Enhancing Resilience
Developing relational capacity
Balance dependence and independence
00:20RICHARD HILL Have you ever wondered what it takes to survive, or even better, to thrive. Clearly, this might be a life or death skill. My name is Richard Hill and this video lecture is about how you can enhance resilience in yourself, your friends, loved ones, or if you’re a mental health helper in your clients. Over the next 30 minutes or so, we’ll be exploring what resilience is, and what types of skills we need to have it if we would be resilient. Several years ago, Meg Carbonatto embarked on a project to find out just how hard people prevailed over adversity they encountered. Interviewing people in Australia and New Zealand who had prevailed over adversity, she noticed that the skills people used in triumphing could be grouped into five categories: skills of optimism, skills of will, social support development skills, practical skills, and skills of purpose. Today, we’ll be using that framework to understand just which qualities and skills will be most useful for us to have when those inevitable tough times come along. Carbonatto’s subjects used a multitude of approaches. So it seems there is no one right way to approach adversity. The skills that someone finally employs may be driven by a combination of factors, particular circumstance, their own personality and skill set, and also what the nature of the challenge is. So with that in mind, let’s look at what we mean when we say resilience. Most of the time, when mental health professionals talk about resilience, they’re referring primarily to psychological hardiness and secondarily to physical toughness. Yet the term resilience was first used in the physical sciences to describe the behavior of a spring. In fact, the word resilience is designed from the Latin, resalire, to bring back. Just like Dolly does here. You can knock her over but you can’t keep her down for long. She just bounces back up. For our purposes today, we’ll define psychological resilience, the type we’re examining, as the ability of a person to deal with adversity without succumbing to a psychological breakdown, such as a mental illness or acts of self harm, or resorting to, resorting to anti-social acts. The truly resilient person manages to live with a modicum of peace or even joy despite difficult circumstances. So the 64 thousand question, how do they do it. Let’s look at the crucial area of optimism skills first. Imagine this, you’re an oncology specialist, meaning you deal exclusively with cancer cases. Recently, two young men, both in their mid-twenties were admitted for treatment. Both have similar life circumstance and also the exact kind of cancer as one another. The prognosis for one man, Jake, is highly similar to the one for Bill. But over the weeks and crawling into months of treatment, you notice some crucial differences. Jake firmly believes that his cancer is just a blip on the horizon of happiness. Won’t last long, he thinks, and the he waits, and he has a lot of other good stuff going on in his life. He studies, his fiancé, he serves as a mentor to younger men in the community. The cancer doesn’t affect things. And besides, he says the cancer is nothing personal. It just happened. It’s no one’s fault. He will get over it. Soon, Jake responds well to the treatments and his cancer is soon declared in remission. He goes home after the last treatments looking relaxed, happy, and he’s relatively well. Bill, meanwhile, is a worrywart. He frets that the doctors won’t know how to treat him properly, that the cancer will plague him permanently, that it’s ruining his whole life. He wonders what he’s done to deserve this terrible illness. His treatment gets prolonged as his body doesn’t seem to respond well. Some things go wrong and a few of his procedures and Bill gets sicker and sicker. Eventually, he’s put into hospice and told to get his affairs in order. What was the difference between the two men at the outset. As far as you can tell, it was only that Jake was an optimist and Bill was not. Now, this example may seem simplistic and of course you’re right. But it’s no less true for that. Proponents of the School of Psychologies such as Martin Seligman, claim that there are literally hundreds of studies which show that pessimists get discouraged and give up more easily while an optimist’s performance at work, academic and sporting arenas tends to exceed predictions made for them. They generally enjoy excellent health, the capacity to age well, and even increased longevity. In other words, they are resilient. Let’s look at those skills up close. Adopting an optimistic explanatory style. Probably the most commonly known optimistic skill is that of adopting an optimistic explanatory style. Seligman and his associates performed a number of experiments in which they found that both human and animal subjects who were subjected to unpleasant experience say, a noise or shock which they could not control, eventually they learned to be hopeless or helpless. The subjects retained a sense of helplessness even if in later experiments they regained the capacity to control the unpleasant experience. Obviously, if we think we have no control, we will not make any effort to change our bad situation. That people would learn to be helpless and not unlearn it when their situation when it would change, didn’t really surprise the researchers. But what did happen contrary to the expla-, expectation, was that in most of the experiments, about one-third of the subjects who had been treated to noise or shock which they could control, didn’t learn to be helpless. No matter what was thrown at them, this one-third continued to believe that, for the human subjects, that they could solve the problem. Turn off the noise or whatever it was. And this was true even when they were given unsolvable problems. Even the rat and dog subjects showed similar results. Seligman and his colleagues realized those who refused to learn helplessness, were the true optimists. And further that others could learn their style of thinking and