Resilient Lives

Today is the five-year anniversary of 9/11. The newspapers, radios and tv have been saturated with recalling that awful morning when the world gasped in horror while bearing witness to the loss of thousands of lives. Movies on tv and the big screen reenact the events leading up to the imagined last hours of those people trapped in the doomed planes or in the burning buildings.

I remember talking with my clinical clients, young children, adolescents and their families, about loss and death for months following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The 9/11 events served to reignite past pain and fears in those clients who had already been touched by death and violence. As a parent, I struggled to find the right words to describe the events to my then 9 year old child; I remember wanting to calm and soothe her, but not being sure, without a doubt, that life would be peaceful again. America, and the world, was jittery and jumpy for months and years following the horrific acts of that deliberate violence. Five years later, the events of the day are still in my memory, but I no longer experience the knot of fear in my belly when boarding a plane or projecting my thoughts into my children's futures.

What I have learned and observed over my professional career and have taught during these five years of recovery is this: The healthy among us possess resilient spirits. As a psychologist I have witnessed firsthand the resiliency of young clients as they recover from traumatic abuse or neglect and move on to become healthy and whole individuals. I have helped adult clients navigate the broken path of grief and loss in order to move onto the smooth road of recovery, and open themselves up to love and relationships once again.

How are they able to do this and what is resiliency? Authors on www.Resiliency.com write: "Resiliency is the ability to spring back from and successfully adapt to adversity. An increasing body of research from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology is showing that most people–including young people–can bounce back from risks, stress, crises, and trauma and experience life success. Researchers are concluding that each person has an innate capacity for resiliency, "a self-righting tendency" that operates best when people have resiliency-building conditions in their lives." These conditions are described in The Resiliency Quiz.

What I have observed in my clients' and my own life as well as what researchers are determining is that resiliency describes a cluster of strengths that are called into play when hardships or crises surface. In order to not only survive the critical event, but to master it, one must be adaptive and open to exploration. Rather than bury one's head in the sand and "pray for the best", a resilient individual seeks out connectedness to others who value him or her. A resilient individual looks around and seeks people that he could model his behavior after. A resilient individual experiences a sense of power and mastery over the situation; that is, not allowing herself to become overwhelmed and engulfed by negative emotions or fear. A resilient person takes initiative; she tries to find solutions to the problem rather than remaining passive and helpless. A person with resilience is able to gain distance and perspective from the problem and he is able to take compassionate action.

Resilience is a psychological tool that can be strengthened through nurture, attention and support. For some, learning resilience requires conscious practice. Instead of blowing up in anger over an unpleasant incident, think about responding to the situation from a place of calm perspective. If we as a population could develop the strength of resilience, I believe that we as individuals, and as members of society, would flourish because we would demonstrate the power of compassionate caring to one another. Bless you all on this memorial day.

Thought for the Day: How resilient are you? What can you do this week to enhance your capacity for resilience in the face of a crisis?

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson