Moving Resilience beyond the Personal Self
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
— GRACE HOPPER
HAVE WE ARRIVED? In a way, yes. The wise effort we have already put into using self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire our brains, and the more complex neural integration that results from that effort, has set us up for the continued learning, growth, and transformation that are fulfilling in themselves as well as beneficial for our resilience. The neural platform of resilience gives the psyche a kind of safety net: the brain is now rewired and primed to meet the unpredictable but inevitable challenges of life adaptively, with courage, optimism, and creativity.
Even when difficulties threaten to overwhelm our expanded capacities to cope, the brain itself is more resilient and better prepared to meet them. More complex integration of brain circuits and structures means more channels of communication within the brain, more synchrony in neural firing patterns, and calmer frequencies of brain waves. There’s more give and flex in the entire body and mind system.
Thus prepared, we can be realistically optimistic. We will always face uncertainties and unknowns, and sometimes we will encounter true catastrophes. But as we become more skillful in facing them, our resilience becomes more effortless.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, developer of mindfulness-based stress reduction, describes our strengthened capacities for resilience this way: “We all accept that no one controls the weather. Good sailors learn to read it carefully and respect its power. They will avoid storms if possible, but when caught in one, they know when to take down the sails, batten down the hatches, drop anchor and ride things out, controlling what is controllable and letting go of the rest. Training, practice, and a lot of firsthand experience in all sorts of weather are required to develop such skills so that they work for you when you need them. Developing skill in facing and effectively handling the various ‘weather conditions’ in your life is what we mean by the art of conscious living.”
This conscious, resilient living requires that we continue learning from experience, keep experimenting. The “use it or lose it” principle applies to our brains, especially our prefrontal cortex, as well as our muscles: we need to work on maintaining the brain cells, neural circuits, and capacities to respond flexibly in our brains throughout our lives. We also have to keep challenging our brains by taking on new and difficult tasks that draw on and extend all our capacities for learning. Challenges such as learning to play a musical instrument, learning to speak a foreign language, and memorizing poetry are often recommended by brain-fitness experts because they require the integration of functions in both hemispheres of the higher brain. Problem solving, which requires input from our intuitive, holistic right hemisphere as well as from our rational, analytical left hemisphere, is another excellent way to push the brain to maintain its capacities of resilience.
Years ago my friend Ted worked as an electrical engineer at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute International), a large engineering consulting firm. A plaque at the entrance to the electrical engineering lab read:
We have not solved your problems.
In fact, we have more questions than when we started.
But we believe we are confused at a higher level
and about more important things.
Recovering resilience can feel a bit like that. We set our intentions, draw on our resources, learn the tools and techniques, and then wonder why this is taking so long. Am I doing it right? Would something else work better? Rest assured, the tools and techniques presented here are exactly the tools you need to keep rewiring your brain for resilience. Developing and maintaining resilience requires that we continue to cultivate qualities and behaviors that support it. We can choose to make resilience a central organizing principle of our lives — not just an interesting hobby or occasional lifesaver, but the core that everything else aligns around, that increases our happiness and well-being.
The following model is taught all over the world to cultivate qualities and behaviors that particularly support resilience. In this model, we move through four phases of competence and awareness of that competence, from a complete lack of the competence or even knowledge of our need for it to full knowledge and mastery of it.
1. Unconscious incompetence. We don’t know how to do something, and we don’t even know that we don’t know. We’re innocent or clueless; the brain is in homeostatis. This was the situation for my client Karen (see chapter 17) when she initially failed to grasp that a young woman and child playing together could be mother and daughter. This is the “ignorance is bliss” phase of learning — except, of course, when it isn’t.
2. Conscious incompetence. This is an “Oh shit!” circuit. We don’t know how to do something, and we suddenly realize we don’t know. Becoming aware of this may cause chagrin and horror, as it did for Karen. If ever our resilience is going to derail, it’s right here. Old patterns of fear of failure, passivity, or shame may resurface. We can get past any denial or blocks to learning by reframing this step as the beginning of gaining competence, as Karen did. When we harness the innate drive for mastery — to recover any missing competencies and to learn new skills — we can be proud of taking steps to recover our resilience.
3. Conscious competence. This is the phase in which we know how to do something, and we know that we know. Through all of our new experiences, resources, tools, and techniques, we are learning. New patterns of response are being rewired in the brain. We are becoming masterful and competent. We spend a lot of our adult lives in this phase, of course. We are confident that we know, in spite of old, negative stories about ourselves that might linger. We don’t go back to the old stories; we persevere in the new, taking in the good as Karen did with her comment, “Now I know I can be playful . . . I guess somehow it’s sunk in.” We are deepening and solidifying the circuits of the competency and of learning.
