253 - Resilience and Overcoming Obstacles: More Tools!
Resiliency is quite a common topic these days, especially considering current political climates, the state of the actual climate, and worldwide poverty and war. Thankfully, there is a plethora of scientific research that has been done on the topic of resilience, and it’s been discovered that being resilient is ever-changing, and can be learned through experience and work.
Throughout this episode we touch on some ways to increase resiliency in your own life from the Greater Good Magazine, including:
Change the narrative
Face your fears
Practice self-compassion
Meditation
Cultivate forgiveness
Give the full episode a listen to learn detailed ways about how to work towards increasing your own resilience. It’s a quality most of us already possess, and having more tools in your toolbox to increase it can only benefit you!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about resilience in relationships and in life. Difficulty is all around us whether it's in the form of the death of a loved one, a loss of a job, or the end of a relationship. Our ability to get through this challenging times is incredibly important, and this is a huge topic so we'll give a brief overview in this episode, but we'll talk about resilience as a psychological term, how to gain resilience in your own life and some caveats around the topic, and just sort of some more wholesome take home Multiamory messages for you.
Emily: Wholesome, take home Multiamory messages.
Dedeker: Is that what we do on this show?
Jase: Apparently. Right, Emily?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: It is now.
Emily: We're the most wholesome ever.
Dedeker: We're fortified with vitamins and minerals.
Emily: Now, I love it. This is an interesting topic. It came to me first from a different podcast. Just somebody talking about it and obviously, we hear about the word "resilience" just in everyday life, but it's not necessarily something that I thought it was like a psychological thing that people did a lot of studies on. When you look into it, there's just tons and tons of studies, and tons of things out there about resilience.
I think it's very important to people especially right now with things like climate change, even our economic disparity becoming bigger and bigger, and then things like, I don't know, just in this country, we have a rough president, a rough time right now with that.
Dedeker: Sometimes things are rough.
Emily: Yes, for sure. It feels like a lot of things are a little rough right now just in the world.
Dedeker: Also before you all researched this episode, when you said the word "resilience", what did you think?
Jase: What came to mind?
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Well, this isn't fair because I did learn some stuff about this already in the positive psychology course that I did. This is one of those.
Dedeker: They talk about resilience a lot in positive psychology.
Jase: Yes, exactly. I've already kind of knew, but I did want to think about this question of like, "What's the definition of the word?" You know what, we didn't even look that up, but right now resilience is like the ability of something to take a strain and not break, right?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Like you're looking physically of like a resilient, what? Sword or resilient building?
Emily: Yes, resilient anything.
Dedeker: I think of like waterproof coating on something.
Jase: Interesting.
Dedeker: That's the image that comes to mind for some reason.
Jase: To me, the images about like bending and not breaking. Like bending and coming back to its original shape.
Emily: Interesting. I think that's just what I thought about resilience. I thought about myself as a resilient person because I'd heard the word being tossed around so much just in relation to humans and to those out there who can bounce back from something that was difficult in their lives.
Jase: I just looked up the definition here and it's either the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, which is kind of what we're talking about in this episode, but the second definition is actually, I was quite close, the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape like elasticity.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: Nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience.
Emily: All right. Yes. Nylon. Is that something that you use when you rock climbing?
Jase: Like nylon ropes and stuff like that?
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Jase: I think so.
Emily: I think so, yes.
Dedeker: You do?
Jase: I think so.
Emily: I believe so, yes.
Jase: I'm sure there's many materials now.
Emily: Somebody out there will tell us that we're wrong, but yes, and that seems potentially right. We read this New Yorker article and they really like what it had to say here. It said, "If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges, do you succumb or do you surmount?" That's interesting.
This article talks a lot about different research that was done on the subject specifically on kids. That I think is an interesting point that some people do grow up very privileged I guess. I mean, even us in the United States in a lot of instances grow up very privileged in comparison to the other countries. I think that, that something to think about here.
Dedeker: It is interesting that there is a huge body of research out there specifically on resilience as a phenomenon which is what makes it so interesting, and especially a lot of research on kids. Like, "Why are some kids more resilient than others?" I know that I definitely just speaking anecdotally, seeing some kid- Some friends of mine when they were kids growing up like extremely privileged, and then as soon as they hit the real world, they just kind of fall apart.
That is an interesting thing. There's a lot of research kind of trying to track. Like, "Is it based on being exposed to more suffering or more hardships early on, things that gets built up, or things like that?" The interesting thing that we can see from the research is the fact that resilience itself is something that does change over the course of one's life. It is ever-changing constantly, and also that it's a learned skill. They found a lot of studies specifically with kids that like resilience for the skill picked up from parents and from the adults around them as well.
Jase: Also, in the studies, they found it could be taught. Like taught in the classroom even which is quite interesting.
Emily: Yes, and that's really interesting.
Jase: It's not just that like, "Yes, you can learn it, maybe, I don't know, through your parents or something," but it's like, "No." They've actually been researchers who have focused on, "How can we teach this?" Like, "How can we help people learn to be more resilient?" That's what I think is really interesting about this field of research, right?
