Someone was hurt before you, wronged before you, hungry before you, frightened before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you . . . yet, someone survived . . . You can do anything you choose to do.
Maya Angelou
In the face of humiliation, rage, degradation, fear of defeat, or simply indefinable fear, being resilient weaves the fabric of eventual success. Rebounding and recovering from the personal insults that life hands us contributes to our eventual growth. Whether these hard times are large or small, overt or covert, physical, mental, or emotional, whether they come from our family of origin, our workplace, or even our circle of friends, these very experiences that could stunt our development instead strengthen it, if we are resilient.
Resilience is standing tall rather than hanging our heads and shuffling away when the invitation to give up beckons. Resilience is saying, “Yes I can,” in the presence of those who doubt us. Resilience means never succumbing to the forces of defeat that may be all around us.
Few of us graciously accept the insults that so commonly become a natural part of living. That's to be expected, perhaps. But what we manage to tolerate successfully, we will thrive from in time. That's my experience, anyway. And that's the experience I think we can all cultivate. That's the experience I hope to help you develop using the suggestions I offer in this book.
Ever since publishing my first book, Each Day a New Beginning, in 1982, I have become convinced that my calling, so to speak, is to serve as your teacher in any way that I can. By that I mean that I am called to share with you all that I have gathered from others over the years. Through my sharing, I get the added pleasure of relearning all that I offer you.
I chose to begin this book with a discussion of resilience because I think it is the kernel that lives at the center of all the positive characteristics we develop when we grow up in families that struggle to be functional. There are countless other strengths that will get our focus in due course, and throughout this book we will look at how resilience informs all of the experiences we face as we try to make sense of the dysfunctional family system.
Resilience means believing there is a path that has been charted for you and staying on it even when you stumble.
Resilience serves as a backdrop for lives that move forward rather than succumbing to the pain and the downdraft of the unenlightened family of origin. I say unenlightened because my research for this book has convinced me that families, for the most part, did the best they could; their best was simply seldom good enough because it wasn't well informed. And since that was the case, I think it's fair to say it took a herculean effort by the many individuals who have crossed my path to thrive, regardless of their circumstances.
One of the many people I interviewed, whose effort to survive was herculean, for sure, comes instantly to mind. His name has been changed to protect his anonymity. I'll call him William. William grew up in a family extremely short on compassionate attention and very long on his mother's withering criticism, coupled with extended periods of deadly silence. His mother, though not officially diagnosed, was mentally ill. And his father was a withdrawn, silent man, uninvolved and completely distant from his wife and two children. His work consumed him, perhaps as an escape, but nonetheless he was not available for emotional support, guidance, or any expression of love.
The family simply didn't function as a unit, but rather like four separate souls sharing the same address. They didn't create a home. Their interactions were few, with the exception of excessive outbursts of criticism from Mom, followed by the nearly immediate disappearance of Dad. My own family resembled William's in some regard. Although there was no mental illness, there was evidence of extreme emotional pain and measurable rage. The punishing silences, coupled with the frequent outbursts by my dad, made the hours at home uncertain, uncomfortable, and unenjoyable.
Children like William, and myself too, sought support and a sense of well-being from others. In William's case, he began to excel in school, reading all the books he could lay his hands on and seeking the approval of his instructors for evidence that he mattered, that he was worthy. William soon excelled at learning how to hide his own feelings of inadequacy.
Resilience means being a willing example for others that you can make lemonade even when the lemons come in bushels.
I, on the other hand, rebelled. I met rage with rage. However, I also sought a creative outlet: I began writing stories of happy families and pretending that I was a member of those families. It was a way to lessen the emotional blows, and it proved to prepare me for a later time in my life. The present time, in fact.
That's one of the hallmarks of resilience. We grow into the person we are (knowingly or unknowingly) cultivated to become by our family of origin. It doesn't matter, actually, how we get there. It's the becoming that's important. Just as Angelou said in the quote that begins this chapter, the history of pain that pushes us forward needn't be our focus. It's that we pushed forward. We survived. And we agreed to make the journey.
