What Resilience Is and How We Rewire Our Brains to Recover It
I’m not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
— LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
IN MY WORK as a psychotherapist, I hear many stories of resilience in action, such as this one from my client Deborah. Deborah had had a wonderful day at the beach during a heat wave last summer, luxuriating in the soft sleepiness of the day. She had no worries, no frets: she was just relaxing into a peaceful feeling that “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.”
Two hours later, stuck in gridlocked traffic and anxious about getting home in time to fix dinner for friends, she had to let go of the effortless good feeling of the day and click into the high-gear planning that she knew how to do so well: whom could she call and ask to pick up the salmon? Who had keys to let the others in? She was swiftly calculating and strategizing to navigate around this blip on the radar screen.
When Deborah arrived home, she encountered yet another setback: the dishwasher had flooded the kitchen. A good half inch of sudsy water covered the linoleum where people needed to be cooking dinner thirty minutes ago already.
Deborah’s friends, who were already there to help pull the dinner together, pitched in to clear up the mess. Meanwhile, Deborah was able to quickly check her phone messages. Her sister-in-law Sheila had called with the news that her brother George in Detroit had been rushed to the emergency room...She didn’t even wait for the end of the message. Her brother had had a heart attack four months before, and she was panicking right now.
She immediately called her brother’s cell phone; Sheila answered at the hospital. George was alive; he was stable; he would probably be kept overnight and released in the morning. What they had suspected was his second heart attack was angina — severe enough to warrant calling the ambulance, but not life threatening. The doctors were glad he had come in so quickly this time; it looked as if he was going to be fine. Deborah talked with Sheila for a few more minutes, discussing whether she should fly out that night; they agreed she could come the next day.
After she hung up the phone, Deborah lost it. Her mother had had a heart attack when Deborah was eleven and her brother was eight. Memories of the panic and worry from the week their mother had been hospitalized flooded over her. Even with a house full of guests, she collapsed on the couch, shaking and crying. Her friend Gary came over and put his hands on Deborah’s shoulders. Without even knowing the details of what Deborah was upset about, Gary reminded her of what she had often said to him in other circumstances: “You are big enough to hold this.”
As Deborah remembers it, she could feel her awareness expanding back out from its implosion like a balloon expanding as breath is blown into it. “Oh, right. This is now; that was then. That then turned out fine. This now is fine.” (Her mother lived another thirty-five years, well into her senior years and Deborah’s own adulthood.) “George is okay. I’m okay. Right here, right now, everything is okay.”
Deborah came back into a sense of presence, into compassion for herself and her brother. She remembered the peacefulness she had felt at the beach earlier in the day and reflected on all the modes of coping she’d shifted in and out of in just a few hours. She went out into her garden and breathed a prayer of relief and gratitude, for her brother, for the empathy of friends, for Gary’s caring touch, for the calm that reconnected her to her inner resources and restored her resilience.
We are all called upon to cope with hiccups and hurricanes in our lives — losing our wallet and car keys, discovering mold in the bathroom, missing three days at the office to care for a sick child — and we do. We are resilient heroes in our own lives every day as we skillfully navigate the disruptive, unwanted changes of the washing machine going on the fritz or the car needing a new transmission.
Occasionally we have to respond with grace under pressure to greater troubles and tragedies: infertility or infidelity, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, losing a job, a son wounded in combat overseas. Sometimes too many things go disastrously wrong all at once: a daughter arrested for selling pot, a laptop left on a plane, finding out that the contractor repairing our roof is being sued for shoddy construction work, all in the same week we’re placing an aging parent in a nursing home. We begin to feel as if we’re drinking from a fire hose and about to go under.
Most of us feel internally stressed-out by some external stressor every single day. Few of us will get through an entire lifetime without our resilience being seriously challenged by the pain and suffering inherent in the human condition. None of us is immune to being asked to cope with what we never asked for, with what we deeply, deeply do not want.
The way we can respond with skill to such unwelcome challenges is through resilience. Resilience is the capacity to respond to pressures and tragedies quickly, adaptively, and effectively. Researchers have found that there’s no single best or infallible way to cope with difficulties. Being able to adapt our coping to a specific challenge is the skill that allows us to find our footing when we’re thrown off balance by the unknown, by stress, or by trauma. Responding flexibly can carry us through the ups and downs of our days. In the words of my yoga teacher, Debra McKnight-Higgins, “Blessed are they who are flexible, for they shall never be bent out of shape.”
