It’s one thing to misplace your house keys and your wallet two minutes before you have to rush out the door to catch the 6:15 AM bus for work. You do your best to breathe slowly and deeply, stay calm, and try to think if maybe you were wearing something else with pockets before the early morning mad dash. We all experience these hiccups in life — spilling the entire dish of lasagna on the way to serve six guests in the dining room, shredding the wrong client file at work, leaving a laptop on a plane, discovering mold in the bathroom walls, learning that the car needs a new transmission or the washing machine has gone on the fritz — and these hiccups can create quite a startle in the nervous system. These kinds of things tax our coping capacities on a fairly regular basis. Our capacity to cope with these inevitable ups and downs is then further tested when we layer on our own critical messages: “You stupid klutz!” or “I knew it; I knew it. I can’t ever get anything right.”
But usually we can right ourselves again. We put on our big-girl or big-boy pants, face the distress of the moment, and deal.
Occasionally we are called on to deal with greater troubles and adversities, not just hiccups but earthquakes that overwhelm our capacities to cope, at least temporarily. They include troubles like infertility or infidelity, a diagnosis of lung cancer, losing a job several years out from retirement, a daughter arrested for selling pot, or a son wounded in combat overseas. When these bigger bumps happen, we have to dig deeper into our inner reserves of resilience and our memories of times when we’ve successfully coped before, while also drawing on external resources such as family and friends. Here, too, finding our way back to our center, our inner equilibrium and ability to cope, can be more difficult if we are told we are — or perceive ourselves as — less than capable, less than skillful, less than good enough, or unworthy of help.
And then there are times when too damn many disasters happen all at once: we lose a child in a car accident or cause the death of a child in a car accident at the same time that an aging parent has a stroke and a freak thunderstorm causes flood damage to half the house. When catastrophes like these strike, we are vulnerable to losing our resilience altogether, temporarily or even for a long time. We may dissolve into a trauma response, finding that our world no longer makes sense or no longer exists, and we have to scramble to find any lessons or meaning at all in what we’re going through. If we have experienced too many unresolved traumas in the past, we can be especially susceptible to falling apart and not being able to recover. When our reserves are already depleted, we can begin to feel like we’re just barely afloat and about to go under.
How in the world do we bounce back from traumas like these? By strengthening our resilience.
Resilience — the capacity to bend with the wind, go with the flow, bounce back from adversity — has been pondered, studied, and taught in tribes and societies, in philosophical and spiritual traditions, and through literature and academies for eons. It is essential to the survival and thriving of human beings and human societies. We now also know that it is one of the behavioral outcomes of a mature, well-functioning prefrontal cortex in the brain. Whether we’re facing a series of small annoyances or an utter disaster, resilience is teachable, learnable, and recoverable.
In this book we’ll look at how to cope resiliently no matter what life may throw at us, no matter what level of disruption to our resilience we’re facing. We’ll begin at the beginning and look at how we develop the capacity for resilience in the first place — or don’t — and then what tools and techniques we can reliably use to build or recover our resilience so that it is ready to help us cope with whatever challenges or catastrophes might come along next — to cope with anything, anything at all.
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but the heart to conquer it.
— RABINDRANATH TAGORE, Fruit-Gathering
Resilience guides you step by step through a process of cultivating more well-being in your life by strengthening your resilience so that you can respond skillfully to any upset or catastrophe that would derail that well-being. You can see yourself as more competent in coping with the disappointments and difficulties that are inevitable in life and trust more deeply that you can bounce back from disasters or even forestall them.
You’ll also become more knowledgeable about how the brain works, how your brain works, and how you can work with your brain to create new habits of responding more flexibly (flexibility is the core of resilience). We’ll explore safe, efficient, and effective tools and techniques that can even rewire long-established patterns of responding when they’re no longer working well for you. Most important, you will not only learn practices that will help you bounce back from any adversity, but you will also learn to see yourself as someone who can learn, who can cope, who can strengthen your resilience and well-being. And that not only builds up further resilience, but it makes life more satisfying and fulfilling in every way.