Emily: Yes. The study in The New Yorker talked about how these kids, they ask a bunch of teachers like, "Okay, which kids do you see out there that have really hard times at home?" They could immediately come up with those kids, and then they would ask, "Okay. Of those kids, which ones do you still feel like, do you really want in a school and have a really good time?" Are still like, "Okay," and seem together regardless of what is going on in their lives.
I guess it took them a little bit longer to think of that, but then they were able to, and those with the kids that they followed throughout their studies. They were longitudinal studies, I think until the kids were about 30 years old. That's pretty cool.
Dedeker: What did they find?
Emily: Again, it did change over time, based on, if the stress or it just became- there were so many over many, many years that your resilience can wane because of that. How do you deal with things just happening over and over again in your life that are so difficult? Yes, it can be learned and can be changed over time.
Jase: Right, and the people who- anytime a bad thing would happen at one point in their life and they would just fall apart and had a really hard time bouncing back from it. Then later in their life, they found that other experiences they would be able to bounce back from, and so it did it would kind of change over their life. That was interesting too.
Emily: Yes. Definitely. I think about this a lot because I had a friend who I think grew up very similar to me, like in a really nice school in Tucson and have loving parents and stuff and yet she became a drug addict and died of her own overdose when she was 23. I feel like we grew up with similar privilege and I obviously didn't see every single thing that happened in her life all the time, but I still, it has always been like a big question in my life how the two of us diverted so heavily. I know that resilience isn't the only factor by any means, but it is potentially one.
Dedeker: Well, something that seems important to highlight thinking about that example is at least what I've seen in reading resilience theory in research and stuff like that, is that resilience, it's the way that researchers tend to talk about it is it's not just like a personal trait. It's not just like you personally have resilience or you don't, that it also bleeds over into what your context is. Like, "Do you have resiliency building factors such as a support network?"
Emily: Exactly.
Dedeker: An adult in your life who is telling you that they love you or is someone at school telling you that you can succeed. That it's not just about-
Emily: It's not only internal, it's external too.
Dedeker: That it is also kind of like there's a more complex factor that is not just an internal trait, but also that depends on the context that's around you as well.
Emily: Yes, absolutely.
Dedeker: Whether it's fostering that within you.
Emily: That's a really good point.
Jase: Right. Yes. That is a good way to segue into this next section where we do want to talk about the dark side of resilience research or some caveats here.
Emily: Yes. There was a really interesting New York Times article, but actually The New Yorker article referenced, it's just talking specifically about caveats of resilience. This was a really interesting quote. It said it is indistinguishable from classic American bootstrap logic when it is applied to individuals placing all the burden of success and failure on a person's character. I don't exactly agree with that, but it is an interesting thing to think about.
Dedeker: If we look at resilience as just a character trait, and that's it.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: The same way we look at kindness or maybe discernment or something like that.
Emily: Sure, and loyalty.
Dedeker: Yes, that then it can bear some uncomfortable resemblance to bootstrap theory.
Jase: Yes. Well, I think that what this person is getting at is this idea that when it's applied to other individuals. When we use it to blame people for whatever has been bad in their life, and that's where it becomes really problematic. I'm not saying that the researchers are doing this, but unfortunately, because the research has been so promising, a lot of people have been like, "Wow, yes, this is a fact," and jumped on it and then turned it into this.
Emily: Yes. Specifically, this article gets into the fact that people of color at Yale University, there were a bunch of things happening like racism in Yale during the time when this article was written. These students got a lot of backlash for speaking up and being angry about the things that were happening to them. People were saying like, "Oh, well. You go to Yale. You have so much privilege. How can you be sitting there being upset about these things that are happening kind of thing."
That The New Yorker article is essentially saying that's bullshit. The fact that these kids want to say, "This is not okay," and stand up for themselves that's being shown as an incorrect thing to do, or that they don't have resilience because they're not just dealing with it and taking it.
Dedeker: Well, what it makes me think of is if I can call back to the beginning of the episode where we're talking about what we thought of originally when you say the word "resilience" is that for me, actually, for most of my life, when I think of the word "resilience", I think of just battening down the hatches and just powering through. I like that you brought up Jase the idea that it's like something that bends. It doesn't break, but then comes back.
I think that's a really, really important distinction to make philosophically and visually, I guess as well. That it's not just about battening down the hatches and like not making a fuss and not saying anything and not complaining and not being angry and keeping the status quo that there is the bend there, there is the effect there. Of course, you're going to feel the effects of this terrible negative thing that's happened and you should, but then it's the process of coming back from that and bouncing back.
Emily: Yes, they were saying essentially just, "Well, millennials, they're not resilient because they've been given the honorary prize or whatever."
Dedeker: They caught them calling us on our racism.
Emily: Well, exactly. Which is like, "Okay, Boomer bullshit."
Jase: Well, yes. I think that that's sort of the point. The other point of that article was that someone can look and go, "Oh, you're complaining. You're not resilient. That means you're not going to be successful. You need to get your shit together." If you actually look at it a little bit differently, it's like actually the courage it takes to speak up about something shows resiliency. Being able to do that is the resilient thing, not just taking it, lying down and not saying something.