We now know, from the latest advances in neuroscience, that capacities for resilience are innate in the brain, hard-wired in by evolution. How well these capacities develop as we mature depends on our responses to our life experiences and how those experiences shape the neural circuitry and functioning of our brains — which in turn influence our responses. Whether we tend to bounce back from terrible setbacks or stay where we’ve been thrown depends on our learned patterns of response to other people and events. These patterns become fixed, not just incorporated into a behavioral repertoire but deeply encoded into our neural circuitry, from an early age. They shape not only the ways we cope with challenges but also the functioning of the brain itself.
Only in recent years have neuroscientists begun to understand how to harness the brain’s capacities to radically rewire these neural circuits and rebuild the functioning of the brain to increase resilience. Science doesn’t have all the answers yet. The technology that can look inside the “black box” of the brain and observe its functioning in real time, as it creates music, reacts to scenes of combat, or grieves over the death of a beloved pet, is a mere two decades old. The application of the findings of neuroscience to behavior in real time, as people cope with losing a job or flunking out of school, is even more recent.
New discoveries are reported daily, but the data are still far from complete. As in any new science, contradictions and controversies emerge, are resolved, and reemerge as new perspectives evolve. New understandings of the structures of the brain are allowing researchers to hypothesize about the dynamic and interrelated functions of those structures that can alter neural circuits, pathways, and networks created by those structures and even change the structures themselves. According to my friend neurologist Rick Mendius, “Modern neuroscience is so new that we must be comfortable venturing not only into the unknown but into error.”
I’m neither a neuroscientist nor an academic researcher: I don’t conduct laboratory research on brains or on people’s behavior. My laboratory has been in the trenches. For twenty years I have worked every day with people earnestly seeking better ways to cope with the unexpected twists and turns of their lives, as a licensed psychotherapist, consultant and trainer, and workshop leader. For fifteen years I have been a dedicated practitioner of vipassana (insight) meditation in the Buddhist contemplative tradition. And for the past ten years I have also been a diligent student of the application of neuroscience to healing trauma and recovering resilience.
I’ve been privileged to study with some of the best thinkers and innovators in the emerging discipline of interpersonal neurobiology and in related, cutting-edge modalities of psychotherapy, particularly accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, emotionally focused therapy for couples, and sensorimotor psychotherapy, a mindfulness- and body-based therapy for trauma. It’s been a great privilege to study with the founders of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, masterful practitioners who bring Buddhist teachings to Western sensibilities with great skill and integrity.
The greatest privilege of all has been to apply the theories and tools for recovering resilience in my work with hundreds of clients, colleagues, workshop participants, and students who have rounded out my own learning about resilience with their openness and courage. Their stories are disguised or composited here to protect confidentiality. I owe them all a deep debt of gratitude.
I take full responsibility for any errors I have made in understanding the latest findings of neuroscience or in interpreting the thinking of the pioneers who are applying those findings to clinical psychology and mindfulness practice. Our interpretations of the emerging data and extrapolations of these findings to clinical applications are still filtered through our own subjective experience. Some of the other paradigms I draw on in Bouncing Back have hundreds, even thousands of years of evidence behind them to validate their efficacy. All of the tools and techniques used here are offered in the spirit of helping you discover for yourself what works best for you.
However, it is abundantly clear that we can learn to bounce back better by consciously rewiring our brain’s learned patterns of coping. To do that most successfully and efficiently, we must know how to select the new experiences that will best do that rewiring. In the words of leading neuroscientist Richard Davidson, “Based upon everything we know about the brain in neuroscience, change is not only possible, but is actually the rule rather than the exception. It’s really just a question of which influences we’re going to choose for our brain.”
In Bouncing Back, I present two powerful processes of brain functioning: conditioning, which determines how our learning of resilience is encoded in the neural circuitry of our brains in the first place; and neuroplasticity, which determines how we can use new experiences to rewire those patterns. Using these processes, you can master what I call the five Cs of resilient coping:
1. Calm: You can stay calm in a crisis.
2. Clarity: You can see clearly what’s happening as well as your internal response to what’s happening; you can see what needs to happen next; and you can see possibilities from different perspectives that will enhance your ability to respond flexibly.
