Resilience Isn't What You Think

Who's responsible if we fall flat on our face and nothing goes right?
More importantly, who's responsible if we don't pick ourselves up again?

Transcript

Speaker 0:02

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and today you'll learn all about resilience. And if you are ready, we'll start the show. How are you doing folks? I hope life's treating you well and if it's not, I hope it's not knocking you on your backside. Life can do that, can't it though? It's like we're carrying sometimes so much that we can't move. Like all the responsibilities and worries are stuffed into this massive rucksack on your back. You know those huge things for backpacking across Tibet or something, and it's just too heavy to carry, and I get it. But in all honesty, most of us are only carrying one thing at a time. And I know it feels like you might be carrying the last 20 years of pain and your worries about the next 20 years, but you're not. You're only carrying the one thing you're dealing with in the moment, but it is hard to put all the other stuff down, isn't it? And I do think that's the secret source to resilience rather than just being tougher. I follow a lot of therapists and mindset coaches on social media and so much seems to be about the benefits of preparing children, particularly for a tough world. A hard life that means you need grit and determination to succeed. And, um, I don't like it. It suggests that you're living life wrong if you're struggling through hard times or that it's your own fault if you're marginalised or bullied. It's odd. I think people like to blame victims for things that happen to them. It gives them a sense of control, a reason for them to be safe themselves if they can see in other people that it must be their own fault if something bad happens. It's not uncommon for women who have been sexually assaulted to be asked things like, what were you wearing? As if it was the clothes that made a stranger in the street turn into a violent predator. Now, I know not everyone lives through those extremes of hardship, but no matter what we have to go through, it's not a lack of resilience that would cause a drop in their mental health, is it? Resilience is what can help to get them through it, but the initial anxiety or depression is pretty much unavoidable. It doesn't matter how many times you stand on a table and sing, I will survive. You're still gonna feel bad if you've been hurt. The difference is someone with resilience will feel the pain, but not let it stop them from trying again. You get knocked down, but you get up again. But it doesn't mean that being knocked down wasn't incredibly painful. Be okay with that. There's a phrase I've been using a lot lately and that's, sit with it. Sit with the pain. Being stoic and pretending it doesn't hurt isn't likely to help you overcome anything. So sit with it, see how it feels. It can help you understand why you feel the way you do. Now, you might be thinking, right, but if I sit with it, won't I just end up going round and around in circles? And yeah that's a fair concern. Because there is a versions of sitting with pain that's just rumination in a dressing gown, you know. That's not what I mean. What I mean is just for a minute, maybe two or three minutes, don't immediately reach for the thing that makes it stop. Don't doom scroll. Don't busy yourself. Don't ring someone just to fill the silence. Just notice what the feeling actually is. Not, I feel bad. That's too vague to be useful, but what flavour of bad is it? Is it anger? Is it shame? Is it grief? Is it fear? 'cause the answer changes everything. You can't navigate towards somewhere better if you don't know where you are starting from. So that's all sitting with it is really, just enough time to take a reading. There's this trope in popular culture, isn't there? A cliche about counselling where a client says something and the therapist says, how does that make you feel? And it is a bit of an overused literary rhetorical device. And if I read the book where the therapist had said that, I'd probably think of it as lazy writing. But there is a reason why we ask that. It isn't just because we're nosy or can't think of anything to say. It's because every client says something different. One person might say that their experience made them feel angry. Someone else might say vulnerable. Somebody else might say worthless. Emotional intelligence is really important. And once you've got a handle on the difference between just simply feeling bad and feeling angry, vulnerable or worthless, then you can understand it better. And with understanding comes acceptance. And with that comes an alternative. So sit with it. Sit with how you feel so that you can understand yourself better. You can't do that if all you do with life's lemons is make lemonade. And I get it. It's got its place hasn't it? If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But let's be honest, you need more than a bag of sour lemons to turn it into something sweet, don't you? Sometimes all you've got is lemons, and that sucks. And it's not your fault. So if you pretend everything's fine, then you can't develop any resilience. Because what is helpful isn't resilience to problems. It's resilience to pain. And in order to get resilience to pain, you need to feel it first. So feel it, sit with it so as to understand it, accept it and learn from it. You might need to practise your optimism skills as you do this though, 'cause ruminating and thinking about the problem too much won't help you to learn from it. 'cause it so often comes with blaming yourself for things that have gone wrong. And although having an internal locus of control, as it's called, is useful for resilience. 'Cause it gives you a feeling of control over your life that helps to lift you up. But too great an internal locus of control. And you've only got yourself to blame. I've spoken about locus of control before. It's worth mentioning it again though, in case you missed it. So first off, locus is just a posh Latin word for location. So where is the control over your life? Is it in the outside world or is it inside of you? In truth, it's both. But if you feel that it's too far one way or the other, then you've gotta challenge that. 'cause like I say, if it's too internal, then everything that goes wrong in your life is your own fault and that's gonna bring you down. If it's too external, then it's really hard to get going. 