Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness. Some people feel that others they see who are able to get through hard times seemingly easily are just born that way. I think resilience is a learned or a conditioned behavior response and I think that everyone can learn resilience if they invest in the process. People can seem to be resilient who are still living with the effects of their past trauma, but most are addicted to control and reacting in their long held trauma patterns.

The first thing on the path to resilience is processing past trauma. Until the past is addressed and the reactions to that trauma are processed and understood, it is very difficult to break the response patterns that are a result of unprocessed trauma. These patterns lead to negative thinking patterns, fear of failure, being in a constant state of fight or flight, and any of the hundreds of conditioned beliefs that have formed in our brains as a result of this trauma. Therapy is the road to being free of those things.

While in therapy, you will hopefully learn how to recognize negative beliefs and thought patterns. One of the greatest barriers to resilience is any belief that prevents you from knowing you can go through hard times and come out stronger on the other side.

In order to be resilient in the face of hard times, we must be able to form a positive thought process about the current situation to confront it without fear and/or having it polluted with our past trauma responses. We must also be able to have positive thought processes to disable catastrophic thinking patterns. We have to believe that we can overcome the hard times without fear and trauma responses and that we will be okay in the future.

Learning resilience after we have processed our trauma allows us to be able to choose our responses and maintain perspective. When we are living in our trauma response brains, we can find it almost impossible to choose our responses to any situation. We can know logically absolutely what we should do or say or how we should act, but the trauma response brain is powered by emotions. These emotions overpower our logic and cause us to respond out of fear. Fear, being the strongest emotion in the world, causes us to lose all perspective in situations where we need to make a different response.

To keep building resilience we have to be able to learn from our mistakes and failures. In everything there are lessons to be learned if we can maintain our perspective and keep our thoughts out of the trauma negative zones. All life is a lesson. When we are living in our trauma response brains, the lessons of our experiences tend to be overlooked while we are in states of fear, fight or flight, or freeze. The lessons are also overlooked in negative thinking patterns of how the mistakes are our fault or that we are always failures, which is again a product of the trauma responses. Learning the lessons of failure and mistakes can make us much stronger going forward and can also teach us what we no longer want to repeat.

Be aware of your thoughts. Practice thought awareness. Meditation is a great way to practice thought awareness. It is also a great way to practice having those thoughts come and go instead of taking up root. Meditation can also be used as thought replacement practice. Our thoughts become our beliefs become our behaviors.

Resilience can be learned. We can all choose our responses, choose what we think and believe, and choose to maintain perspective. Each choice makes us stronger and more able to withstand hard times. Cultivate resilience.

Until next time be well,

Deborah