explaining things. Positive psychology was born. To adopt an op-, optimistic explanatory style, there are three crucial aspects that we must pay attention to. Permanence, whether we believe that a given event will go on for a long time or not. Pessimists believe that bad events will go on for a long time, whereas optimists believe just the opposite. That the tough stuff is, is about to end. The example, an optimist, uh, who lost her job, would tend to believe that you could replace it fairly readily. Pervasiveness, how specific or universal the event is. In other words, how much of our lives it pervades. Pessi-, pessimists believe that the difficult happening will spread form one area of life to others, whereas optimists are quick to point out that a given difficult circumstance is limited in scope. The optimist, for example, may have lost her job, but she will observe that she still has excellent health and supportive relationships. In other words, the bad news is confined to the work area and does not affect other aspects of her life. And personalized. Whether it is we or others that get the blame, you know, for the bad stuff that happens, or the credit, for the achievements, optimists consistently attribute failure to causes outside themselves. Pessimists, conversely, tend to blame themselves even when they should not. The job losing optimist might, for instance, feel that she had performed well in the role but she was let go because the organization was going through some kind of downturn. In addition to an optimistic explanatory style, there are several other optimistic skills. Social comparison thinking. This optimist skill can work for our resilience or against it, depending on how we use it. It involves comparing ourselves with others as an optimist, an optimism, uh, skill, it means finding a favorable reference group and comparing ourselves with that, rather than a group which immediately disadvantages us. Uh, let, let me give you an example of that one. Uh, uh, let’s say, you decide you want to learn to play guitar so you enroll in a guitar class. You’ve never played an instrument before and you don’t know, uh, really much about music. But you have enrolled in a university guitar class and, and guess what. All the other students are music majors. They play multiple instruments, they’re well-versed in music theory and have well-tuned ears. When you compare your progress with theirs, are you being fair to yourself. Well, probably not. And will that help your resistance. Well, sorry, but probably not much. A better way to employ social comparison thinking as an optimist skill would be to say, compare your rate of weight loss with dieters who started at a similar weight to you. Or, who had experienced similar issues in trying to lose weight. The point here is if you wanted to be resilient and give yourself a fair fighting chance, or better yet, maybe just drop the comparisons altogether. Silver-lining thinking. Avoid focusing illusions. The optimism skill of silver-lining thinking goes hand-in-hand with avoiding what researchers have called focusing illusions. It’s about acknowledging the dark clouds, say, an impending divorce or a diagnosis of a, a serious or incurable condition. But refusing to give an inappropriate amount of attention, focus, to certain feared aspects of the cloud. Concentrating instead on the silver-linings in the cloud. Some aspects of the situation that may be positive in spite of the overall tough circumstances. An example of this occurred in the 1980’s when getting AIDS was pretty a death sentence. On an AIDS roadshow set up to promote safe sex, one of the AIDS patients participating was, was asked how he was managing to live so cheerfully and with such obvious happiness, given his condition. All he said, that’s easy. I and many others with AIDS know that our time may be limited, so we just let the rubbish go by. That is, he saw the dark cloud, the specter of death hanging over him, and decided not to focus on his probable short lifespan, and looking instead at the quality of his relationships and the joyful and meaningful things that he could do with his time. His resiliency reframed, I’m probably going to die before too long, to, I have a wonderful quality of life now. Thus, avoiding the focusing illusion that all of life now must be held ransom or focused on early death. Take advantage of opportunities. The skill of seeing and then taking up opportunities is a response which expresses trust that a better future exists and then can be attained. In other words, an optimistic response. History is rife with people who, in the face of some unfortunate experience, nevertheless maximized it by a sideways response which utilized what resources were available in the moment. Julio Iglesias once told an interviewer, uh, making a documentary film about him, that his singing career might even not have, have gotten off the ground were not for having broken his leg as a teenager. Lying there in the hospital, Julio, Julio could not move much, let alone get back on the playing field to do the football he was really so keen to play, someone brought him a gui-, a guitar to fool around with so, as they say, the rest is history. Julio took full advantage of the months on his back to begin an endeavor that would define his life. Another category of resilience skill which we need to be aware of is that of the will skills. There are few stories in the world of literature where the hero prevails merely by curling up in a corner until the drama is all over. The ability to engage ones will appropriately may be the cornerstone of the resilient response. Without ones will on side, even the brightest optimist thought, you know, degrades and wishful thinking and let opportunities slip away without noticing they’re, their escape the deviling hero throughout most of the action. Psychosynthesis writer Roberto Assagioli notes that our human will has at least three main aspects. Aspect number one is that of strong will. This is the energy intensity or fire in the belly to accomplish something. And also the aspect