4. Unconscious competence. Once we know how to do something well and practice doing it again and again, the new skill becomes wired into our implicit procedural memory. Our wise effort becomes increasingly effortless. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle: we don’t even have to think about it anymore. Once playing with kids became second nature, Karen could let go of her worries about motherhood once and for all.
Exercise 1: Learning Resilience
1. Identify one attribute of resilience you would like to cultivate or a behavior that your resilience is now strong enough to support your growing into: assertiveness, determination, purposefulness, collaboration. Assertiveness is used as an example here, but you can focus on any attribute of your choice.
2. Identify areas of your life where assertiveness seems to be lacking; maybe it hasn’t even occurred to you that being assertive in these areas would be useful. They could include negotiating with your spouse over household chores; talking to the bank manager about financing a car purchase; persuading the city council to install a needed stop sign in your neighborhood; or writing to your congressional representative about health-care reform.
3. Identify moments in your life when you could and should have been assertive but had no clue how to do that. Maybe you still don’t. Hang in there: don’t retreat or procrastinate. Now is the moment to set the intentions to master this useful life skill. Set the intention to learn assertiveness by practicing and experimenting with it. Set a second intention to see yourself, and feel proud of yourself, as someone who intentionally cultivates capacities of resilience.
4. Whatever means you use to develop your assertiveness — attending workshops, practicing with friends, putting it to use in real-life situations — notice your skills steadily developing. The awareness of competence is essential to wiring that knowledge of your assertiveness into your sense of yourself.
5. Recall a moment when you realize you were assertive, this morning or last week. Take in the fact that you exercised that skill without even thinking about it. Congratulations. You’ve mastered another competency supporting your resilience.
You can repeat this exercise as many times as you wish, with as many qualities you wish to cultivate for more resilience. You are learning from experience rather than concepts, from experiments rather than instructions. That’s what keeps rewiring the brain in the most integrated and resilient fashion, lifelong.
What Resilient Learning from Experience Opens Up
As an irrigator guides water to his fields, as an archer aims an arrow, as a carpenter carves wood, the wise shape their lives.
— BUDDHA
Shaping our brains to be increasingly resilient and, beyond that, shaping our lives to be increasingly fulfilled and meaningful can take people in many different directions. Whatever direction we choose, we rely on the skillful use of our prefrontal cortex — and the brain integration it makes possible — to seek, discern, and settle into what gives meaning and purpose to our lives, to move beyond coping and surviving to creating change and thriving.
Big Organizing Principles (BOPs)
How we live our days is, of course, how we live our lives.
— ANNIE DILLARD
We’ve learned that one capacity of the prefrontal cortex is to create a coherent narrative of our sense of self. Another way of describing that coherence is to say that we come to see clearly the big organizing principles (BOPs) that guide our actions: the wholesome patterns of coping we choose to live by, or what philosophical traditions call values and virtues. Among my clients, Betty, a single mother of three, identified her BOPs as patience, faith, and planning. Neil, a retired surgeon, chose curiosity, gratitude, and awe. David, a car mechanic learning computer skills at the local community college, steered his course by hope, steadiness of purpose, and the love of his family.
Exercise 2: Identifying Your BOPs
1. Identify three principles from this list that resonate with you as BOPs.
accountability
commitment
cooperation
courtesy
creativity
dependability
determination
discipline
faithfulness
focus
forgiveness
frugality
helpfulness
honesty
humility
idealism
inclustriousness
joyfulness
kindness
knowledge
love
loyalty
magnanimity
mercy
modesty
obedience
orderliness
patience
prudence
purposerulness
reliability
resourcefulness
respect
reverence
simplicity
tolerance
2. Identify three arenas where you are able to manifest these BOPs (or others that you choose) regularly: For example, helping kids with homework calls for patience; working with customers takes courtesy; volunteering at the homeless shelter once a week calls on your selflessness. Acknowledge your conscious competence or even your unconscious competence in applying these principles.
3. Identify one more BOP from the list, or another quality from your own list of values, that you would like to cultivate and that would be a stretch for you to cultivate. Set the intention to look for opportunities to manifest this BOP every day for the next month.
4. As you manifest this BOP more in your daily life, notice how your view of yourself as an agent of change in your own life develops as you wisely shape your life and become competent.
Finding Keys for Cracking the Code of Life
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
— JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
We can find guidance about which BOPs lead to the deepest happiness and meaning for each of us, the greatest sense of fulfillment and well-being, through many different models and paradigms. These are systems that help us crack the code of life, showing us how to move through suffering and struggle to strength and well-being.