I asked a number of my interviewees what resilience meant to them. I got myriad answers, but the crux was the same. Most simply, resilience meant not giving up. But beyond that, it meant making the best of whatever the situation was. It meant searching for the “pony in the pile of hay.”
To Charlie, it meant not giving up on his dream of being an aviator, even in the face of his father's constant criticism. Being told he'd never succeed in fact pushed him to prove otherwise. In the end, he not only flew professionally for a major airline, but has built two full-scale airplanes since retiring.
He was certainly wounded by the criticism heaped on him as a youngster and even into adulthood. But his dream was never thwarted. The dream was bigger than the criticism. Not everyone is able to rise above without help, however, and that's the reason for a book like this: to help those who are still struggling to put the past to bed by revealing true stories of others who trudged a similar path—people who found a way to move forward with a certainty that was unthinkable in their youth.
Resilience means not letting failure or criticism deter you from the willingness to try again. To move forward, regardless.
I found this to be the case for a number of the interviewees, in fact. For Judith, her dad was the “bully.” The criticism was not only aimed at her, but also at her mother and her younger brother. Judith developed a hard exterior much like her dad's. However, she was as afraid as he was. Eventually she came to appreciate the fear that ruled his life. She also observed how his behavior created fear in the lives of her mother and younger brother. The tension in their home was palpable, she said, and nothing seemed to lessen it. A drink or two might relax her dad, but the clenched hands and raised voice were always just a breath or a moment away.
Fortunately for Judith, she knew she wanted to teach, she knew she wanted to write, she knew she wanted to help others. The life experiences with a rageful dad and a disspirited mother that might have drowned her actually served as a lifeboat for bringing her story of survival to others. Even though I will share much more about Judith later, let me assure you that she was a “good student” of human behavior and watching her parents taught her well about who to be and who not to be. For now let me simply say that she didn't maintain her hard exterior forever. Even though her father was never ever able to shed his, she came to understand and to develop compassion for what had initiated his attitude and took that information and used it in her own life so that she didn't have to repeat his pattern.
We are imprinted by the experiences we have as youngsters in our family of origin. Some research even suggests that we are imprinted while still in the womb. Some pregnant mothers play Beethoven or fill the house with fragrant flowers and the sounds of quiet rain on the roof or music meditations—who's to say those techniques don't have a beneficial effect?
I too was imprinted in the womb, but not with the soft sounds of a bubbling brook. I didn't know what exactly I had been imprinted with until well into my adult years. Let me share the backstory. From childhood on, I suffered the dread of impending doom in the form of a certainty that I was soon to be rejected, by whomever, for whatever reason. This fear haunted me as a young girl among my girlfriends and as a teenager trying desperately to attract and keep a boyfriend. Though my exterior looked hard, just like my dad's had looked, my interior was a constant jumble of nerves. My unease wherever I was influenced every interaction I had.
Resilience is letting the past be past rather than allowing it to control the present or forecast the future.
Of course I carried this uncertainty into every relationship. I watched my partners like a hawk, certain they were soon to dump me. And dump me they did, of course. My terror about abandonment escalated. It brought tension into a marriage that was troubled by alcohol from the start. My tension, and his too, coupled with our alcoholism, made manifest my worst fear. He abandoned me for another woman.
The result was that his action propelled me deeper into my alcoholism, which was fortunately followed by eventual sobriety. It was in early sobriety that I sought the help of a counselor because my fears around abandonment continued to negatively impact my behavior in every romantic relationship, and with every friend. The counselor's nearly first words were, “You were abandoned in the womb.” What allowed her to intuit this I'll never know, but I didn't doubt, even for a moment, that she was right. However, what to do with this information provided my next stumbling block.