Again, I think that the takeaway message here is just that this is something people can confuse for bad. It can be used as a way, just like I think the whole power of positive thinking movement has done where it makes hardship in your life your own fault. While maybe that could be empowering for a person when applying it to themselves, it's really shitty when you're then applying that to someone else and saying, "Well, this is your own fault because you didn't believe it and receive it and achieve it enough," or, "It's your fault because you're not resilient enough," or whatever.
I did want to read this quote actually from Maria Kournikova who's the one who wrote The New Yorker article that we that started this whole dream. She says, "In recent years, we've taken to using the term sloppily, but our sloppy usage doesn't mean that it hasn't been usefully and precisely defined. It's time we invest the time and energy to understand what resilience really means."
She's basically making the point of like, "Yes, people are using this as a shitty thing, but that doesn't mean we have to abandon the whole thing because it is something that's being researched and has shown a lot of promise." Also, I did want to mention real quick. I'm blanking on her first name right now, but Duckworth.
Dedeker: Angela Duckworth.
Jase: Angela Duckworth. Thank you. Angela Duckworth, who does a lot of research on grit.
Emily: What's the difference there?
Jase: Basically--
Dedeker: Grit's better with cheese.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I really want some grits now with some gravy.
Jase: Yes, it sounds really tasty. I do love grits.
Emily: I don't know.
Jase: Resiliency is basically the ability to bounce back from a traumatic thing and grit is basically sticking through something even when it's hard. It's like they're related, but a little bit different.
Emily: Interesting, but they're not quite the same thing.
Jase: Grit's also called "sticktoitiveness". It's also one of these things that in research has been shown to be really promising with students and things like that, but again, there's this dark side of it, where some schools in California are actually now putting grit tests on their standardized tests and stuff.
Dedeker: What? How?
Jase: Because it's been shown to be this measure of success, and so they're doing awful shit. Actually, Angela Duckworth has spoken out about like, "That's not what this is for." Like, "Yes, include this in your curriculum to teach kids how to be gritty, but do not test on this. This is not what this is about."
Dedeker: How do you even?
Jase: Oh, she's got a test on her website. You can take it.
Dedeker: No, that's great. I just mean like, how do you put that onto a standardized test?
Jase: You do those sorts of questions. You do like a psychological evaluation for grit.
Emily: That's very strange.
Jase: I think it's actually hugely problematic to use it as a testing factor. Rather it's just something that teaches kids to help them.
Emily: Yes, and then you're going to get a grade on it? Are you kidding me? What?
Jase: It determines what schools you could get into or something.
Emily: I don't like that at all.
Jase: There's a dark side to all of this.
Emily: Definitely.
Jase: It sucks because both things in that research can be very useful when applied well and I think one of the things we say a lot on our show is, "Take these things and apply them for yourself. Don't weaponize them against other people."
Dedeker: Please don't.
Emily: Yes, exactly. We just wanted to have a special consideration for people of color regarding all of this and people in specific situations. Again, maybe outside of the ones that the three of us live in, we're White-passing all of us and we definitely grew up in a very specific way that maybe was a lot easier than other people's challenges. I do think that given all of this and there has been some research out there regarding like people in South Africa or Somali or other places, refugees, these things are not necessarily measured in the same way. That is something to think about and people who are people who are neurodivergent, any of those, it may apply in some other capacity, so just to be aware of that as well.
Jase: That the research isn't really doing the job of studying those populations.
Emily: It's really not. Exactly. It's like kids here in America or kids in Europe or whatever.
Dedeker: Maybe a different scale of resiliency.
Emily: Exactly. Maybe some that do have challenges and hardships, but there are different scales here. Definitely think about that because this isn't going to apply to everyone by any means.
Dedeker: Well, I really liked it when we interviewed Ruby Booey. It's just her saying very plainly that it's like people who are neurodivergent or who have mental illness or mental differences already are resilient. I think that that's also part of the stigma around mental health is seeing it also as a personal failing. You're depressed and you couldn't get under control as you're not resilient.
Emily: Yes, exactly. That's the scary part of this word to me is that maybe somebody wouldn't find themselves to be resilient simply because depression is in their life at all times. Does that mean that I'm not resilient anytime?
Dedeker: Right. Does that mean that it's your fault because you don't have high resilience? Which is not necessarily the case. I really liked that-- Actually, I was reading positivepsychology.com specifically tackles resiliency. They just say straight out, we're just going start saying most people are resilient. It's not a special thing. It's not a special glittery thing that you have to aspire to. It's like most people are resilient and have resilience. I like coming at it from that perspective as well.
Jase: Yes. We're going to get into what are some ways that you can build more resilience in your own life. Yes, I think that's a great place to start from is just that like, we're all resilient and just in the same way that we all have muscles, we all have a brain, those are things that we can train to be a little bit stronger. It's not like you don't have them. It's not like its on or off. It's just you are resilient or you're not. It's like, "Now, okay, this is a thing we all have. How can we get a little better at it? How can we help ourselves to whether things that happen in our lives as best as we can?" With that, we're going get started on how we can learn to be more resilient.
