakes. It is all a work in progress. In looking beyond myself, beyond someone who felt that it was all my fault, I learned to see what other things were not about me that caused the traumatic events.
Adversity gets our attention and is how the brain and advertising work but trial and error leads to trial and success.
Individual success usually is in exact proportion of the scope of the defeat the individual has experienced and mastered. – Napoleon Hill
Columbia University psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz says that trial and error learning from gradual exposure to risk insures against anxiety disorders. But there is an edge to how far we can push ourselves and others. One of my mentors taught me, “push them to the edge but not over the edge.” There is a middle ground between exposure to failure and relentless failures that can crush the spirit of even the most resilient. Fostering resilience is a process.
I have found that writing down my feelings in a journal helps me process my failures and to move on, something James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, demonstrated. The more we foster resiliency, the more we welcome failure as a learning opportunity and see ourselves as a work in progress.
Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoesksema suggests the difference between people who pull themselves out of failure and those who do not is a spiral of morbid self-involvement and rumination. What may separate the ruminator from the resilient is the type of optimism and enthusiasm that allows one to persist. Another mentor gave me the mantra, “peristence furthers.” Perhaps as Irish author Samuel Beckett suggests, we need to learn to “fail better.”
Ever Tried.
Ever Failed.
No Matter.
Try Again.
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho
My mother has accused me of being too overly optimistic. But the value of cultivating optimism and fostering resilience is well known. We can accomplish this through the learned skills of emotional awareness, impulse control, accurate thinking, empathy, appropriate risk, and problem-solving. According to psychologist Karen Reivich of the University of Pennsylvania, the most important of these is optimism.
What if resilience wasn’t bouncing back but bouncing forward? This is how the Thriving Resilient Communities network describes the movement to address the root causes of unsustainable resource use at the heart of the social and environmental crisis. After leaving home at age fifteen, I created a family of choice around me knowing that relationships and community foster resilience. The work of give and take necessary to maintain those relationships brings a sense of emotional gratification and maturity.
In my thirties, I discovered the work of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and that I am a woman who also runs with the wolves – a wild woman, not a bad girl. Clarissa gave me resources for recovering resilience through myths, stories, and archetypes that remind us of a universal human story in which patterns repeat, and we are not alone. Others have gone before us and can show the way. While we may need to descend into the underworld, we must also ascend as winter into spring and night into day.
Cultural diversity and Indigenous wisdom have brought us even greater access to different approaches to building resilience. Studies have shown that a caring support system is a primary resilience factor. Our ancestors knew the importance of community and the world of nature as an essential part of that support system. Nature teaches us that we are in relationship with all that is: Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “all my relations” in the Lakota language.
Hugging a tree and fighting to save an old-growth forest or protect the sacred life-giving waters not only defines a value system but also fosters resilience. I believe that resilience is an art. It is the art of believing in oneself, life itself, and the power of something greater. Native American Spirituality gave me a reference point for dying to that which I was to become something more. It is through these shamanic deaths that I have risen. I didn’t lose heart even though my heart broke. Through drumming, dancing, and singing, I have found my way to a resilient life as aspen leaves shimmering before the fall.
References:
Grierson, B 2016, ‘Weathering the Storm’, Psychology Today
Estroff Marano, H 2003, ‘The Art of Resilience’, Psychology Today
Pinkola Estés, C 1996, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Cariad Barret, A 2017, Shamanic Wisdom for Pregnancy and Parenthood: Practices to Embrace the Transformative Power of Becoming a Parent
Reivich, K 2003, The Resilience Factor
This is an amazing article and one that should go out far and wide, especially to the “woke” movement that so wants protection from everyone, and supports rules in the name of social appropriateness against the rest of us. It would also be a great article for teens, and Jordon Peterson comes to mind. I will send it to one of my clients who does mentoring with teens. Thank you!🙏🏼