What is resilience?

When thinking of resilience we might think of someone who has overcome an extremely difficult situation or completing a goal like being in the Olympics. It’s easy to think of the most extreme situations when defining this word. When I think of resilience I think of YOU! I think of people who are…

Working towards a goal at their work

Striving to be a good parents

Working through traumatic or hard childhood memories

Survivor of an abusive relationship

Getting up daily and going to work and living life even when dealing with chronic illness or mental health challenges

Survivor of sexual assault

Starting a new chapter or a new goal

There are so many examples that we could list of what makes someone resilient and how showing up and doing life takes having resilience. We experience stress, disappointment, heartache, and frustrations that often require being resilient. Resilience is typically defined as the ability to bounce back or recover quickly from difficulties.

I recently went through a ten month training to become a trainer for Social Resilience Model by Threshold Globalworks. It was honestly life changing to learn that it is possible to increase our resilience. This might seem like an obvious statement, but our brain plays a big role in how our body reacts when we experience stress, trauma, and relaxation. It’s through training our brain that we can increase our resilience. There are two well known ways of training the brain to increase resilience including top-down resilience and bottom-up resilience (Van Der Kolk, 2021). Top-down resilience is focusing on our ‘thinking brain’ and doing activities like meditation, yoga, mindfulness, therapy, journaling, and spiritual practices to captivate our thoughts and refocus them to build our resilience (Van Der Kolk, 2021). Bottom-up resilience is using how our body first experiences anything in our environment, which is through our senses (Van Der Kolk, 2021). So it is teaching the body to shift from stressful and traumatic sensations to calming and relaxing sensations. It’s about teaching the brain to shift to things that bring calmness to the body in order to not be overwhelmed or for the body to be triggered to release stress hormones. We will explore all of these areas of resilience and learn together what is helpful for each of us individually. Here is a journal prompt to consider what resilience means to you!

References:

Van Der Kolk, B. (2021). Body Keeps the Score. Audiobook. Narrated by Sean Pratt.

Threshold Globalworks, founder of Social Resilience Model. Welcome To Threshold Globalworks – Threshold GlobalWorks