10. On resilience and returning home

We often hear how we need to build resilience in this time.

There is immunity resilience. What about psychological resilience?

Resilience is not to be defined as enduring hardship and live-to-tell once safely through it. The so-called “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” attitude (which British nostalgia and jingoism excel in).

Psychological resilience is pre-emptive – to mentally and emotionally prepare for the challenges of our day by coming back into ourselves for deeper self-understanding. This looks like knowing what our limits are, identifying what sets us off, becoming aware of what stories we tell ourselves in struggle, communicating clearly for what we need from our family arrangements, and providing sustenance for ourselves in whatever forms you get it. In this way, we are more adept at dealing with difficulty in a conscious way rather than getting caught up in it and becoming it and making everyone in our paths part of our own difficulties.

Returning home or the family reunion

The holidays are a time we reunite with family and return to the hearth. Whether you are able to travel the distance to meet in person or virtually, notice the expectations we still hold for others – particularly those tender relationships where we revisit an empty well expecting different results. Say, an older brother who is insensitive to your transformation as a parent. A mother who is not as delicate or gentle as you wish for her to be with you. A culture or value system that doesn’t abide by your own values.

These historical relationships carry a stockpile of disappointments which we collect and lick our wounds over a lifetime.

“How we approach our sorrows profoundly affects what comes to us in return.” Francis Weller

Building psychological resilience and awareness does not happen in isolation. That is we do not need to retreat into our bunkers. The invitation is to test your mettle and your own self-awareness in relation to one another.  How can you can hold your boundary and self-awareness and still appreciate the other? How we can accept the character flaws of others we don’t like and not avoid or retreat from the other (which are likely part of our own shadows)?

For if we do not attend to these wounds - and by extension to these relationships - we are ruled by our emotions and they go underground. In the context of our collective precarious times, our unexpressed and/or unmet expectations can wreak havoc on our lives and our relationships – snapping at our loved ones or withdrawing, shutting down, and losing the ability to function in this time.

David Kessler writes so eloquently:

“When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.”

Finding time for reflection to acknowledge your experience, where you’re at in this moment, just now, will shape how you show up. And showing up is the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family and your friends now.