Emily: Let's do it.
Dedeker: We found this great list inside Greater Good magazine.
Jase: Greater Good.
Emily: Greater Good.
Dedeker: Which is published by UC Berkeley, actually. They have a list of five suggestions for practices to help build resiliency. The first one is, what they call changing the narrative. Before we dive into exactly what that entails, we need to talk about rumination. What do you all know about rumination?
Jase: I know that rumination is when you think overall the shitty things that have happened and all the things you're upset about, or all the things you've done wrong. That's what I know it is. Is that accurate?
Emily: Yes, I know that it happens with people who have PTSD or OCD, because a very good friend of mine ruminates and has both of those things as well. He's a survivor of PTSD.
Dedeker: It's what cows do, that's where it comes from.
Jase: Oh, really, when they take up their food and they eat it again.
Dedeker: When they say that an animal is ruminant, that really means is that, like a cow, they eat the grass, they chew it up in their mouth, they swallow it, and then it comes back up again later and then they chew on it again. That's where that comes from. Rumination.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: Wow. Sometimes my dog ruminates.
Dedeker: I don't think he's meant to be ruminating.
Jase: Yes, I don't think he's supposed to be.
Emily: I've definitely seen Henry do the same thing.
Dedeker: Animals are gross, even though we love that.
Emily: We're animals, though.
Dedeker: As far as it applies to humans, it's the process of repetitively or endlessly-- you can be reliving an event in your head. You can be rehashing a conversation. You can have repetitive thoughts. Often, it's unproductive thoughts as well. It's different from processing and thinking about something and working it out. Often, it's unproductive, just like rehashing and reprocessing, rechewing, as it were of something in your head. Often, that can be a symptom of PTSD, OCD, and things like that.
Even outside of that, your normal average everyday person will still have rumination. Rumination happens. Definitely, if you've experienced some trauma or some difficult times or things that are extra stressful for you right now, it can be really easy to get into that mode of just thinking about it constantly, which I think makes sense because the way that our brains work, is that it's like this radar system that's constantly scanning the landscape, trying to see if anything that's going to hurt us is coming down the pipe, essentially.
Sometimes that instinct that our brains have caused us to constantly have to think about a situation. I've seen this a lot with clients, like, if their partner's going out for a date for the first time, they're like, "I just can't stop thinking about what's going to happen, or how's it going to be when they get home? Or is it going to go terrible? Or is it going to go good? Or how am I gonna feel," just constantly thinking about that and just ruminating on it.
The best thing about this list is all these things are research-backed. There's research that found that, specifically, rumination can be combated by expressive writing. In other words, free writing about a specific topic, the topic that's on your mind for at least 20 minutes. There's a lot of other research that talks about how 20 to 25 minutes is like this magical amount of time when it comes to your brain, and how it processes things and your focus on things like that. There's a 1988 study that found that participants who practiced-
Emily: 32-years?
Dedeker: I know. A long time ago. They found that participants who practiced expressive writing for four days were healthier six weeks later, and still happier even three months later as well.
Emily: Well, for just four days.
Jase: Anytime studies find stuff like that, where the effects last, I guess that they aren't just right when you study it.
Emily: That's cool.
Jase: It's cool.
Dedeker: There's some theories about why this works. People theorize that writing and doing expressive exploratory writing, where you're really getting into your deepest thoughts and feelings about this particular topic, it forces you to not only get those thoughts outside of your head. It's literally the act of all this stuff bouncing around in my brain, now I put it down on the page. It forces you to confront and organize each idea one at a time, and reframe it all outside of you, and help you to process a struggle or a stressor or a trauma in a different way than what's going on just internally.
Jase: I've heard before of a thinking exercise, where if you think about the thoughts in your head as you close your eyes and you visualize them, and it can feel like they're just like whizzing by, like they're spinning around you.
Dedeker: It always feels like a beehive to me when I do that. Minimal thought bees.
Jase: Mine is like a filmstrip roll that goes by fast. Anyway, it's just consciously, specifically thinking of that slowing down and looking at each piece individually and putting it away or something like that. I have found, though, that for me, writing stuff down like this is probably the best way to do that. Even if I'm in a place where I can't do that, I will try sometimes to do this visualization thing of like, take each thing and I think it's like putting it in a box and setting it aside. It's still there if I need it, but I'm going to set it aside. I don't have to be thinking about it right now, things like that.
I do find that idea of just writing something down, it's like it locks it in time, so it can't just be buzzing around. It's like now it's trapped physically, so it's a little more in control. There's also something called finding silver linings, which is also listed on the Berkeley site in the Greater Good magazine. This is an exercise that invites you to call to mind an upsetting experience, and then try to list three positive things about it.
For example, you might reflect on fighting with a friend and how that brought some important issues out into the open. I think this one is great when applied to partners too, to apply to our romantic relationships. It allows you to learn something about their point-of-view. Maybe it's actually there had to be a fight that got you there. It's like, "Hey, that is still a positive thing."