What You Will Find in This Book
Because resilience is truly recoverable, I have designed this guide to resilience specifically as a brain-training program to help you strengthen your capacities to bounce back. You will find over 130 experiential exercises that will train you — and your brain — to steady or right yourself no matter what is happening around you, to respond skillfully to the most common and the most challenging external stressors, and to help you work through any negative internal messages you may be believing about your ability to cope with those stressors.
These practices tap the brain’s phenomenal ability to adapt. They are organized by the five different kinds of intelligence that are foundational to resilience: somatic, emotional, relational within ourselves, relational with others, and reflective. You will learn to strengthen each of these five intelligences through three key processes of brain change — what I call new conditioning, reconditioning, and deconditioning — that will reliably increase your ability to respond with flexibility to stress and trauma. You can apply these processes to any level of disruption to your resilience, from barely a wobble to serious sorrows and struggles to a potentially traumatizing “too much.” Practiced regularly, they will build your resilience, strength, and wisdom, enhancing your well-being for the long haul.
How to Use This Book
These tools are presented in a deliberate sequence, one building on another, which is a process very similar to the way your brain develops these skills in the first place. I encourage you to work through the book from beginning to end and not skip around too much until you’ve gone through the book at least once. You can use Resilience like a self-guiding workshop.
Chapter 1 explains how resilience developed in your brain (or did not), how to choose the experiences that will strengthen your brain’s response flexibility now, and five conditions that accelerate your brain’s learning and rewiring.
Chapters 2–7 contain most of the book’s exercises. Within each chapter, the exercises progress from simple to complex and address increasing levels of disruption to your resilience. The introduction to each chapter explains how these exercises work, what outcomes you can expect, and why you might want to use them to strengthen the specific kind of intelligence the chapter deals with. You may choose to download selected exercises from my website, www.lindagraham-mft.net, to play back whenever and wherever you wish.
Please approach these exercises with a sense of curiosity and experimentation. If an exercise works for you, continue practicing it. If something doesn’t work for you, let it go and try something else.
A large body of research has shown that the brain learns best through the repetition of experiences, little and often: small, incremental changes repeated many times. Through practicing any of these exercises for just ten to twenty minutes a day, you’ll experience immediate shifts in how you respond to stressors. Over weeks and months of consistent practice, you can create permanent changes in your brain — and thus in your behavior. As you encounter new stresses, small or large, you will start to notice these long-term changes in how you can think and respond.
Chapter 8 suggests lifestyle choices you can make to keep your brain functioning optimally, protecting your resilience for the rest of your life.
Where Does This Program Come From?
I have been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for over twenty-five years, helping clients meet their personal challenges and catastrophes with greater skill and resilience. For at least twenty of those years, I have also been focused on integrating cutting-edge research discoveries in Western behavioral sciences with advances in modern neuroscience, attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, positive psychology, resilience training, trauma therapy, and post-traumatic growth. In that same period I have also studied and taught practices from Eastern contemplative traditions, focusing on mindfulness and self-compassion practices, which are recognized as two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to science.
My first book, Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being (2013), offered a tool set I had created by integrating research data and perspectives from all of the above paradigms. Bouncing Back won several national awards and broke new ground in the teaching of resilience. Since the book was published, I have continued teaching the neuroscience of resilience to thousands of mental health professionals and seekers of personal growth and self-transformation, in clinical trainings and workshops throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. And I have collaborated closely with mentors and colleagues, sharing our most effective practices in an interactive network of learning.
Now, with this guidebook, I supplement the teachings in Bouncing Back with new understanding gleaned from those trainings and experiences, as well as dozens of new tools and resources to help you recover the resilience, vitality, and well-being that are your birthright. Through the practices described here, you can increase your response flexibility to make the wise choices that allow you to cope with anything, anything at all.
I am no longer afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
— LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Little Women
Let’s begin.