'cause you carry around this feeling that your life is already mapped out, predetermined by destiny, fate, and nepotism. Where you were born, your accent, your social class. Does that make your future happen and make everything out of your hands? Yes and no. No it doesn't because you're a human, just like every other human. But I'm not naive enough to think that there's no such thing as nepotism and patriarchy, racism and sexism. And on top of that, you have the influence of the labels that you might have given yourself since you were as young as you could remember ever being. But until you sit with it and recognise how the world makes you feel, you can't do anything with it. So look for your labels, look for your locus of control. Make sure that you have that middle ground between no control and nothing but control. There was a longitudinal study in Hawaii once started in 1955 on the island of Kaua'i, a small island with a lot of poverty, and it followed almost 700 children from birth until they were 18, at first. Looking for correlations with class and consequences of childhood mental health issues. And once they got to 18, they started a new study. And I think it's still going on today, although they're not reporting it. Shame. 'cause the research subjects are only 70 years old, so there's still some studying that could be done. Anyway, cutting to the chase. These kids had a hard time. The island was hard. Attachment wasn't that secure. The kids all grew up a bit troubled. But some did well. Some flourished. One in three got to 18 years old and had made a success of their education. They had never broken the law and were described as competent, confident, and caring. And these kids weren't tougher. They weren't luckier. They just believed somehow that they had some say in what happened next in their life. That's it. That's the whole thing. By the time they got to 40, those same one in three were all doing well. Their achievements equaled or even surpassed many of the children who grew up in more economically secure and stable home environments. Their very existence challenge the myth that a child who is a member of a so-called high risk group is destined to become one of life's losers. These people defied the odds. Why? Well, there were lots of things going on. It was a useful study 'cause it highlighted the importance of many things. One was finding a surrogate parent. If their parents weren't a good influence, they found someone else who they could form a close bond with. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers. It even extended to finding a place in the community like a church or something. They took action and that's why I think it's an important study. 'cause in the third of children that got to age 40, defining the odds and becoming successful and happy, there was a direct correlation with where those children felt their locus of control was. Those that sensed that they were in the driving seat, rather than their circumstances dictating where their life went, did well. I know it's tempting to use our circumstances as something to blame for our life going in the wrong direction, but once you can see that you're no longer being pushed in that direction anymore, you're actually just walking down the same path out of habit, then you can stop and look for the path next to it and walk that way instead and create new expectations by setting new goals. Realistic goals. Achievable goals, that's another thing they picked up in the Kaua'i study. The resilient adults had set themselves goals throughout their life, realistic educational and work life goals. And they weren't huge, but they were big enough to be challenging. And so we're good enough to lead them in the right direction, so that they were less likely to fail at them. We wanna practise resilience, not practise failing. Being resilient doesn't mean you are good at failing. That's not gonna make you feel good. Resilience is practising dealing with the challenges. So that if things do go wrong, you've got a good habit of talking to yourself in a respectful way so that you can pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and put it down to experience. You can learn from it that way, then. Especially if you talk about it, and I know as a psychotherapist it might seem that I'm a bit biassed saying that talking about your problems helps. But if it didn't, then I'd be doing something else. Like I so often say, it's good to look at alternatives to your beliefs and look for evidence that you're wrong, not just right. To combat what we call confirmation bias. So I do, I look for articles about the different ways of boosting wellbeing just in case there's something better than what I'm already doing. And in the meta-analysis in all the studies, it's quite rare for talking about things to not have a positive impact, whether that's with a therapist or a friend. There was a study at the University of Bedfordshire in 2016 with 351 student nurses, which was designed to examine the links between what they called emotional labour and emotional exhaustion. So these are nurses working in quite literally life or death situations for people. So there's a lot of difficulties, a lot of stress. They found that the nurses who had emotional support and could vent their emotions were less likely to be emotionally exhausted than those that didn't. I know it sounds obvious, but they'll still keep on doing these studies to make sure that we are not blowing smoke up people's arses unnecessarily, which it seems astonishing to believe. But as a medical treatment blowing smoke up the arse was still going on when scientists first accurately measured the speed of light. We were smart enough as a species to do that, but at the same time, doctors were literally blowing tobacco smoke up someone's backside and feeding them mercury as a way of maintaining health. So we'll keep on investigating just in case we're wrong, so that we know what's a good idea or not. Turns out it's still a good idea to vent your problems with someone. And look, I know I'm gonna sound self-serving, saying this is a therapist, but talking to someone about a difficult experience, whether that's a professional or just a mate who's good at listening, it does something specific that's worth understanding. 'cause it's not just about getting it off your chest. What it does is it lowers the emotional charge of the memory of the experience you're talking about. It's like, you know when you've been carrying something really heavy for a long time and someone else takes one end of it? The thing itself hasn't changed. It's still just as heavy, but now you can actually move with it. That's what talking does. It doesn't make the thing smaller, it just makes it less likely to stop you in your tracks when it comes up again, which it will. But next time you'll have a bit more left in the tank to deal with it. It's one thing to be able to handle the rubbish that life can throw at us sometimes, but you need to know that you can so that you don't fear obstacles to any progress you wanna make in life. I'll leave all this with you for now. I'll be back on Friday with a five minute bonus episode of course, and I'm on Patreon every Monday with a full length episode. The one today, if you're listening to this as this comes out, will follow on quite nicely from this actually, 'cause it's about acceptance. So come and join me on Patreon if you fancy it, let's keep your mental health topped up, shall we? Have a super week and I'll speak to you again soon folks. Bye for now.