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Resilience: Growth despite loss

  • hayley5762
  • Oct 1
  • 3 min read

Life can be incredibly challenging at times. Illness, loss of work, relationship break ups, and of course, grief, will all test our resilience. But what is resilience exactly? I think this word can be a little tricky, someone in the depths of grief, depression or feeling very anxious might think they are not resilient. I don’t believe this is true though. These are just symptoms of what you are experiencing in your mind and body, they aren’t an indication of weakness. In therapy, I tend to look at all presenting issues through the lens of ‘what is this symptom trying to say?’ or, 'the question isn't what's wrong with you, it's what's happened to you'. It fosters curiosity and empathy, rather than pathology, and it's the basis for helping people to build on their already natural resilience.


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In Dr Lucy Hone’s book, Resilient Grieving*, she writes about the research behind human resilience to traumatic loss and our innate ability to grow and find meaning despite it. She writes from personal experience, not just as a researcher, as her life was torn apart when her own 12-year-old daughter was killed in a car crash in 2014.


She tells us that there are three fundamental truths about resilience:

1.       Most people have the capacity for resilience

2.       Resilience requires very ordinary processes

3.       These processes can be taught and learned


Some of these processes are around choosing where to put your focus. Hone talks about her own experience of having an internal conversation with herself about putting down the photographs of her daughter, because at that moment, it was causing her more pain than what was feeling useful for her. She talks about asking herself, 'Is this helping me right now, or hurting me?' This is a fine line of course. Avoiding something like photographs of your dead loved one could become a real problem, and Hone isn’t suggesting that someone avoids all pain. What she does suggest, and what her extensive research reveals, is that when someone pays very close attention to what they are experiencing in real time and begins to recognise when they are either pushing themselves to hard, or collapsing under the weight of avoidance, they have a chance to increase resilience.


This way of thinking chimes with what we know about working within a person’s window of tolerance (Seigel, D. 1999). Working in someone’s window of tolerance means paying very close attention to what is happening with their central nervous system as they talk about events or even respond in the relationship with you. Ideally, as the therapist, I want to keep you within your window of tolerance but touch the edges of it. This helps to stretch your window of tolerance over time, building more capacity and resilience within you.


A short video explaining the window of tolerance

Risk analyst, mathematical statistician and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb** goes one step further than resilience, he has coined the term ‘antifragile’. He argues that to be resilient isn’t quite enough and that it’s more important to be anti-fragile, because we must expect that life can and will throw inevitable surprises our way (both good and bad) and resiliency suggests that we expect the system (whether it’s an economic system, or a human system) to take the shock and then return to ‘normal’. Anyone who has experienced grief, loss and/or trauma knows that there is no return to so-called normal. What actually happens, is we change and grow and adapt to our new normal. We expand around our grief, given enough time, care and support, forever changed by it, and quite often in very positive ways.


I think Hone would probably agree with Taleb on this though, as I believe this is what she actually means in her use of the word ‘resilience’. And she acknowledges that, ‘Resilience doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone fully resolves a loss, or finds a state of “closure”. Even the most resilient seem to hold onto at least a bit of wistful sadness’. Building capacity and resilience doesn’t mean you won’t feel sad about the loss you have experienced. What it does mean is that when you do feel sad, angry, guilt, regret, etc., you are able to acknowledge it, attend to it and then help yourself move through it.


What do you think? Do you think of yourself as natural resilient, or do you prefer anti-fragile? Can you recognise when you have been out of your window of tolerance and what has helped you to get back into it? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, leave a comment below.


*Resilient Grieving: Finding Strength and Embracing Life After a Loss That Changes Everything by Lucy Hone, PhD (2017)

**Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)

 
 
 

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