One such paradigm is the eightfold path of the Buddhist tradition, which influences many of the practical tools and techniques offered here. Understanding what causes suffering and what leads to the end of suffering leads to wise intention (one of the practices that accelerates the rewiring of the brain), which leads to wise mindfulness (seeing clearly, always with empathy and compassion rather than judgment) and wise concentration (steadiness of mind, steadiness of purpose, perseverance). These practices in turn lead to wise effort (letting go of the unwholesome, cultivating the wholesome, deconditioning and reconditioning coping strategies that don’t work, conditioning new strategies that do) in learning practices that lead to wise action, wise speech, and wise livelihood — the ways we engage and thrive in the world. Sylvia Boorstein adds wise relationships as a ninth step on this path — her deep wisdom reverently reshaping an ancient and revered path of practice.
In addition to the Buddhist model, many other models can help us find our moral compass: other spiritual traditions, modalities of therapy and personal growth, philosophies of politics and business, customs of culture. It matters that we find a set of values or principles to live by so that we don’t drift, get lost, or sink. It matters that we settle ourselves into living those values and principles, experimenting to see how they really work and how they might need to evolve.
Exercise 3: Finding Keys for Cracking the Code
Finding your key for cracking the code, or finding an organized system of BOPs to live your life by, is similar to finding a path of practice (see chapter 5).
1. Identify the core values you already live by and seek out role models or paradigms of practice that can lead beyond them to something even more truthful and useful.
2. Ask friends, colleagues, and mentors whose lives exemplify the qualities you would like to cultivate more in your life what paths and practices they follow and how you might experience them for yourself.
3. Approach any model with a sense of openness and curiosity. Apply the teachings to the needs and circumstances of your life with a sense of exploration and excitement. See what works, what fits, and leave the rest. You can choose for yourself whether to follow the entire model to the last dotted i and crossed t of its teachings.
Here’s the way I remember a lovely Aesop’s fable from my childhood that illustrates this practice of applying what’s useful from a model to your own life. A magpie announces that she is giving a free seminar on nest building to all the birds of the forest. So the birds gather. The magpie lays a bowl of twigs on a branch in a tree, and the oriole says, “Oh! That’s how nests are built!” and goes off. That’s how orioles have been building their nests ever since. The magpie then daubs the bowl of twigs with some mud to seal the cracks, and the jay says, “Oh! That’s how nests are built!” and flies off, and that’s how jays have been building their nests ever since. The magpie then lines the caulked bowl of twigs with some soft downy feathers, and the robin says, “Oh! That’s how to build a nest!” And that’s how robins have been building their nests ever since. The magpie continues teaching throughout the day, and various birds continue to fly off until the end of the day, when the only birds left to learn how the magpie is building a nest are the other magpies.
I used to think the moral of that fable was that if you didn’t stay until the very end, you wouldn’t learn everything there was to learn about building a nest, and that would be a failure. But now I think it shows that every single species of bird did learn how to build a nest, and what they learned was good enough for them to survive and thrive as a species. You decide when you’ve learned what you need to from a model or paradigm, when it’s enough to help you to survive and thrive as the unique individual that you are.
The crafting of a resilient and meaningful life doesn’t stop with crafting “more” for the personal self. Researchers have found that practices that move the concerns of our resilience beyond our personal self immeasurably enrich our own lives and the lives of others when we maintain our intention to practice them.
Altruism
In every community there is work to be done.
In every nation, there are wounds to heal.
In every heart, there is the power to do it.
— MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
Patti Quigley and Susan Retik were “ordinary” suburban Boston housewives, both pregnant, when their husbands were killed on the planes that were flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In interviews, both Patti and Susan stressed how important it was to them to respond to the tragedy of 9/11 and their husbands’ deaths “out of love rather than hate.” They channeled their anguish into a three-day fund-raising bike ride from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Boston, raising $140,000, which was distributed to economic development projects to benefit Afghani women through Care International: women widowed by decades of conflict in Afghanistan, from the Russian invasion through the Taliban occupation to the American military presence. Three years after 9/11, Patty and Susan traveled to Afghanistan to meet with some of the women who had used these funds to start their own businesses. This personal statement of international reconciliation continues to ripple outward still.
Altruism — an unselfish concern for the welfare of others — is one of those qualities that we can express when we feel resilient. A natural outcome of mindful empathy, altruism is also fueled by the release of oxytocin. When we feel the plight of another through our resonance circuit and are moved to act, our behavior is partly motivated by the “tend and befriend” function of oxytocin. And when we have come into earned secure attachment, we can maintain a balanced focus on self, other, and the world. Moving flexibly between independence and interdependence, between autonomy and affiliation, allows us to act generously and compassionately in this world.