In a 2014 study, they found that doing this practice daily for three weeks helped participants become more engaged with life afterward, it decreased their pessimism over time. It wasn't true for group members who just wrote about them, but it was true for the ones who wrote about it and have tried to come up with these positive things that decreased pessimism and made them, in some cases, even less depressed.
The effects did wear off after two months, suggesting that it is something we have to do regularly. It's not just a one-time fix. "Okay now, I don't have to worry about that."
Dedeker: One time for the one event. That makes sense.
Jase: I think that sometimes people can be very resistant to these types of things of like, "Whoa, well, look for the silver lining. What's the good thing that happened in this." It's just like, "No, I'm upset. Fuck you." I think that's a very valid feeling too. Again, this isn't something for us to weaponize against other people. For yourself, if you're able to, even if the positive thing is like, "Well, I got to eat some chocolate cake because I was upset." Eat some chocolate cake.
Emily: That's something. For sure.
Jase: Even if it just seems like this is ridiculous that this is my silver lining, it still helps to think that way.
Emily: When writing it down, it's something that you can potentially go back to. I know when I came to China again the second time, my internet didn't work and I was really upset about a lot of things. Then I wrote down like, "Check yourself before you wreck yourself," kind of thing because it is important to realize the good that you have and moments that are potentially really challenging right then, that you can look at the bigger picture.
This next one is a little scary. Face your fears. Definitely, I don't know. Exposure there, I've always been like, "What, like, really? Exposure therapy?" This is basically the practice of exposing yourself little by little to the things that scare you, either self-directed or with the help of a professional. The help of a professional would be a good thing in these instances.
Dedeker: It really depends on the scale. If it's something like, "Oh, I feel a little bit scared about public speaking," it was the example they gave in an article, versus, "I have extreme fear of spiders, to the point where I lock up and have a full trauma response," it's like, maybe that's what the help of a professional. I think it depends on the scale.
Jase: Yes, absolutely.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. There have been several studies since the '80s, that have found exposure therapy to be really effective, especially for things like PTSD. Again, PTSD, I'd be like, "I don't know." I guess this is a good thing and that's fine. For PTSD I would worry that would be very traumatic.
Jase: Well, again, this is with professionals guiding this and helping this.
Emily: Exactly.
Jase: I actually on one of my flights a few months ago, I was flying back from Japan to the US and I was seated next to a guy and we got talking and he works for a nonprofit that specifically uses tech to help people in basically like war torn countries.
Emily: Oh, wow.
Jase: One of the things that they do is specifically using VR as a way of this type of exposure therapy for children in countries who have PTSD from this and using VR as a way to essentially like in a very controlled environment allow the reliving of certain things or of certain stimulus to a certain extent, but it's in control because it's VR. Right?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: You can turn it off-
Emily: VR is pretty scary though. It can be.
Jase: Yes. Well, yes and I think it's super interesting though. He's like, yes, it's not something a lot of people think of when you think of like humanitarian work, but it involves like cryptocurrency and VR and stuff like that. It has been shown to be very powerful.
Emily: I thought you were going to say that like there was a guy exposing himself to his fear of flying on the flight and that was what was happening and I was like, "Yikes."
Jase: That is also an example of exposure therapy on just a day to day basis. It doesn't all have to be about suffering from huge trauma. It can also just be about your fear of talking to strangers or your fear of disclosing your STI status or right. This like all sorts of things that this could apply to.
Dedeker: I have like two examples from my personal life of this facing your fears in order to gain more resiliency/some exposure therapy. There's like the high stakes one and the low stakes one. Low stakes being just that for years I've been learning Japanese. It had like this extreme fear of actually speaking it really quite honestly, like just-
Emily: You wouldn't notice-
Dedeker: You wouldn't notice now, but I was convinced because most of my language learning growing up, like I just didn't get good training in speaking these languages. I was just convinced that I was just bad when it came to the speaking portion of learning languages. I was good at reading and writing and then bad at the speaking portion. I was just like really scared of having to.
For me, my self-directed exposure to that fear was do things like, "Okay, I'm going to book like a conversation lesson with a tutor that's only like 15 minutes long," and then I just have to live through 15 minutes and then it's going to be okay. Doing that over enough time and gradually increasing the amount of time until eventually then it's super comfortable. Well, Japanese is never super comfortable never mind, but is more comfortable.
Emily: Fairly comfortable.
Dedeker: To speak for long periods of time and it's really transformed my sense of confidence in the language and my skill and stuff like that. That's kind of like the how day to day example of this, but the more serious example is like my own work in therapy with my own PTSD. There's a lot of types of therapy that take advantage of this exposure effect.
Weather is literally something like, I mean I think I've seen a video of people with arachnophobia using VR also actually to help tackle that. Often a lot of exposure therapy is just about getting you more comfortable with just thinking about the thing and that like the thought of what happened doesn't spin you out into like a full PTSD response, and it's like walking you through very gently coming back to the thing, and even thinking about it or talking about a little bit, and just slowly over time making it feel a little bit more normalized. I would say that as far as that goes, I don't know. I feel like it helped the Japanese resiliency and my trauma resilience.
