I write a lot about trauma. This is a topic I am passionate about, because I find that trauma tends to underlie a lot of the issues women want to work on in counseling.

I wave the flag of how subjective trauma is, how everyone experiences it in an individual way.

Something “counts” as trauma even if it doesn’t fit the life-threatening extreme parameters of the PTSD definition of trauma.

Even if nobody else would consider it to be “trauma.”

Especially if nobody else would consider it to be “trauma.” It makes us feel “crazy”, or “too much” when other people minimize our experience, and then we pile shame on top of our trauma, which makes it feel even more traumatic.

Trauma can be anything that overwhelmed your brain’s capacity to handle it at that time.

We all seem to have individual capacities to handle the hard stuff, as well as unique ways we get through it. Just ask any family who has been through something hard together.

The hard things in life impact us in different ways because we each have a personal cluster of factors that make up our capacity to deal with things.

Life experiences
Social support
Beliefs/Values
Resources for obtaining basic needs
Sense of identity
Relational skills
Coping skills

It struck me that these very things that decide whether someone experiences something as “traumatic” are the very things that also make up resiliency.

I have shared my own story about trying to fake resiliency and then falling apart during a military assignment that required my husband to be away from our family for a year.

I may oversimplify too much; I did have some resilient factors going for me when that year hit. I had social support and I didn’t have to worry about my basic needs being met. Most importantly, I had a strong faith.

Faith is a system of making meaning, of feeling part of something that is bigger than us.

My faith allowed me to trust something other than my feelings. I didn’t feel good about much of anything that year, but I could lean on what I believed from the Bible, even if I wasn’t feeling it. I could decide that something good would come from that year, and that helped me to put one foot in front of the other and look for the good.

So much good came from that year!

Now, looking back on it, I can see that I learned additional resilient processes. I had to discover my own solid sense of identity, improve my communication skills and develop an ability to set boundaries. I learned coping skills to challenge my automatic thoughts and regulate my emotions.

Since that year, our family has been hit with circumstances that most people would consider to be harder than that remote assignment year. I am not willing to share details, but there have been multiple times when our family has found itself in some of those life-threatening extremes that commonly define trauma. This situation has not been a cakewalk, for sure, but it has been easier for me to manage – because of the resilient processes I learned during that remote assignment year.

So what do I mean by “resilient processes”?

Before I describe some resilient processes, I want to take a look at the definition of “resilience.”

We tend to think of it as a bouncing back, like we are supposed to go back to life as usual, the very same way we used to.

But the problem is, we usually go through some changes when the hard stuff of life hits us.

One of the impacts of trauma is that it changes the way we look at ourselves, other people, the world.

Even if we could “bounce back,” we do not have the same frame of reference for what we are bouncing back to. This is why trauma can feel so disorienting.

I really love the way Froma Walsh captures resilience as “bouncing forward to face an uncertain future” (2002, p. 35).

Our belief system changed, so we are truly bouncing into something new.
Usually, we grow through the struggles, so we may find ourselves bouncing forward in a new way.

For me, this definition captures the best part about resilience.

It is a confidence in our ability to handle whatever comes.

We build that confidence through resilient processes.

I use the word “processes,” because resilience is more than a tool (or set of tools), like we would pull out of a toolbox. It is more like the way we set up our workshop so the tools are accessible and we have the skill and wisdom to know how and when to use them – and the confidence to do so. This is an ongoing process, a way of life.

Resilient Processes

Life experiences

Our early life experiences and relationships teach us what the world is about, how we interact with others, who we are. We can’t go back and change our past experiences, but we can learn from them.

We can identify experiences that generated certain beliefs that we lean on as we navigate life. Some of these foster resilience, and others foster fear. While someone who grew up with lots of fear can’t go back and change that, they can learn that life experiences don’t have to be that way. They can process those experiences in therapy so the fear part is no longer driving their way of responding. They can break generational cycles and learn what it is like to have healthy life experiences moving forward.

Resources to meet basic needs

Like our life experiences, we do not have much control over our resources, especially in the past. If we grew up in scarcity, it is easy to develop a scarcity mindset that guides our decisions. It can be a little easier as an adult to control our resources, but many people face challenges that get in the way of making progress there. The world is not a fair place, and sometimes the advantage goes to who you know or what you look like.

Resources can be external (like food, shelter, clothing, a job) or they can be internal (how you think, what motivates you, how you feel, how you view yourself in relation to others). Even when external resources are lacking, we can still work on those internal resources.

When our basic (external) needs are not met, it feels very difficult to keep plugging. Perseverance is an internal resource that we can work on when we decide that our efforts will pay off someday. It is fueled by hope (another internal resource).

Beliefs/Values

Our internal resources are very much tied to our beliefs and values.

For example,

It is hard to have hope unless you have an internal framework that allows you to believe there is something to hope for.
It is hard to persevere if we do not believe there is a point to all that hard work.
It is hard to suffer when we think it is meaningless.
It is hard to be flexible if you have a belief system that catastrophizes anything that doesn’t go your way.
If you believe there is something wrong with you; you are not good enough, you will struggle to feel confident.

Beliefs help us make meaning of what we experience and provide a foundation to build on.

Sense of identity

A strong sense of identity is necessary to know what we believe and what we need.

We do not think to ask for what we need (or allow ourselves to even have needs) if we allow other people to define who we are. This is where belief systems come in again – we can use our belief systems to help define who we are, what we are about. When we know that, we can discover what we need to function well, and work on boundaries that protect what we need.

Relational skills

We can know who we are, what we believe, and what we need, but if we do not have relational skills we do not know how to ask for it, how to effectively advocate for ourselves, how to care for others well.

I tend to focus more on helping women speak up and express needs, because that’s what comes up the most in my practice. However, there is a flip side – we need to know how to care for others and respect their boundaries as well, otherwise we will still end up in empty relationships because we are only focused on ourselves.

Relational skills include things like perspective taking, empathy, good communication, and assertiveness.

Social support

I believe we are hard-wired to need other people. None of us can do all the things, all the time, by ourselves. We need help. We need company. We need to feel *not-alone*.

When other people let us down, or we can’t seem to find a place where we belong, it can contribute to feeling hopeless. It can make us want to withdraw even more, but when we learn to reach out, to ask for help, we find that we are not alone. People may not always have the exact kind of help we are looking for, but just knowing that they are there wanting to be helpful is a comfort.

Sometimes we need to learn who is safe to reach out to, how to do that, and how to make sure we care for ourselves as we get involved with other people.

Coping skills

I mention these last, because these are really the most superficial. However, they are usually the first things we start working on in therapy, because we can employ coping skills without having worked through the deeper issues. Having some solid coping strategies to manage emotions and anxiety can be a good start to finding some relief while we do the longer-term work of unpacking the hidden beliefs and building those support structures.

Coping skills help us to slow down and feel safe enough to challenge the automatic thoughts that pop up. I’ve written a lot about coping skills. They include things like:

This is just my own personal list of resilient processes, based on my clinical experience and my personal experience. There may be others that I am not thinking of right now, but I’ll be sure to come back and write about them as I keep learning. Commitment to continual growth may be another good resilient process to add to this list!

We can’t control the cards that are dealt to us, but we can learn how to play the cards we have and develop skill and wisdom to accumulate more cards that will be useful in the future.

There is so much hope in the idea that resilience is possible to learn.

Please reach out if you want some help finding your own resilient processes.

Reference

Walsh, F. (2002). Bouncing forward: Resilience in the aftermath of September 11. Family Process, 41(1), 34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.40102000034.x

Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her office in Carlisle, PA. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.

What is Resilience?