Build Your Resilience

CBT, mindfulness and stress management to survive and thrive in any situation

Donald Robertson

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781473679528
• eBook ISBN: 9781444168730
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Resilience: How to Thrive and Survive in Any Situation helps you to prepare for adversity by finding healthier ways of responding to stressful thoughts and feelings. You will learn a comprehensive toolkit of effective therapeutic strategies and techniques, drawing upon innovative 'mindfulness and acceptance-based' approaches to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), combined with elements of established psychological approaches to stress prevention and management. The book also draws upon classical Stoic philosophy to provide a wider context for resilience-building. This book is a complete course in resilience training, covering everything from building long-term resilience by developing psychological flexibility, mindfulness and valued action, through specific behavioural skills such as applied relaxation, worry postponement, problem-solving, and assertiveness. Each chapter contains a self-assessment test, case study, practical exercises and reminder boxes and concludes with a reminder of the key points of the chapter (Focus Points) and a round-up of what to expect in the next (Next Step), which will whet your appetite for what's coming and how it relates to what you've just read.

1

Introduction: what is resilience?

In this chapter you will learn:

• What is meant by ‘resilience’ in psychological research on the subject and a way of defining resilience in relation to pursuit of your personal values in life

• What ‘risk factors’ and life events typically create increased vulnerability to stress-related problems

• What ‘protective factors’ and coping strategies typically reduce the risk of stress-related problems

• How to begin developing a personal resilience strategy or plan

• How to use this book and troubleshoot common problems you may encounter while trying to build resilience.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The importance of resilience

How can you improve your ability to ‘thrive and survive’ in any situation? What disadvantages, stresses or difficulties do you currently face? What future problems might you need to anticipate and prepare for? What strengths and assets have helped you to cope well with difficult events in the past? What can you learn from the way other people deal with life’s challenges? These are all questions about psychological resilience. Building resilience is a way of improving your ability to cope with adversity or stressful situations in general.

We all need some degree of resilience in order to cope with the problems life throws at us. Indeed, research shows that resilience is normal and involves ordinary skills and resources. Everyone is capable of being resilient and becoming more so by developing appropriate coping strategies. The types of adversity that demand resilience can range from ordinary ‘daily hassles’ to major setbacks, stressful life events such as divorce, redundancy, bankruptcy, illness or bereavement, and perhaps even more severe trauma in some cases. Most people believe that they are at least moderately resilient. However, few people are as resilient as they could be in all areas of life, and there are always more aspects of resilience that can be developed.

This book differs from the vast majority of self-help books, which are normally assumed to serve a ‘remedial’ function by attempting to mend a specific problem, such as overcoming depression or managing anxiety. By contrast, the self-help approach you’re reading about here aims to serve a more general and preventative function by improving resilience to both current and future adversities. Building resilience also tends to improve your wellbeing and quality of life by enhancing positive qualities like psychological flexibility, social skills and problem-solving ability. This book will therefore help you to expand beyond your ‘comfort zone’ and reach out towards new values and goals, by meeting challenges and opportunities that arise resiliently.

Exhibiting resilience does not mean completely eliminating anxiety and other forms of distress. Many resilient people experience strong emotions but cope well with them and overcome stressful problems anyway. Someone who is bereaved may naturally feel extreme sadness, for example, while still adapting well over time and avoiding developing more serious depression as a result. Resilience does not usually mean amputating or avoiding your emotions but rather, as we shall see, it may often involve accepting them while actively pursuing healthy goals and personal values.

Research on ‘resilience’ is a fairly specialized area that only really began to develop in the 1970s, and initially focused on factors that contribute to resilience during the developmental course of childhood. However, there has been increasing awareness that similar factors are relevant to the resilience of adults faced with adversity and research has also been conducted in this area. Established resilience-building programmes have now been used to help prepare schoolchildren and college students to cope with stress, while reducing the risk of depression and anxiety, to enhance the performance of athletes, parental skills, teachers’ performance, and also to improve productivity, job satisfaction, and work–life balance among corporate employees (Reivich & Shatté, 2002, p. 11). Whereas traditional stress management and therapy approaches generally target problems once they have arisen, resilience-building approaches train individuals to anticipate stress and prepare in advance to minimise its impact by weathering the storm.