Emily: That's good.
Jase: All right. The third thing on this list now after changing the narrative and facing your fears is to practice self compassion.
Emily: Also challenging.
Dedeker: Also extremely challenging.
Jase: I struggle with this one a lot.
Dedeker: Yes. When tough shit happens in life, it's really easy to feel lonely, to feel like you're the only person going through it or feel like you're struggling alone. Also to have feelings like shame or anger or frustration or sometimes those things can all be self-directed as well. The idea behind this is that self-compassion can combat these feelings and also make it just a little bit easier to weather the hard times.
In one study, there were participants that were in an eight week mindful self compassion program and they reported having more mindfulness and life satisfaction, with lower depression, lower anxiety and lower stress afterward, compared to people who didn't participate. The interesting thing is that the benefits of that lasted up to an entire year.
Emily: That's great.
Jase: Yes. Wow. In terms of a way that you can do this yourself, like you can do that exercise for yourself. This is the self-compassion break or a counter spell as we like to call it because of the relationship anarchy manifesto. Is step one, without judgment or analysis notice what you're feeling. For example, I'm feeling sad or I'm suffering right now. This is painful. This is stressful, right? Just notice what it is.
Then step two is remind yourself that you're not alone. Many others have suffered in this way or we all struggle. Everybody poops. I mean everybody suffers. There are other people who have gone through something like this. Then step three is to give yourself kindness. Put your hand on your chest or hug yourself or some other kind of self soothing and say may I be peaceful, may I be patient, may I go easy on myself and that's it. Super simple. What do we think? Have you ever done anything like this? Like this type of self-soothing exercise?
Emily: No.
Dedeker: You haven't Emily?
Emily: Probably not.
Dedeker: I definitely have. Yes. Well, this is very similar to some Metta meditation in like Metta is like a loving kindness meditation, but you always start with yourself.
Emily: Oh, interesting.
Dedeker: Is the thing like before you-
Emily: That was more external-
Dedeker: No, but before you can offer message to anybody else, like you start with yourself. That's very much a foundational part of the practice and usually like the hardest one.
Emily: Yes. Sure.
Jase: Totally.
Dedeker: Usually the most difficult one, but I think that there's something to this that like when you do this it can feel fake in the moment, but I think that's okay. I think it's okay just taking a break and just getting into that space and just saying these things to yourself. Eventually with time and repetition, it does help. It does help to ease things a little bit. It does help even if feel like everyone else is attacking you or everyone else's is dragging you down that you're not also doing that to yourself at the same time.
Emily: Yes. That's good.
Jase: Well, so a visualization for this one, like a visual metaphor. I don't know what I'm trying to say. A metaphor for this one that I've heard before that really resonated with me was if you think about sometimes the negative things that you'll say to yourself and that who we're saying this to is this inner child part of ourselves, and essentially is to imagine, say if you were in a group of people and there was a child there.
If you imagined the other people in that group saying the things you say to yourself, to your inner child, to that child, how mad you would be, actually be like, "What the hell is wrong with you people? Stop that." You would come in and stand up and be like, "What's wrong with you?" Yes, we do that to ourselves. We do that to our own inner child. To put that in perspective of like, "Hey, let's not beat up on this this inner part of ourselves."
Emily: Yes, totally.
Dedeker: Something I also really like about this exercise is the practice of reminding yourself that you're not alone. Reminding yourself that I'm not the first person to go through this. Chances are you're not, it's actually very rare that you would be the first person to go through whatever struggle you're going through or whatever stress you're going through.
I like that not as a means to try to minimize what you're going through or discard what you're going through, but again, just as a bolstering effect of like, "Oh yes, I'm not alone in this. There's other people even other people that I know who've also gone through this thing that I'm going through right now, whether it's loss of a job or death or a breakup or something like that."
Emily: There is a caveat to all of those. Just don't interpret this one as a saying that you just need self-compassion in order to get through a shitty situation and be complacent, instead do things like take action, speak up, dump the dick. I don't know. Asshole whomever. Fight the man. Yes. Be kind to yourself at the same time though with all of this is, that is important and something that's very challenging for me. I know when you were talking about that I was getting teared up.
Dedeker: Oh, why?
Emily: Something I can be better at.
Jase: Maybe I'll do some self compassion exercises after this.
Dedeker: Sounds great.
Jase: I think the other caveat here is that this also isn't saying that you have to let yourself off the hook for doing anything bad. It's like, no, you could still acknowledge like, "Yes, I did screw that up. I screwed that up. I was mean, I was selfish. I was dishonest." Whatever it is, but being compassionate at the same time. By being kind to yourself doesn't mean you're just going to go do those things again. There's a difference between self-compassion and just saying, "Oh, whatever. I don't need to care." I also want to point out that little caveat there.
Emily: For sure.
