Developing Resilience

A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach

Michael Neenan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351745321
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Some individuals emerge from grim experiences stronger in mind and spirit than others who suffered the same ordeal. In this updated and revised edition, Michael Neenan focuses on the meanings we attach to life's adversities in order to understand how we respond to them. This is why different people can react to the same adverse event in a variety of ways such as fighting back or crumbling. Different meanings of what constitutes resilience are also discussed and the author takes issue with the simplistic view of it as bouncing back from adversity which suggests the absence of struggle and emotional pain as well as underestimating how long the process of self-righting can sometimes take.

Developing Resilience shows how people can find constructive ways of dealing with hard times by using the ideas and techniques of cognitive behavioural therapy as well as drawing on the viewpoints and experiences of other writers presented here. This book provides useful guidance and advice on topics including:

• managing negative emotions in difficult times

• using an assets and liabilities model to understand resilient behaviour

• distinguishing between what's within and outside of your control

• identifying and changing attitudes that undermine resilience building

• developing self-belief

• increasing your level of frustration tolerance

• maintaining a resilient outlook.

This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about resilience as well as for mental health professionals, coaches and therapists looking for guidance in helping their clients to cope better with adversity.

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Chapter 1

What is resilience?

Introduction

Imagine two people working for the same company at the same level and salary, who both love their jobs. Unfortunately, they lose their jobs when the company goes through a ‘restructuring process’. They both experience initial bitterness and dejection, ‘Those bastards! After all the hard work and loyalty we’ve shown them. Might as well give up when you’ve been kicked in the teeth.’ But then they begin to show significant differences in dealing with job loss in the days and weeks ahead. The first person accepts, without liking it, that his job has gone and commits himself to finding another one. He welcomes support in this endeavour from his family and friends. Eventually, after several attempts, he secures a new job. The salary is lower, but he is glad to be back in work and the chances of promotion are promising. How did he manage to keep on track during this difficult time? ‘I don’t know really. No point in staying miserable. That’s not going to get me a job, is it? You’ve just got to get on with it, haven’t you?’

The second person finds his initial bitterness strengthening. His drinking increases as he broods on the unfairness of what’s happened to him. His wife and children become reluctant to approach him as he snaps at them when they do. He’s envious of his friends who have jobs and avoids their company. Attempts at finding a job are negligible. His wife, when she can summon up enough courage to talk to him, suggests that he should see his GP. ‘I don’t need any help from her! What can she do? She can’t get my old job back which is what I want.’

Why didn’t both men react the same way (e.g. crack-up or fight back)? After all, the event was the same for both of them. A starting point in attempting to understand resilience is to discover the meaning (attitudes and beliefs) that people attach to adverse life events. The first man eventually concluded, ‘No point in staying miserable. You’ve just got to get on with it’, and successfully found himself another job. The second man clung to the idea that ‘I just want my old job back’. Mired in bitterness and helplessness, he avoided looking for a new job. People react differently to the same event depending on how they view it. This underscores the point that there’s always more than one way of seeing events, even if, at times, it’s difficult to discern any other viewpoint than the current one. So being a flexible thinker (or attempting to develop such a mindset), rather than remaining locked into a fixed viewpoint, allows for adaptation to changing (and often unwelcome) circumstances.

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Understanding your interpretation of events

The crucial importance of how our thinking powerfully influences our feelings and actions is the basis of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and will therefore be emphasized throughout this book. Examining our thinking provides an entry point into our inner world, enabling us to discover whether our attitudes are helping, hindering or harming us in our struggle to deal with difficult times. Self-defeating and goal-blocking attitudes are targeted for examination and change. CBT focuses on the psychological and behavioural factors that keep our problems going, unlike some other approaches which concentrate on uncovering the origins of these problems. The reason for this here-and-now focus is that factors linked to the development of a person’s problems usually differ from the factors maintaining them. For example, while it may be true that your parents preferred your older sister to you when growing up, it’s your current thinking about these past events (‘I’ll always be second best in life’) and your associated behaviour (such as not speaking up for yourself when you’ve been unfairly treated) that keep your problems going today. But, due to their ingrained nature, changing beliefs and behaviours can be hard.

Uncovering a person’s attitudes may not reveal straightaway who is demonstrating resilient behaviour in times of misfortune; a snapshot of a particular moment in the struggle may not provide a reliable prediction of who will make it in the longer term and who won’t. Remember that both men were initially bitter and dejected when they lost their jobs because they both had the same view of the situation. If the snapshot had been taken at this point, could you really say which one would start to fight back and which one would give up? Incidentally, if you admire someone for their upbeat and positive attitude, this doesn’t prove they’re resilient as they may not yet have faced hard times and had their character put under the spotlight.