Key idea: Psychological resilience

Resilience consists of various processes, ways of thinking and acting through which individuals adapt and cope well with adversity, without suffering from long-term harmful consequences due to stress. It has been defined by researchers in this field as consisting of ‘patterns of positive adaptation during or following significant adversity’ (Masten, Cutuli, Herbers & Reed, 2009, p. 118). Resilience employs fairly ordinary abilities such as problem-solving, assertiveness, and dealing with your thoughts and feelings, etc. It therefore reduces the impact of stressful life events while also enhancing general wellbeing and quality of life. However, there’s some ambiguity about what ‘adapting’ or ‘recovering’ mean insofar as there’s no set-in-stone definition of wellbeing. In this book, we’ll use the approach known as ‘values clarification’ to help you define resilience in terms of remaining committed to living in accord with your personal values despite encountering challenges or setbacks. Whereas reduced anxiety and depression are seen as the ultimate goal in some traditional approaches to resilience-building, here we view these more as common internal barriers or obstacles to a more fundamental aim: living in accord with your personal values.

DEFINING RESILIENCE FURTHER

Various groups of researchers have found that there are certain individuals who tend to cope particularly well with even highly-stressful life events, such as poverty, divorce or trauma. These challenges have little impact on the ability of some people to function, such as their performance academically or at work, and don’t lead to long-term stress-related or psychological problems such as anxiety or depressive disorders. The term ‘resilient’ is used to refer to such robust individuals. ‘Resilience’ is therefore the name of the dynamic, ongoing process whereby people cope well with stressful events. What do we ordinarily mean by ‘resilience’? The standard dictionary definition is derived from physics and engineering where it refers to the capacity of a material to automatically resume its original shape after being bent, stretched, compressed or misshapen in some way. For example, rubber is highly resilient to physical stress whereas glass is not. Resilience, in this sense, is linked to things like flexibility, pliability, suppleness, springiness and elasticity. The word ultimately derives from a Latin term, resiliens, meaning ‘to spring forward’, or leap back into position. By analogy, the term ‘resilience’ is used in biology and medicine to refer to the ability of an organism, such as a human being, to recover from stress, injury or illness.

For example, bywords for resilience include the following, relating to the ability to cope with stress and adversity:

Hardiness, toughness, strength, fortitude, adaptability, flexibility, endurance, robustness, resourcefulness, etc.

Resilience also encompasses the notion of an ability to recover from harm or setbacks, coping with the consequences of adversity:

Buoyancy, bouncing back, recovery, getting back on your feet, return to form, etc.

This aspect of resilience is also expressed as an ability for ‘self-righting’ by modern authors. It’s sometimes said, for instance, that resilience is more associated with a ‘survivor’ mentality whereas lack of resilience is more associated with a ‘victim’ mentality.

In studies on children, surviving setbacks is understood in terms of achieving typical developmental goals, performance at school, etc. However, with adults it’s less clear how we measure resilience, i.e., what constitutes ‘bouncing back’. One answer to this is that we can define resilience as coping with challenges or setbacks in a way that allows you to remain committed to living in accord with your own core values. If you par...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• About the Author
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: what is Resilience?
• 2 Letting go of Experiential Avoidance
• 3 Values Clarification
• 4 Commitment to Valued Action
• 5 Acceptance and Defusion
• 6 Mindfulness and the Present Moment
• 7 Progressive Relaxation
• 8 Applied Relaxation
• 9 Worry Postponement
• 10 Problem-Solving Training
• 11 Assertiveness and Social Skills
• 12 Stoic Philosophy And Resilience
• Bibliography
• Copyright