3. Connection: You can reach out for help as needed; you can learn from others how to be resilient; and you can connect to resources that greatly expand your options.
4. Competence: You can call on skills and competencies that you have learned through previous experience (or that you learn through Bouncing Back) to act quickly and effectively.
5. Courage: You can strengthen your faith to persevere in your actions until you come to resolution or acceptance of the difficulty.
Bouncing Back helps you develop these five Cs of coping by teaching you how to rewire old patterns of response in your brain that derail resilience and how to wire in new and better coping skills. It shows how you can apply the latest discoveries of modern neuroscience to your everyday struggles to become more resilient.
In part 1, you will learn how the brain develops its strategies for coping in the first place, and how our earliest experiences in responding to stressors shape the functioning of the brain’s CEO of resilience — the prefrontal cortex. Do you need to know how your brain works to skillfully navigate your daily life? No, no more than you need to know what’s under the hood of your car in order to drive to work, or how the Internet works to check your email. But if you want to change how you manage your daily life, then knowing how your brain works, and how you can change how it works, will help you develop a sense of competence and mastery that in turn will engender a sense of confidence about rewiring your brain to become more resilient.
In part 2, you will also learn self-directed neuroplasticity — tools and techniques to harness the capacities of your brain to change and strengthen itself in lasting ways. The tools are drawn from two of the most powerful paradigms of brain change known to science: mindfulness, from the 2,500-year-old Buddhist contemplative tradition, and empathy, from the 150-year-old practice of Western relational psychology.
With the findings of modern neuroscience to guide the integrated application of tools from these two paradigms, you won’t have to spend years either meditating in a cave or reclining on an analyst’s couch to learn how to effect immediate and permanent changes in your coping strategies. You’ll learn how to use an integration of these tools in ways that make it safe, efficient, and effective to tinker with, even wrestle with, the brain. You can become resilient again, creating options and choosing wisely, even during catastrophes.
The brain rewires itself by focusing attention on new experiences and encoding in its neural circuitry the learning from those experiences. And it does that most quickly through interactions with other people. Parts 3–7 lead you through a series of experiential exercises you can do on your own, with a partner, or in a small group that steadily build skills in relational intelligence, somatic (body-based) intelligence, emotional intelligence, reflection and choosing options, and the deep wisdom of simply being. These exercises strengthen the functioning of the prefrontal cortex and then use that platform both to rewire old coping strategies that don’t work so well anymore and to learn new ones that work better. Following the exercises, I briefly explain the neuroscience underlying them, showing how you are rewiring your brain for resilience as you go along.
In my twenty years of clinical practice, over and over again I have seen people rewire their own brains, making lasting changes for the better in their capacities to respond to the storms and struggles of their lives. The well-researched tools and techniques presented here have been further refined by my own longtime practice and teaching of meditation, my personal journey through the ups and downs of life, and my study of the neuroscience of human development and self-transformation, all of which help guide me in suggesting which tools work well and why.
Many current models of self-help and personal growth and many modalities of coaching and therapy presume that individuals already have resilient brain functioning. Bouncing Back takes the time and practice to develop or rebuild that functioning. Part 8 examines what resilience in the brain makes possible: finding more meaning and fulfillment, creativity and productivity, connection and belonging, ease and well-being, and compassion to skillfully navigate your life and engage with a widening world. We rediscover the urgent need of the human mind to re-envision ourselves and the world, and the boundless depths of the human heart and soul to care.
I encourage you to try all the experiential exercises as you proceed through the book, as practical experiments in rewiring your brain. Because every brain is conditioned differently, everyone’s experience using these exercises will be different. I suggest you do them at your own pace. It will be helpful to do the exercises in the order presented to progress steadily toward more complex skills. It will be useful to engage in these experiments with curiosity and openness rather than following fixed rules and expecting a guaranteed outcome. As you reflect on the learning your brain is encoding from each exercise, you will notice that you are rewiring your brain as you go along. As you learn to rewire your brain from the level of the neurons up, you will experience the joy of recovering a resilience that will last a lifetime.