of will that comes to mind for most people when they think about will. Aspect number two is that of skillful will, which we could say is the most efficient and effective means of accomplishing something as opposed to the most obvious or direct path. Aspect number three is that of good will, which is a sense of orienting ourselves toward the general good in our plans. Although good will should include consideration of ourselves, as well. It’s said that all three aspects need to be present, generally, in order to achieve success at an endeavor and that uniting these with love, would activate what is called transpersonal will. Most resilient skills are based either directly or indirectly on the capacity to engage will. So let’s look at some of the more direct will skills. Never give up hope. All of us can be grateful for the persistence, a quality of strong will, on the part of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. Edison is said to have tried thousands of substances before having success with carbon wire in his electric light bulb. It was surely a resilient person who came up with the saying, the impossible only takes a little longer. Refusing to give up hope that thing will turn out alright, even if it’s crushing defeat, is the whole mark of a person whose will has been activated and that person is probably an optimist. Know when to surrender. Paradoxically, although there is much resilience in the capacity to remain ever hopeful, genuine resilience also demands that we know when to surrender. Let’s be clear here, sof-, surrendering is not the same as giving up. Giving up is about loss of hope. It’s a, a will disengagement, a, a spirit crushed. Surrender, rather, is a willed act. One in which a person undertakes precisely because acknowledging human limitation and lack of control in a situation offers the greatest opportunity to prevail, to survive. If you’re working as a mental health practitioner, what tendency do you observe in your clients to actively engage their will, or to surrender. How do they know which is more appropriate in the context of their ultimate triumph over the difficult situation. If it’s surrender, it’s genuine surrender. That is a willed act. But do you sense that they might be just giving up. Mind power skills as resilience boosters. If you want to help grow your clients’ heartiness, a good place to work from is the mind power skills. Let’s review the connection between mind power and resilience. Nothing comes into being on planet earth without there being a blueprint in the ether. Houses under construction follow an official paper blueprint. A tailor sewing a dress follows a pap-, pattern of what the finished dress is going to look like. And company restructurings take place after a level consultation and planning to decide on how the ultimate organization or chart should look. We bring into reality what we are able to conceive. We conceive that which we can visualize, feel or hear in our minds. We can create much more strongly in our minds, giving our subconscious the command to gather up the energy and manifestation in the physical world, if we’ve developed our will sufficiently for the unconscious parts of ourselves to hear the command. You know these skills already. Affirmations, visualizations, uh, fit in the positive emotions you feel when you manifest what you want, conceding, as that’s called. Express frustration through creative channels. In some cases, the client’s tough times are recurring not because nothing has manifested, but because something has happened which is unpalatable, hard to accept. The client feels frustrated and the energy of frustration mounts. The client may be working on practical levels to sort out the situation, you know, retaining legal assistance, say, in the instance of victimization. But the person may be working steadily on a mind power level to slowly work their will through the unfortunate circumstance. But assistance is required for immediate release of the pent up energy. Imagine this scene. You’re accused of a crime you did not commit. You’re wrongly jailed with a very long non-parole period. Of course, if you’re able, you’ll appeal the incorrect verdict but what do you you do to relieve the everyday frustration, boredom and rage, uh, at the injustice you’re suffering. It’s an exercise of resilience via skillful will but not without some good will towards yourself. To take on some form of creating to help assuage the frustration, you may write about your situation, draw, sculpt, or paint, or even just plunge yourself into intense physical exercise. As a therapist, guide, uh, you can facilitate discussions with clients to help them maintain equilibrium and physical health while guiding through their terrible time. And while they’ll be using much skillful will in doing this, they will also be exercising good will, or what will be called the skills of loving compassion. Good will, the skills of loving compassion. As we’ve already noted, exercising good will means including the welfare of others, the greater good, in ones intentions. Even if a person were to have exemplary levels of strong and skillful will, eh would be defeated if he were to exclude good will from his acts of will. Fortunately, showing good will to ourselves is part of the deal, and, indeed, may be the crucial ingredient needed in some challenging situations. The following skills show how good will can make the difference between psychologically surviving and not. So be willing to shift the goal posts. Did you make your plans before your situation changed. Do you need to review them now in light of what has happened. Susan had a goal to run a marathon. After having done half marathons for many years, but two weeks before the big event, she experienced a terrible asthma attack followed by a respiratory illness. She had to conclude that running a marathon was not going to be appropriate that year, as her lun-, lungs were in no condition to do so. But she still wanted to participate. She decided that this year, the 10 kilometer walk run, the 10 kilometer walk run would, would