Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Writing

Are You Resilient?

What is Resilience?

It has been called the great puzzle of human nature.

Is it something some people have and others do not?  Is it something you can learn?  Some research on resilience talks about genetics and a predisposition towards resilience.  Here are diagrams of a seesaw with a fulcrum to illustrate this.   Your life experiences and genetic predispositions sets this fulcrum to make your seesaw go up or down more easily.  Adverse childhood experiences make moving the fulcrum more challenging.  It can even make resilience out of reach for some people.

However, it is people who have had the most adverse life experiences and somehow have overcome them that inspire us the most.  Who are these people and what did they do?  The answer to these questions can help us understand resilience.

Resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief  that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

Viktor Frankl was preoccupied with survivorship/resilience during his dehumanizing, life threatening experiences in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  He later traced the roots of his resilience to a sense of purpose and the acquisition of meaning.  He then expanded meaning into three dimensions: purpose, mastery and autonomy. He wrote about in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Other core characteristics of resilient people include the ability to form strong attachments to others and the possession of an inner psychological space that protects them from intrusion or abuse.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom,” says Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, quoting from Diane Coutu in her Harvard Review Article, “How Resilience Works.”

So how can we train ourselves to become more resilient?…

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Healing The Shame Of Sexuality

(Photo taken at Ephesus, a Greek and then Roman city that flourished around the time of Christ)

 

I have been exploring Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness in which he describes the hub of awareness as the center of ourselves and the spokes and rim as the things we take in from the  outside world: our senses, our mind thoughts, our relationships, our body sensations.

Practicing this for several days I became interested in my hub, the essence of me that is me — the center.

This is a new variation on many practices of I have tried over the years.  I have always found some resistance to going into the center of myself.  In the past I have  thought I was afraid of how little would be there, that I would find that I am really just made up of everything going on outside of me.  I am very ‘other’ focused.

This time I began to notice something new stir in the center of my being.  The word feminina came into my consciousness.   It is a word my husband uses to refer to me often.  The word means feminine in Portuguese.  I have noticed that I have a slight aversion to him calling me this name.

This aversion, as I really explore it, contains a lot of strong emotions and is a microcosm of myself as a sexual woman — fear, shame and lust.  In the center of my being I find my sexuality as an integral part of the essential me!

When I was becoming a woman at age 14, my mother was becoming a man.  She had a radical mastectomy and then took hormone treatment which made her voice lower, and hair grow on her face.  This was horrifying to me and I understood — this happens when you are a woman.  I also knew that  for women there was another type of danger, whispers of pregnancies, getting in trouble, being a bad girl.

My own budding sexuality, although active, went into hiding, laced with shame and isolation.

This may be a common experience for women even though my coming of age experience with my mother was unusual.  The photo above depicts  Medusa looking very ambivalent herself, some 2000+ years ago. It adorned a wall of a home in ancient Ephesus.

If I am Feminina, what does that mean?  Pressure to be something, the receptacle of endless need?  I have not had many positive associations.  AND that is changing!…

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The Dry Desert of Self Contempt

Each of us has words we say to ourselves silently that we would never speak out loud to anyone else.  These words become so familiar they barely reach conscious thought but they carry very negative energy.  With my clients we have excavated phrases like “you are such an idiot”, “you are a fat big”, “you do not even deserve to live”, or “you are worthless” and more.  You might be interested in listening for what you say to yourself.  This self-contempt is so painful, but is actually meant to protect us.  If we say these things to ourselves we will fend off the criticism of others.  We will whip ourselves into better shape (smarter, thinner, deserving, etc).  Sometimes these words were said to us and we have internalized them.  Sometimes we just lived in an environment where our significant others interacted with us in a way to make us draw these conclusions.  For example, one of my client’s Dad was a policeman.  When he came home after a long day of work all he wanted to do was watch police chase videos on TV or Pornography on the computer which was in the living room.  His Dad did not delight in him or show interest in him.  He drew the conclusion that he must be an idiot and he now has trouble focusing on tasks — finishing things he starts.  This of course confirms his phrase “You are such an idiot”.

The healing of this dynamic has some challenging but very clear steps.  Self-contempt is in our control.  First we have to excavate these phrases.  Listen for them in our background thoughts and self talk.  Then we have to challenge their validity.  Is it true I am idiot?  A fat pig?  This challenge immediately softens the energy these phrases carry.  Next we have to go into the early scenarios that began this self talk.  Go into the living room and feel how much you wanted your Dad’s attention and how he was not interested in you.  As you feel this also allow yourself to feel how this really happened to you.  You were a cute, creative kid.  You deserved attention and support.  You needed it.  Once you allow yourself to feel your feelings and really validate what happened, you are on your way to healing….

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PURITY

While at the beach in Florida this winter I had a casual conversation with a stranger.  We quickly found we shared step-parenting.  Both of us each wrested with feeling included in a family not of our own making (at least biologically).

I agreed to send her an article I was reading about cultivating the good amidst our tendencies to see how we don’t belong or might be excluded.

The next day I saw her again on the beach and she said I had made an impression on her.  Like a yoga teacher she knew once, “I was pure”.  In the moment I dismissed what she said.  I found no place in myself to connect with purity.

I have fallen out of contact with Marie but her words stayed with me.  For a time they stayed in the periphery of my mind.  But I woke yesterday from a dream in which I was in bed, with purity as a young daughter lying  next to me.

What if I used the exercises of the great teachers, Tara Brach and John Welwood to make space and really embody this feeling of purity?  They both have similar four-part exercises to make space for, embody and receive support for difficult feelings.  What if this exercise worked for positive feelings too?…

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Redemption

Redemption

An act of redeeming or atoning for a fault or mistake and returning to a state of being redeemed.

Here is what happened for me. I married my husband when I was 26. I was a very young 26. I needed a mother and a father as much as I wanted a husband. He was going to make up for all my losses — a happy ending to a sad life.

It wasn’t so easy. He had two young boys in our care. They were 5 and 7 and had lots of NEEDS. I did not understand what it meant to be a wife, let alone a mother. I did my best at each of those tasks and I wasn’t very good at them. Most of the time I was resentful of everyone else’s needs and competed with them for my husbands attention. And I was so afraid to love. What if they did not love me back? I had no understanding of, or way to hold this negativity inside. The little boys were cute, creative and so smart. How could I feel so mean? I hated myself ­— guilt, fear and resentment forming a toxic mix….

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