Not coincidentally, I was enrolled in a class on the dynamics of the family of origin at the same time. The two experiences, in combination, changed my life in a profound way. The teacher of the family of origin class assigned each one of us to talk to our families, particularly our parents, about their life experiences. The purpose was to see how our experiences mirrored theirs, or perhaps were a reaction to theirs in some significant way. I made the call to my parents, explaining that I wanted to interview them. The silence on the other end of the line was deafening, but they agreed to my request. I went home to talk to them a couple of weeks later. And my life made a right turn!
Resilience is a decision before it's anything else. And then it's a commitment to execute the plan.
I sat with my mother first, bless her heart. For sure neither of them wanted to be interrogated, but she did the motherly thing and agreed to go first. “Tell me about your life, Mom?” Almost immediately, the tears began to flow and then turned into sobs. “I never felt like a good wife, a good mother, and I didn't want you when I was pregnant with you.” Bingo. My counselor had nailed it. My life began to make sense. The abandonment issue that had plagued me my entire life was born in the womb. Having this confirmed at age thirty-eight shed light on my journey, a light that has never been dimmed.
When I spoke to my dad, he shared openly the fear he had lived with his entire life, a fear that was shrouded in rage. At the time, it was a new concept for me to see rage as the cover-up for fear, but it made perfect sense. Rage kept people “in their place” and away from the interior spaces of his being. What an eye-opener my trip home was. My own hard exterior began to develop cracks, and my incessant certainty that every relationship in my life was on a trajectory of inevitable rejection began to ease.
With my changed perception about how life was unfolding, I became more willing to trust the process of daily life and to embrace each experience as the next perfect one. This allowed me to truly feel resilient and undaunted. I no longer waited for the bottom to fall out of my world. I no longer waited for everyone else to define my happiness. Being resilient makes it viable to stand tall rather than be knocked down. We can make a decision to stand, resilient, as every wave of experience hits us.
Resilience wears many coats. One of the more brilliant ones is worn by Allison, a fascinating interviewee. She was the first in her very large family to seek help for her addiction. Perhaps I shouldn't say she sought the help. She was institutionalized first, and an insightful counselor could see that her problem wasn't as simple as extreme incorrigibility but rather alcoholism. The acting out, which included running away and frequent fights in bars, was her cry for help—a cry neither she nor her family recognized initially.
Allison's story is long and complicated and I will cover many parts of it throughout this book, but right now I want to highlight her resilience. She has a truckload of it. She was the middle child in a family of eight children. It was easy to get overlooked in a family of that size, particularly when it was troubled by alcoholism too. Her acting out was probably a way of seeking attention, but it was also the direct result of drinking uncontrollably and doing drugs. For sure it won her attention, but not the kind she really wanted.
Following treatment for the mental problems and the alcoholism, she married. Her life seemed to settle for a time, but her decision to have children meant giving up the medication that stabilized her. Back into the hospital she went, but this time it didn't feel like prison. She found her equilibrium again. She kept going back every time there was a setback. It was as though her lesson in life was to rebound and show the rest of us what resilience looked like.
Resilience is a trait that can be honed by all but is avoided by many because of fear of failure.
Her struggles were far from over, however, and when her children were small, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Her pelvic bone was removed and she lived in a body cast, for the most part immobile, for an entire year. How she managed that test of acceptance was amazing to everyone who knew her. And if the result of this trial was the freedom to walk again once the year was over, one might understand how she managed to live it. But that outcome was not to be—never again would Allison walk unaided.
She is a testament to resilience, however. She lives with joy and a sense of humor about the insanity of life. Her life was the embodiment of dysfunction, starting with the family she was born into and moving into her own diseased body. But nothing has kept her down. She lives her life to the fullest and helps others live theirs too. She did not transfer the dysfunction she was imprinted with in her family of origin to her own family. She broke the pattern. She blocked the trail of alcoholism.
For sure it could be said that every person I spoke to about survival in a family that seemed destined to defeat them actually gained strength from the experience. As is so commonly said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Perhaps no one reflected this more than Dawn. Dawn is an Oneida Indian from Wisconsin. I met her in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had no idea when I met her that we would travel this same path for nearly three decades, a path we still travel, in fact. Dawn is an amazing woman, one of sixteen kids, one of only seven still alive. Alcoholism has taken the lives of all the rest of them.