We can find inspiring examples of altruistic behaviors through books, magazines, film and television, the Internet, and the stories we pass on to each other: American schoolchildren who contribute pennies to buy paper and pencils for schoolchildren in rural India; a Canadian teenager who researched the effect of unclean water on health for a school science project and then spent three years raising money to build 272 wells in rural Africa; high school students in America who ran half marathons to raise funds to build a girls’ high school in Nicaragua; a church group from England that spends one week every spring rebuilding homes around the world destroyed by hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes.
My grandmother became blind from glaucoma when I was two years old. I grew up learning to “read” Braille with my eyes as my grandmother and I sat on the living-room couch and she read the pages with her fingers. I learned to set aside the sharp knives as we did the dishes together and learned how she kept bills of different denominations in separate compartments in her wallet so that she could know how much money she was handing to the store clerk.
After my grandmother died, I found a way to contribute to the restoration of people’s vision that has brought me deep satisfaction for more than thirty years. I save all my receipts from dining out during the year, and at the end of the year I contribute the same total amount to Seva, a nonprofit organization that trains doctors in developing countries to perform cataract surgery, saving the eyesight of more than 3 million poor people to date. Could I do more? Probably. And sometimes I do. But this steady practice is one of the ways altruism has become one of the big organizing principles of my life.
Exercise 4: Practicing Altruism
1. Take five minutes to identify an opportunity for your resilience to move beyond your personal self in an act of generosity or altruism: participating in an environmental cleanup day at a local park; becoming a counselor at a summer camp for children with life-threatening illnesses; tutoring in an adult literacy program.
2. Notice any changes in your experience of yourself as you decide which action to take, prepare to do it, and implement your plan. Notice changes as you take in the feeling of your own generosity, simply knowing that you acted out of compassionate caring, whether or not you learn of the outcome of your efforts. Notice how you feel if you learn of the ripple effects of your action from someone’s email or card. Let the experience of altruism broaden and build your resources of resilience.
Compassionate Action: Becoming an Agent of Change
I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
— HELEN KELLER
Our mature resilience — the ability to courageously meet challenges and solve problems as they arise — supports us in taking compassionate action in the world. We become agents of change who evoke changes in others. Our resilience fuels the generativity that can change the world. And we change the world one person, one program, one committed action at a time.
One colleague, after coming to terms with her own grief at being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, found a way to apply her research skills to improve services at the mood disorders clinic of the local medical school. Another colleague, the mother of a son with autism, offered free weekend workshops every month for a year to other parents of children with autism, sharing what she had learned about coping lovingly and skillfully with her own child and about reducing her burnout through self-compassion and self-care. The son of yet another colleague chose to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday by recruiting his buddies to spend one exhausting but exhilarating weekend building a home in a neighboring county for a family of five displaced by a recent flood. But it’s also possible to share compassion and effect change in small ways.
Exercise 5: Becoming an Agent of Change
1. Take a moment to identify a cause or purpose that stirs your sense of caring and your willingness to act: protecting the environment, volunteering in an after-school art program.
2. Either in a moment of reverie on your own or brainstorming with friends, begin to imagine ways in which you can create change in the world through your own resilient efforts. In the coming weeks and months, find a way to express that intention as a part of your resilient growth, and treasure your growth and fulfillment as you do.
Resilience is your birthright. Throughout Bouncing Back you have learned to use tools and techniques that enable you to:
• improve the moment-to-moment functioning of your brain;
• use three proven processes of self-directed neuroplasticity to change old patterns of coping and create new, more resilient ones;
• create the conditions, resources, and practices that help you rewire your neural circuitry most reliably and most safely;
• choose the new experiences — in interactions with other people, in reflections and imagination, in simply being — that rewire your neural circuitry most efficiently and effectively;
• develop confidence in your own competence to return to calm in a crisis, to see clearly what needs to happen to resolve the crisis or to come to terms with it, and to connect to the resources that give you the courage to carry on.
You’ll notice your strengthened capacities to bounce back operating everywhere as you adjust to challenging situations, make tough decisions, and embark on new adventures. To bring all of these teachings back down to earth as you continue to maximize your resilience and well-being, here’s a final teaching, from the cartoon beagle Snoopy. It is printed on a flag that hangs in my garden — a gift from my brother, Barry, who practiced gratitude with me while he was in the hospital:
Live well, laugh often, love much.