Dedeker: Definitely. Let's keep going through this list. Our first one was changing the narrative. Second was facing your fears this last one was practicing self compassion. Now the next one on this list is meditation. Now, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this-
Jase: We have a whole episode about it.
Dedeker: Yes, I know. Just know that there's a huge body of research that shows the benefits of meditation especially the benefits of meditation regarding resiliency, your ability to bounce back from difficult things or stressful things. The main takeaway I want people to have is because I feel like now in 2019 or 2020 now that it is, that as soon as you say the word "meditation", people are like, "Oh yes, whatever."
I had the Headspace app for two months and then never did it and yada, yada, yada, yada. It's just that do your research, read books, join a class and find the technique that works for you. It doesn't necessarily have to look like sitting on a mat for half an hour every morning. It doesn't have to look like that. It doesn't even have to look like a regular meditation practice, honestly.
It can just look like some meditation techniques or breathing techniques that you do during the day or a meditative visualization that you do during the day. Just like go and find what works for you.
Jase: I want to challenge people on this one actually here. I think that meditation is very misunderstood and I think the reason it's so misunderstood is capitalism.
Emily: I would agree with that.
Jase: I think that the reason why it's so misunderstood is because like someone awhile ago in one of our Patreon discussion groups talked about a study showing that some percentage of people find they're more stressed after meditating instead of less.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: It's like meditation is not for everybody. I want to challenge that because my understanding of meditation through the thousands and thousands of years that it's been a thing. Meditation has never been about relaxing until capitalism tried to sell it.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: Until you're trying to sell an app, you're trying to sell a course, meditation.
Dedeker: Till you tried to sell like here's the escape from you're overworked, horrible, awful busy life.
Jase: Right. In the same way that we sell TV or film or video games or passion or whatever.
Dedeker: It becomes part of the whole wellness industry that's selling us the same shirt.
Jase: That it's being sold as an escape. I would say that actually meditation is the opposite. Meditation takes a lot of courage because it's about sitting and being aware of your thoughts, not escaping from them. I think people really don't get that part of it. I think the best metaphor would be if you did a study that said, "Oh, well, 80% of people found that they were sore after exercising."
Clearly exercising doesn't work for everybody. I think it's more about, if you think of it a little bit more like an exercise, it's not about getting away from all your thoughts, it's about becoming more aware of them and over time becoming more comfortable and being able to better identify your thoughts as they're happening. That then you can do all these other things we talk about doing these different interventions or noticing, "Oh, I'm beating up on myself right now. I should be compassionate to myself." or "Oh, I'm spiraling into this. I should step out of it." That meditation is more like training the muscles of becoming aware of your own mind of what's going on. That was my talk on meditation.
Emily: I love that.
Dedeker: I would agree with that because I don't have anything to add to that, just props.
Jase: There was my talk on meditation.
Dedeker: Don't expect to be super relaxed after meditation.
Jase: No, that's not the point.
Emily: Especially when you do it for like four days in a room for an hour and a half a time.
Jase: I think sometimes people beat themselves up. They're like, I tried meditating and I didn't empty my mind and I didn't feel great afterward. It's like, "No, that's not the point." It's just like working out.
Emily: It's a practice.
Jase: I was sore afterward, I must have screwed up. It's like, "No, that's how it works." It's going to be challenging.
Emily: Okay. The next one is going to be cultivating forgiveness. This is a interesting one as well, also challenging. Forgiveness practices are out there. There is a thing called the nine steps to forgiveness and the eight essentials when forgiving, you can look these both up. They basically just offer a list of guidelines to follow. In both cases, you're going to begin clearly acknowledging what happened, including how it feels and how it's affecting your life right now, and then you make this commitment to forgive, which means letting go of resentment and ill will for your own sake.
Forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean letting the offender off the hook or even reconciling with them, but it is letting go of this resentment which is a powerful thing in and of itself. Maybe being able to be resentful is also powerful, but I think over time, I don't know, there's not very many people that I hold grudges for. Maybe a couple.
Dedeker: The hard thing is I feel like this starts to run also into a language issue. First of all, I do think that forgiveness as a concept is not very prioritized in our culture. It's not very valued in our culture right now for probably some justifiable reasons, but this starts to run into a language issue where there's so many different ways that forgiveness can look like letting go of resentment like no longer harboring ill will, or people interpret it to mean that it does mean letting someone off the hook, or reconciling with them, or we all pretend like it never happened.
Some of those are good things, some of those are bad things depending on the situation. There may be some situations in your life, maybe in your romantic partnership or partnerships where it's like, I do let you off the hook and we agree like, "Okay, let's just continue forward with some compassion and grace and pretend that this never happened." If it's a small thing versus some situations where you shouldn't let somebody off the hook, but maybe it is beneficial for you to come to a place eventually of healing and letting go of ill will and resentment and stuff like that.
I just think that right now, forgiveness as a concept because so many people equate it, like automatically means that you just pretend that everything's fine or automatically means you have to reconcile with the person who abused you or whatever, when it's like forgiveness, I think can mean different things and fit into different situations differently.