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Showing hardiness in response to present misfortune doesn’t mean you will always be hardy no matter what happens to you. Similarly, falling into despair doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck there forever. Meaning is not static and therefore likely to change depending on how you’re assessing unfolding events. For example, you can keep moving between ‘Why me?’ bafflement, ‘I can’t take much more of this’ despair and ‘Get on with it!’ grit in your time of struggle. As I will argue further on, bouncing back from adversity unrealistically suggests the absence of inner turmoil during this time.

To return to the two men who lost their jobs, flash forward several years and the ‘fighter’ might be receiving psychiatric help following the end of his marriage (‘I can’t cope without her’), while the ‘giver up’ may have his own moderately successful business (‘Deep down, I always wanted my own business, so I thought “give it a try instead of moaning all the time”. I’m glad that I did’).

There’s no education like adversity

Some people can have relatively uneventful lives – no traumas or tragedies – and their characters are not cracked open for inspection, as usually happens when adversity strikes. When it does strike, the education you receive about yourself can be unexpected. You surprise yourself by how well you rise to the challenge of tough times and find unimagined strengths within yourself. Once these times have passed, you take stock of your life and move it in a previously unanticipated direction such as training for a new career.

You despise yourself for acting very badly during these times and are shocked that you were capable of such behaviour. You see your behaviour as unforgivable and unforgettable, yet you try to understand why you fell so far below your moral standards. You’ve never been severely tested like this before and you realize you don’t know yourself as well as you thought. In an attempt to put things right in your mind, you seek to make amends and repair the moral damage by spending some of your time helping others through charity work. But the biggest challenge is how to integrate this period of unforgivable behaviour into a new and complex view of yourself that will never forget what you did (your conscience will continue to prick you), but that doesn’t also imprison you within self-contempt as you struggle to find some measure of self-forgiveness. Your life has also taken you in a previously unanticipated direction.

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With regard to self-forgiveness, some people struggle long and hard to make amends for their wrongdoing and their self-forgiveness is a long time coming. Conversely, other people forgive themselves quickly and easily for their wrongdoing (e.g. ‘I’ve admitted what I did, but now I’m on a journey to becoming a better person’), with the emphasis on the journey and little time spent trying to understand their behaviour and the harmful impact it had on people’s lives.

The mystery of resilience

Resilience is an intriguing yet elusive concept: intriguing because it can provide some kind of answer as to why one person crumbles in the face of tough times while another gains strength from them, but elusive in that the concept resists a definitive definition. Some writers on resilience suggest ‘that we will never completely understand it’ (Coutu, 2003: 18) and that ‘there is little consensus among researchers about the definition and meaning of this concept [despite studying it for the last six decades]’ (Shaikh and Kauppi, 2010: 155). No matter how many books I read on the subject, or how much I reflect on the factors associated with it and speak to people who’ve been through hard times, resilience still remains something of a puzzle to me. Why can one person endure so much suffering and still remain largely optimistic and happy while another person, whose scale of suffering appears much less, retreats into bitterness and victimhood?

Some people who’ve survived grim ordeals reply in a disappointingly brief way when asked how they did it, such as ‘it was there and had to be faced’. They may not be able to explain to themselves in any depth how they got through it, but they also don’t want to manufacture inspiring and heroic stories just to satisfy an eager audience waiting to hear them. So their survival remains something of a mystery to them.

Why resilience is important

The philosopher Tom Morris states that if you live long enough and pay attention to what’s going on around you, ‘you may come to understand one of the deepest truths about life: inner resilience is the secret to outer results in this world. Challenging times demand inner strength and a spirit that won’t be defeated’ (2004: 1). Resilience is the bedrock of positive mental health (Persaud, 2001).

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Bouncing back or coming back from adversity?

The popular view of resilience is bouncing back from adversity. But this bland, feel-good definition reminds me of a childhood toy I had: a blow-up, chest-high figure of Yogi Bear which, when punched, fell to the floor but immediately sprang back to the upright position. Bouncing back depicts a rapid and almost effortless recovery from tough times when, much more often, ‘suffering and struggle are experienced in forging resilience’ (Walsh, 2016: 5). Also, bouncing back from adversity doesn’t automatically transform you into a stronger, wiser, better person as some accounts have it. Some people have very mixed feelings about the outcome of their grim experiences, and would find it difficult to point to evidence of personal growth; for example, feeling glad the experiences are over but also facing the sober reckoning of the physical and psychological toll of their struggle.

If a person can spring back so effortlessly, was it a genuine adversity she actually experienced? Can visiting your cantankerous and elderly parent for a day be described as an adversity when compared with being caught in a bomb blast? Researchers studying traumatic experiences have debated whether objective criteria can be established to distinguish between genuine adversity (catastrophic events) and non-catastrophic events, which are the difficulties, demands and discontents of everyday life. From this perspective, you’re either facing a genuine adversity or you’re not.