be as good as it got. Facing reality with acceptance one day at a time. Anyone who’s ever been caught in a long-term bad time, as in recovering from a chronic ailment or bankruptcy, or, or say dealing with a court case can identify with the absolutely brilliant book title, I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once. Carbonatto found in her research that in all of the long-haul ordeals, people nominated the response of just doing one day at a time as a key strategy to get through. If we analyze what is involved in this, we inevitably find elements of attuning our personal will to a larger transpersonal will. That is, we’re only ever motivated to use the banter of one day at a time, when the days are so challenging that contemplating them rolling on and on day after night is too hard. We can’t, for example, imagine surviving years of living in excruciating pain. But every morning we can wake up, salute the sun, grit our teeth and say, okay. I guess I can get through today in this condition. The capacity to keep re-contracting with ourselves is a trusting act of will. The source for which lies beyond our bodies, feelings and minds though all of our, those may be recruited to help us in getting through. The source of energy or capacity that allows the deal is at the level of the self, that is spirit of transpersonal will. It’s larger than a single conscious person’s will and is ever-present to us all. But we know how to access, the, the willingness, there’s the word again, to trust some sort of universal aspect or what we are calling transpersonal will comes through using, which means activating and developing one’s personal will as often as possible. Dealing with uncertainty. I realize I’m going on here about will skills, but I just find them so interesting. There are just two more I’d like to point out. A surprising finding by resilience writers is that of the uncertainty principle, which says that even bad news known is better than living in uncertainty. Peter Ubel gives two excellent examples of this principle in operation. During World War II, London central was bombed nightly by the Nazis. The suburbs around London were bombed occasionally. Now, objectively speaking, getting bombed every single night is worse than getting bombed once in a while. But doctors and others began to realize that it was the people of the suburbs who’s stomachs were getting ulcerated much more frequently. The explanation arrived at was that the central London residents knew that they were being bombed every night so they could prepare for it. Expect it. But the suburban residents lived in uncertainty, never knowing when they would be bombed, which was more stressful. It was they who developed most of the of the stomach ulcers. The second example of the uncertainty principle is that of the people in the 1980’s who took the test to find out if they were HIV positive. In those days, it took six weeks to find out. Curiously, most of the men who went through the experience said that the six weeks of being in limbo were worse than an ultimate diagnosis of being HIV positive. Apparently, even bad news known is easier to deal with, to accept into one’s life than uncertainty. The take-home message of resilience here is that if we want to thrive, we must learn how to deal with uncertainty. While thinking of domestically and using will effectively, uh, mostly interpersonal strategies to help an individual respond resiliently to adversity, some types of resilient responses are essentially interpersonal. We look at the cluster skills in the support category. How good are your social networks. The saying of no man is an island seems never truer anywhere than in the realm of resilience. Happiness author and business coach Alvah Parker, lists 10 traits of resilience of happy people. In the very first one, she notes that resilient people are strong people who realize the importance of having a good social support system and are able to surround themselves with supportive friends and family. Similarly, organization advisor and facilitator David Little addressed, addressing managers, names six traits of resilience in organizational healers some which is team support. Although you are a strong individual, you know the value of social support and are not able to surround yourself with supportive colleagues and strong leaders. There are two sub-skills a person needs here. Developing relational capacity and balancing dependence and independence. Developing relational capacity. If your networks are not well-developed, you can ask yourself how much do you trust people. How good are you at reaching out. What is your capacity for supporting others, for intimacy. Balance dependence and independence. In most western countries, people are trained from an early age to be independent and dependence gets very bad press. Yet dependence, the ability to ask for help, comfort or solace, softens a world that can seem harsh and unrelenting. It’s difficult to imagine a society in which citizens are prescribed from asking one another for help so calm and unemotional that it surely would be. Most people who prevail over tough times say they would not have gotten through their adversity had it not been for their networks of support. Whether those were mainly family, community, national or even international networks. Most people realized that in some way, that their ability to triumph is due in part to their ability to go into either mode. That of independence, or that of dependence as appropriate. Both are needed for solace. Mostly, survivors seem to work their will as well as they can, initiating actions that seem logical to get themselves out of their mess. But then being unapologetic about it and unafraid to ask for help when they’ve exhausted their own resources. The point with any development of social support networks is that you need to do it now. By the time catastrophe hits and you need the relationship, it can be too late.
Enhancing Resilience [Video file]. (2013). Mental Health Academy. Retrieved July 7, 2017, from Academic Video Online: Premium.