Emily: Yes. Maybe even forgiving yourself for you being a part of the situation at all things, that's very powerful in and of itself as well.
Dedeker: Definitely. Yes. I have a friend that I grew up with, who we grew up together in church and long story short, like basically not a few years after I left church, it came out that she was basically being groomed and abused by our youth pastor. No, really terrible. Of course, the way that the Christian Church reacted to it was also really terrible, like did not center her or her experience or anything like that. Treated her as complicit.
She spent several years in all different therapy, intensive therapy getting over this, but she's also a really wonderful writer and she writes about it publicly and she has like really amazing things to say on the topic of forgiveness because for her, again, growing up in the Christian Church and the Christian Church was so much like, forgive, forgive, forgive. We're forgiven by God or by Christ, and so you need to forgive anyone else and her being like, "No, this is bullshit. I can't just pretend like nothing happened", but for her, the process of forgiveness, she ties it to this idea of like when you forgive someone, it's like you're forgiving their debt.
Someone owes you a bunch of money and you decide to forgive their debt, but before you can forgive the debt, sometimes it's going to take time to actually tally up what the debt is and sometimes that's not immediately clear to you when you're a week out from someone hurting you or six months out from something hurting you or five years out from someone hurting you. It's like what the debt actually is changes to a certain extent.
The process of forgiveness of being able to let go of that resentment is also going to change over time which I thought was really interesting. I think that forgiveness is not just this like one and done thing, that it's more complex fluid process in my opinion. I don't know what how you all think.
Emily: I love that.
Jase: Well, I think that something to focus on here is that the forgiveness, the point of this and the reason why it's on this list is about yourself, is making your experience less bad or ideally eventually good. It's not about like whether or not that person should be punished or whether or not you should leave that person if this is a bad or whatever it is. It's not about that. It's about your experience.
In the research on this one, the testing is basically doing this type of forgiveness versus the other alternatives which is ruminating like we talked about before, ruminating on negative feelings or just repressing them, not acknowledging them at all. They found that cultivating compassion led the participants to report more empathy, more positive emotions and more feelings of control, which I think is interesting because I think also sometimes you just got to forgive them seems like, "Oh well, I'm giving up all my power of control and that actually they found more control." In this case, the victims, this is the outcome for them is more positive emotions, more feeling of control, regardless of how we feel about the offenders here.
Emily: I mean at least then you have your control of your emotions regarding the thing that happened, or just how you view it in general. It's like I have control over what I think of the situation and how it's going to affect my life.
Jase: Just that this is about how to make your experience less awful on a day to day basis after something bad has happened, rather than about whether or not that person should be punished or whether or not you should stay with this person or, right. I think that's an important distinction to make here and it goes along with what Dedeker was talking about too.
Dedeker: Yes. Let's review the list. Okay. Again, our list of five ways to gain more resiliency in your life. Changing the narrative, things like expressive writing, finding silver linings, facing your fears, exposing yourself little by little to the things that scare you. Practicing self compassion, meditation and mindfulness and cultivating forgiveness.
Emily: Good list. Things for every everyday life. Not just like this practice, but cultivating forgiveness just in your life and I think meditating and yes, stuff like that. Facing your fears, not just for resilience, but for other moments in your life as well.
Jase: I think that something else that's interesting about this is about how do we measure what success is?
Emily: I have no idea.
Jase: In these studies it's like how well do the kids do in school? Right? Or do kids turn to drugs and violence or not, right? They find some metric. I think that as human beings we're a lot more nuanced than that. There's a lot more options. It's like we talked about in that earlier article about is resiliency speaking up about something bad that's happening or is resiliency not needing to whine about it.
Like these questions where it's not just like this obvious clear, "Oh, well this is good and this is bad." I think that something with all of this to focus on for ourselves is what does our success quote look like. What is that, and focusing on that, like, so for you resiliency might not have to mean starting a company and doing something or getting good grades and going and getting a PhD or something. That doesn't have to be success for you.
That it can be just feeling good on a daily basis or having good positive relationships or making your life be one that's surrounded by positive and good people. There's lots of different ways that your success could look and I think it's just worth spending a little time thinking about that too. Not using someone else's idea of what success is.
Emily: Metric. Sure.
Dedeker: We want to close with a similar frame that we've had on previous episodes which is just don't weaponize this shits. Don't use the concept of resiliency to excuse bad policy or bad behavior. These are tools that can be really powerful when learned, when applied to your own life, when applied to your own struggle. Don't use it as a tool to be an ass to your partners, to the people you love. Don't call them out on being like not resilient people and yada, yada, yada. Just like Emily said, check yourself before you wreck yourself.
All right, so we are going to talk in the bonus about a couple of different resiliency quizzes out there. Some of them solid, some of them more dubious.
Emily: You all were like, "I have skepticism about this," but it is interesting.
Dedeker: You can find more about that if you'd listened to our bonus episode.
Emily: We want to hear what you think about all of this. Do you feel like you are a super resilient person? Do you feel like you have gained resilience over the years?
Jase: I think I'm most interested in all of that. Has it changed? Has it gone up or down?