There is nothing about Dawn's upbringing that would have suggested she'd be one of the survivors. But survive she has, and thrive she does in her own way. It would be a vast understatement to say that her family was dysfunctional. Both parents were dead from alcoholism in their early 50s. Her father shot himself because he couldn't stop drinking. Her mother died of liver disease. All sixteen children were placed in foster care and Dawn and her younger sisters were molested again and again. The authorities never stepped in.
Dawn has carried the guilt over not being able to protect her younger sisters all of her life. She began to drink and gamble and run away as a way of coping at thirteen, and her path was grooved by the time she was sixteen. Amazingly, she proved to be a good employee for many years, in spite of her alcoholism and absenteeism. The past eventually caught up with her, however, and she was brutally beaten by a cop using a billy club while in a drunk tank. Many brain surgeries were not able to repair the damage that was inflicted on her. Her speech continues to be affected, as is her handwriting.
Resilience is getting up again and again when one falls.
Dawn has rebounded from unbelievable odds. She now has Parkinson's disease, along with the brain damage. Her gait is compromised. The seizures from epilepsy hit at the most unexpected times. Fortunately she receives disability and food stamps and is able to work part time, which gets her out of the house and around people two or three hours a day. A friend picks her up for AA meetings and an ex-husband makes sure she gets to family functions.
In spite of all the challenges, Dawn does not complain. She feels lucky to be alive and to have friends and family who continue to love her even though she put them through hell. She is determined to hold her head high and continue to face the world with dignity. She sees the bright side of life, even though her own life has been mostly dark. She helps others see the humor in the unexpected occurrences of daily life. She laughs heartily at herself and helps others to do likewise. She is the epitome of resilience.
When I consider all of the people I spoke to for this book, I'd have to say Dawn ranks at the top of the resilience list. Nothing could destroy her, no matter how dire—sexual abuse, rape, being beaten by cops, being jailed, going through detox and treatment more than two dozen times. Nothing kept her from continuing to put one foot in front of the other. And now at sixty she models to others that no matter how hard life is, taking it one day at a time makes it tolerable. Survivable. Even enjoyable.
Before moving on, let me reiterate some of the ideas outlined here for easy reference and as a practical outline for changing your behavior. To be resilient means being willing to try again, even when the odds don't look good.
It means not letting failure deter you from the willingness to keep trying—to move forward regardless.
It means believing there is a path that has been charted for you and staying on it even when you stumble.
It means being a willing example for others that you can make lemonade even when the lemons come in bushels.
Resilience is a trait that can be honed by all but is avoided by many because of fear of failure. (I'm reminded of the story about Thomas Edison and his perfection of the light bulb. He made more than five thousand attempts before he succeeded in getting one that continued to burn, and he was convinced that every one of the failures was serving the purpose of getting him closer to his goal.)
There is nothing magical about resilience. It's a decision before it's anything else. And then it's a commitment to execute the plan. Every story I shared in this chapter, brief though they were, provided an example of how really simple it is to demonstrate resilience.
It's getting up again and again when one falls.
It's letting the past be past rather than allowing it to control the present or forecast the future.
Dawn, for example, might well have given up dozens of times, but quitting wasn't in her vocabulary. She has rewritten her story. Her ending will not mirror her parents' ending. What she has, the willingness to rebound, they did not possess. What she has, any one of us can claim for ourselves. The choice is available. Choose wisely.
Let's take a moment to recall an earlier time when we practiced one or two of the suggestions that were demonstrated in this chapter. And if you haven't made a practice of any of them yet, can you remember a situation that would have been a perfect opportunity to express resilience? If you were able to re-experience the circumstance and take advantage of the chance to practice resilience, what might it look like? Share your thoughts with a friend, or in a journal. We can only make something our own when we practice it and then tell someone else about it too. Forge ahead!