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Resilience
By: Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, June 8, 2006.
Few people entering counseling would say "I want to be more resilient." However many people entering counseling might say, "I don't easily adapt to change."
Resilience gives us that capacity to respond easily to the changes in our circumstances. It helps us to let things go and move on. Without resilience we tend to become entrenched in old patterns.
"...resilience is the maintenance of high levels of positive affect and well-being in the face of adversity. It is not that resilient individuals never experience negative affect, but rather that the negative affect does not persist.
Dr. Richard Davidson1
Resilience
Most people think of resilience as a mental thing. They are strong thinkers and believe that their ability to bounce back from hardship is because they "will" themselves into it. However, being driven or pushing oneself through life is very different than "resilience".
A truly resilient individual can flexibly respond to one's changing circumstances--not in a collapsed defeated way nor with a "I'll do it if it kills me" attitude.
Resilience, on the other hand, is a body based state that largely depends on the health of your nervous system. A healthy, resilient nervous system moves easily and rhythmically between stimulation and discharge. In other words, the nervous system manages energy well.
Let me explain.
We all experience stress and it is the health of our nervous system that determines whether we get freaked out or literally let it go.
An individual with a resilient nervous system can contain the stress and not be adversely affected by it. Someone who has a "maxed out" nervous system experiences the stress more intensely and it takes him or her longer to come down from it.
A resilient nervous system can handle more.
Let me give you an example.
So if you can imagine, all things being equal, Charlie is organizing a barbeque for a couple friends and Darren, his neighbor is planning the same thing.
Charlie fills his day running the kids to little league, doing the weekly groceries, cleaning the house from top to bottom and putting food on the table. At dinner he sits down, relaxes and enjoys himself.
Darren spent his day only getting the food and preparing it. He sits down with his friends at dinner and is too tense to enjoy their company.
When you have a resilient nervous systems you can bounce back from daily stress, traumatic events, and abrupt changes in your circumstances. Your body (a.k.a. your nervous system) knows how to let go.
The term resilience actually comes from physics: a resilient object bends under stress instead of breaking. Similarly, a resilient nervous system is characterized by being able to bounce back from higher levels of arousal and then discharge the energy when it is safe to do so.
Under normal conditions the nervous system moves into states of increased arousal when stimulated (i.e. watching The Matrix) and subsequently discharges the energy to regain balance, or homeostasis (talking with friends after the movie). It will move in these cycles throughout the day. The easy rhythm is believed to give us that sense of well-being.
Another term to describe resiliency is self-regulated. So I might describe my nervous system as self-regulating now that I am no longer dissociative. I can process activation within the window of my capacity.
Individuals who chronically cannot process energy well tend to move into hyperarousal or become dorsal.
How does one get a resilient nervous system?
The most efficient way is to have many positive interactions (including the repair of misattunements) with another resilient nervous system in the first three years of life (i.e. with your mother or father).
In today's fast-paced world fewer and fewer children are receiving the amount of care they need to develop a resilient nervous system. Hence, we're seeing unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression and personality disorders and the conmensurate health problems associated with them.
However, with an attuned relationship with your therapist you can re-build your nervous system capacity and become more resilient. Somatic therapists have seen this over and over again. This is why is it so important to include a somatic component in your work with your therapist.
Can you become resilient through therapy without a somatic component?
Yes, I believe so. But I also believe changing patterns in your nervous system will take that much longer. What we know of how the brain is structured leads us to believe this is the case. However, we don't yet have clinical trials to support this contention.
My Personal Musings
Once you understand that the therapist/client dyad plays the same kind of role as the mother/child dyad, you will naturally want a healthy template from which you will nonconsciously pattern your own after. So when you're looking for a therapist you might want to find one whose nervous system is resilient , self-regulating or as Dr. Daniel Siegel phrases it, "neurally integrated".
What's important to realize is that you can increase the resiliency of your nervous system. Watch for notices in MyShrink UpDates for more information on this exciting topic.
Reference
Longhurst, James (2005, March). The resilient brain. [Electronic Version] Reclaiming Children and Youth.
Heller, Diane, P. (2001) Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma & Recovery. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books. (Please note: If you have been in a car accident, you may find material in this book a bit activating.)
Scaer, Robert, C., (2005). The Trauma Spectrum, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Siegel, Daniel J., (2007) "Psychotherapy from the Inside Out: The Brain of the Mindful Therapist. Nov. 8-9, 2007, The Justice Institute, Vancouver, BC.
Notes
1Davidson, Richard J., (2000). Affective style, psychopathology, and resilience: Brain mechanisms and plasticity. American Psychologist, 1192-1214. As quoted in The Mindful Brain by Daniel Siegel, (2007).
Inspired By
...the clinical work of Drs. Lynne Zettl and Edward Joseph who emphasized the importance of a "self-regulated" therapist.
How young can you die of old age?
Steven Wright
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