It has been theorized that the way we traverse the birth canal affects our start on our lifelong path. We can't be sure of how much that influences our future course; we can only be sure that we are here, and that we are on our way. Some people strongly believe that they can succeed, that they can overcome every obstacle. Some think that life is filled with impossible tasks. Both are right. Attitude is a major factor in determining how we deal with the obstacles on the road. But what about the vast majority of people in between? What of people who think they might be able to succeed but have some doubts, and people who would like to change their ways but lack the courage?
Beth Miller has not been afraid to put her head in the lion's mouth. At midlife she left a comfortable marriage to return to graduate school, earned a doctorate in psychology, worked with groups of male sex offenders in a treatment center, taught psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and established a private practice in individual and group psychotherapy in San Francisco. Over the past ten years, she developed and tested a program for developing resilience in women. This book contains a distillation of her program. It will appeal to those who believe that their lives can be more fulfilling and that they can deal better with problems and relationships than they now do. Dr. Miller describes a series of qualities that lead from embracing your vulnerabilities through analyzing your problems, getting your needs met, setting limits, giving up resentments, using humor, and practicing forgiveness to improving your ability to communicate. She provides exercises to help you practice the steps in everyday life. The book is a valuable personal guide; it can be used with a friend or partner, and it can serve as a model for support groups.
June Singer, Ph.D.
introduction
A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life.It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster.The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life.If we have not been wounded, if we have not been injured,then we will not produce the pearl.
—S. HOELLER
mOST OF US want to see ourselves as survivors, as having that deep sense of confidence that allows us to conquer our personal demons and catastrophes. We want that exhilarating feeling of accomplishment and achievement. We want not just to survive but to thrive.
We want to think we'll be able to overcome unrequited love, have the confidence to look for another job, learn how to live with loss and disappointments creatively and constructively, whether it is not being able to have a child or being passed over for a promotion. We want to believe that we'll have courage when we fail and know how to keep trying, especially when the addiction, pain, loss, or fury appears to be getting the best of us.
We want to be resilient. We want to bounce back from misfortune and thrive from difficulties.
Sensing its importance to people's ability to cope with adversity is how I came to study the quality of resilience a little over a decade ago. At first I just loved the sound of the word. It seemed to embody a certain lightness and buoyancy. As a psychotherapist working with people stung and damaged by all sorts of life events, I had a sense that resilience might be the single most important capacity people need to develop in order to cope with their demons, with life's inevitable misfortunes, and with a vastly changing world.
As I delved into the subject, I immediately thought of the many children who survive horrific backgrounds relatively intact and began to wonder why they are able to do so when others are crushed by similar circumstances. I wondered the same thing about adults who managed to bounce back from profound losses, personal addictions, and serial disappointments. How is it that some of us are able to stand back up from tragedy able to love while others are permanently scarred? Why are some people resilient and others not? The further into that question I got, the more I became entangled in a debate similar to the nature-nurture one. My research led me to believe that we are born with a temperament that determines, to a large degree, how we relate to the world and each other and how much stress and tragedy we can withstand without breaking. But if that's the case, I then went on to wonder, if resilience is inborn, what happens to those of us who do bend too far under hardships? Is that it for us, or can we actually develop bounce-ability and become resilient again? If temperament plays such an important role in our ability to be resilient, can those of us who are more tender increase our resilience? Can those areas in all of us that leave us quivering become stronger?
I discovered many things:
Resilience is natural. Bones heal, hearts mend, and the human spirit's destination is enlargement. Change or misfortune is part of the human journey through life. In fact, without troubles we would not have the need to be resilient. There are changes throughout our natural development, like birth, adolescence, midlife, and death. There are changes in our societal initiations, like marriage and career choices or shifts. There are cataclysmic events like earthquakes and hurricanes. We torture each other with rape, holocausts, wars, slavery, and oppression.
But our culture teaches us to pick ourselves up again, brush ourselves off, and start all over again. Our myths regale us with triumphant phoenixes rising out of the ash heaps. We swell with pride when ordinary people champion over horrendous odds.
We know that resiliency reigns because we survive to tell our tales of misfortune, trauma, abuse. Indeed, we are built to be able to go to the edge of life and come back with heart and soul elevated, with the ability to evaluate and reevaluate what is important in light of whatever adversity is going on in our lives, with the ability to deepen our understanding of ourselves and the environment we live in. We are built to be resilient, to be able to take sure and steady steps over rocky terrain.
No one is resilient all the time. Even for those of us who appear naturally resilient and take life in stride, there will be pockets of our lives that are more difficult to navigate. One aspect of our life can be flexible; for example, being a crackerjack on the job is easy but relationship breakups do us in; major crises are manageable but not so the everyday disappointments. Many bright, capable people can feel overwhelmed by a calamity or an unexpected turn in the road.
Also, what is easy for one person is hard for another. It is irrelevant and even destructive to compare ourselves to others, because pockets of resilience and pockets of vulnerability differ from person to person. Some people are so disciplined that losing control to an addiction is anathema. Others make friends so easily they cannot imagine being lonely. It is important to locate the areas in our own lives where we find ourselves down for the count and not look to others as a benchmark.
We may be designed to be resilient and flourish, yet life and how we perceive and receive hard times can crush this natural ability. Poverty, abuse, unrelenting difficulties, overwhelming loss all can and do take their tolls on our ability to thrive. And, yet, even with all these difficulties, what most often determines our resiliency is how we perceive the event and what it means to us. The literature on resilience speaks of working well, playing well, and expecting well. Not too much or too little. From growing up in a profoundly neglectful environment without enough to eat to parenting an autistic child, being resilient means not denying the reality of the situation, not wishing for it to be different, and not succumbing to a victim mentality. Instead, expecting well, seeing clearly, knowing that what is, is, and then finding what you can do about it—these are the keys to resilience. The child who finds a kindly neighbor who invites her in for dinner, the parents who give their child all the love and support they have without waiting for their child to do what a child without autism would be able to do—expecting well frees us up to creative responses.
Resilience can be crushed out. We need to be resilient to be human and we are born with that quality—but what happens when life crushes us over and over or trauma, disappointments, and loss are too horrific to bear, what about when we break in certain places? The astonishing number of depressions, the varying degrees of anxiety lived with on a daily basis, mental illness, the loss of work hours as a result of not being able to face the day, suicides and violence in the home, work, and