A different viewpoint is to see events in terms of subjective severity. For example, for one person, public speaking provokes fear, panic and nightmares (‘My mind will go blank and I’ll make a complete fool of myself’) and she cancels the presentation. Her colleague thinks she’s making a fuss over nothing as he would look forward to impressing an audience with his wit and wisdom. Several months later, he descends into depression when he discovers his wife is having an affair (‘Trust is destroyed along with my happiness’). So a subjective view of what constitutes adversity allows us to discover which situations trigger a person’s psychological vulnerabilities (which can be long standing), and what procedures are needed to address them.

Another point to consider with the bouncing back from adversity image is this: does your life return to exactly the same state before the adversity? Imagine you’ve been injured in an accident and now suffer from chronic pain which is made barely tolerable only through medication. There is no quick and easy return to your pre-adversity state. In some respects it’s gone forever (‘I’ve never had this kind of pain before’), while in others there remains continuities such as seeing the same friends, reading the same newspaper and going to the same pub. In my experience, clients usually, and understandably, get psychologically stuck when looking back to how life used to be before, for example, the accident – ‘I just want my old life back. What’s wrong with that?’ This looking back can be part of the problem in adjusting to change, as some of them exaggerate how wonderful life was then compared with their wretched state now.

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Eventually, most do turn their minds to coping adaptively with the new and unwelcome circumstances in their life. Bouncing back suggests that little time would be allowed for this often slow process of adaptation and recovery. So, the bouncing back view of resilience is not for me. I prefer the term coming back as it allows for different speeds and pathways to recovery.

‘Vulnerability is for losers’

Another unhelpful idea about resilience is that hard times have tempered the steel of your character and it will never break, whatever life throws at you. No matter how robust you’ve become, you still remain vulnerable to coping poorly with future adversities. Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness; no one has an absolute resistance to adversity. Resilience cannot be seen as a fixed personality trait – when circumstances change (e.g. being sent to prison, aggressive new boss, prolonged ill health), resilience alters (Rutter, 1987). In these new circumstances, you might cope badly and believe that your resilient qualities have vanished, having assumed they would automatically transfer from one difficult situation to another.

For example, I was seeing a tough and highly capable manager who’d been involved in a car accident and suffered cuts and bruises as well as shock, but the real shock for him was that he needed a week off work to recover. He had a normal human response to the accident but dismissed it contemptuously as ‘being pathetic’ and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t back at his desk the next day. He was bewildered by his actual response to the accident versus the ideal bouncing back response he expected of himself. His fear was that he’d lost control of himself; his toughness had deserted him and he felt ashamed. In discussing and accepting the ideas contained in the last paragraph, he reformulated his view of resilience in more realistic terms: ‘Strong and capable, but still vulnerable at times. I need to remember that.’ What’s also important to remember as you move through your life is that new challenges will emerge which may reveal more vulnerabilities and, therefore, the necessary development of new strengths to tackle them.

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With this compassionate change in his attitude, he took a more helpful and less condemnatory stance towards colleagues he had previously dismissed as losers for complaining of heavy workloads or missed performance targets.

Nietzsche’s nonsense?

Many people like to quote the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim – ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ – and assume it’s self-explanatory. This is how resilience is forged, getting through hard times will, in and of itself, make you stronger. As the philosopher Julian Baggini remarks:

To believe that hard times naturally empower us couldn’t get Nietzsche more wrong, since his point is precisely that it is all down to us how we deal with difficulty. That which does not kill you may well make you weaker, if you let it.

(2009: 24)

Others find Nietzsche’s maxim unconvincing. The writer and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens had to contend with emaciation following a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer when he lost almost a third of his body weight:

It [cancer] may not kill me, but the atrophy of muscle makes it harder to take even the simple exercises without which I’ll become more enfeebled still . . . One finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer towards death. [What one doesn’t need in this relentless process are] facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

(2012: 70–2)

Hitchens died in 2011. Another writer ill-disposed towards Nietzsche’s maxim is Julian Barnes who lost his wife to cancer in 2008 and asserts that many things that don’t kill us weaken us for ever: ‘Ask anyone who deals with victims of torture. Ask rape counsellors and those who handle domestic violence. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life’ (2014: 84). It’s important to examine any aphorisms, proverbs, maxims, sayings, mottoes that you use to guide yourself through troubled times to determine if they do provide genuine wisdom, insight or comfort; if not, cold comfort is all you’ll get from them.

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Surviving, but not necessarily thriving

The term survivor has heroic connotations: the person is still standing strong and resolute when the storm has passed. A survivor and a person demonstrating resilience are not necessarily undergoing the same process of recovery (from sexual abuse, for example). A survivor can be consumed wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Developing Resilience
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 What is Resilience?
• 2 Attitude: The Heart of Resilience
• 3 Attitudes That Undermine Resilience Building
• 4 Making Yourself More Resilient
• 5 Strengths Underpinning Resilience
• 6 Resilience in the Workplace
• 7 Resilience in Relationships
• 8 Resilience in Dealing With Difficult People
• 9 Maintaining Resilience
• 10 An Overview of Resilience
• References
• Index