An excerpt from Resilience by Linda Graham
Everyone knows what it’s like to be knocked off center, to lose their inner sense of balance and groundedness, at least temporarily, when faced with life’s unwanted curve balls. Whether it’s a troubling health diagnosis, the death of a loved one, a serious car accident, a layoff, or a natural disaster, life can intensely challenge our resilience.
In Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster (New World Library, October 2, 2018), author and psychotherapist Linda Graham, MFT, guides readers step by step through a process of cultivating more well-being in their lives by strengthening their resilience so that they can respond skillfully to any upset or catastrophe that would derail that well-being. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.
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Many people think of mindfulness as a kind of thinking or cognition. That’s not exactly it. Mindful awareness is about being with rather than thinking about: it entails knowing what you are experiencing while you are experiencing it. This awareness and reflection about experience (and your reactions to your experience) creates choice points in your brain. When you are aware of your choices, you can respond flexibly to whatever is happening, moment by moment.
Let’s look at some of the steps of basic mindfulness as they apply to resilience.
1. Pause and Become Present
Whether they’re responding from inexperience, defensiveness, or the upheaval of a crisis, too often people don’t step back from a dilemma or disaster to reflect and discern options. Their reaction is often, “Don’t just sit there! Do something!” And sometimes we do need to act quickly and save the reflection for later. But reflecting before reacting gives the brain time and space to do the job you are strengthening it for — functioning with response flexibility.
When you become present to what is happening, you step out of denial, out of distraction, out of dissociation. You show up, pay attention, and engage with your experience in the present moment.
2. Notice and Acknowledge
Becoming aware of your experience starts with simply noticing: “This...is...happening.” Maybe you can’t articulate what “this” is right away, nor your reactions: “I don’t know what’s happening! I am confused! And overwhelmed, and scared.” Acknowledging and naming the experience — the confusion, the overwhelm, the fear — is the first step in being able to step back from it and observe it rather than being it. This step engages your prefrontal cortex to manage your reactivity so you can discern what is happening and choose how to respond to it.
3. Allow, Tolerate, Accept
This is an important step: allowing what is — the situation and your reactions; tolerating that experience, including your reactions to your reactions, so that you can move beyond any hair-trigger reactivity; and accepting — not necessarily liking or agreeing or condoning the experience or your reactions, but making room for them, so that you can work skillfully and effectively with whatever is happening.
4. Observe
Rather than staying caught in or identifying with the experience of the moment, try to disentangle yourself from it and observe it, as though you’re sitting high in the stands watching it like a basketball game. You can observe what’s happening — and your reactions to what’s happening — without believing that this is who you are or that this is permanently true. Rather than identifying yourself as an angry person and believing that you are angry all the time, you can observe, “I’m feeling very angry right now,” or even “The anger is pretty strong right now.” This disentangling and observation enable you to create choice points in the brain rather than simply acting (or reacting) automatically as you have acted before.
5. Reflect on Increasingly Complex Objects of Awareness
You’ve already practiced bringing to your conscious awareness experiences of body sensations, breath, touch, and movement; experiences of complex nuanced emotions, even cascades of emotions; messages from inner parts that may support or derail your resilience; and the interactive dynamics between you and another person that may do the same.
Learn to work with “mental contents” — thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, values, points of view, identities — because these complex constructs of the mind can also support or derail your resilience. You’ll become aware of the processes of the mind that can create, get stuck in, and shift those mental contents. You’ll strengthen your response flexibility so you can shift and rewire even deeply held beliefs, such as “But this is who I am!”
6. Discern Options
Response flexibility requires not only perceiving possible responses but also perceiving the possible consequences of those responses. In this step, you begin to integrate the capacities of mindfulness to reflect on “what is” with the cognitive capacities of the prefrontal cortex to reflect on what could be. These capacities of executive functioning are what enable you to analyze, plan, make judgments, make decisions. Integrating them with mindfulness allows you to “monitor and modify” your responses to your experience, not just in the moment but for the long haul.
7. Choose Wisely
Resilient choices are guided by your own values and inner moral compass. Every tribe and society, every philosophical and spiritual tradition that has ever pondered resilience has also had to ponder and teach the values and virtues it believes can best guide individuals in meeting life’s challenges and foster well-being for themselves and others, so the values that guide your decisions may have been previously conditioned by lessons learned in your family and culture.
Living out of alignment with your chosen values and virtues will quickly and powerfully derail your resilience. You can’t move forward when you are disastrously off balance within.
Even here, you don’t want to get bogged down in categorical definitions of right and wrong, or good and bad. You allow, tolerate, and accept in order to be flexible, to discern skillful from unskillful, wholesome from unwholesome. Your mindfulness allows you to notice and reflect on any choice that might put you out of alignment with your core values.
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Linda Graham, MFT, is the author of Resilience and also Bouncing Back, the winner of a 2013 Books for a Better Life Award. She is an experienced psychotherapist who integrates modern neuroscience, mindfulness practices, and relational psychology in her international trainings on resilience and well-being. Visit her online at www.lindagraham-mft.net.
Excerpted from the book Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster. Copyright ©2018 by Linda Graham. Printed with permission from New World Library.