Resiliency and Post-Traumatic Growth

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:

‘How unlucky I am that this should happen to me. But not at all. Perhaps, say how lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened, and I am not afraid of what is about to happen. For the same blow might have stricken anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation and complaint.’

On my first Christmas spent with my family in California, I decided as a joint present to myself and my father, I would get a tattoo for him.

The tattoo is of a Joshua tree with a bunch of violets underneath. Joshua trees (coincidentally sharing my fathers name) are hardy trees that grow in the most arid environment. These trees represent resilience, perseverance and survival in a harsh and unforgiving environment. The violets represent forgiveness. There is a quote from Mark Twain that goes ‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.’ The juxtaposition between the Joshua tree; a plant that thrives in a desert environment and the violet, a delicate little flower…at first glance, these two seem almost polar opposites. Yet when we look at what they represent, it tells a very interesting story of resilience and forgiveness.

Together, these two images represent the relationship between myself and my father, how I see him and love him despite all that has come before. Yet as time has gone on, it has come to mean something else…something more deeply related to me and how I place myself in the world.

In a collective consciousness where people romanticise their struggles, mental illness and vulnerability and yet are not quick to forgive (as evidenced by how easy it is to get ‘cancelled’ online), it seems that some people have their source of strength coming from their ability to hold a grudge and their vulnerability from their inability to thrive in a harsh environment. It seems on trend to wear our problems on our sleeves. Heartbreak, trauma, mental illness, poverty…these are all real-life issues that millions of people struggle with on a daily basis. Yet when these issues are not tackled with a sense of strength and resilience, we become like the violet…easily trodden underfoot.

To me, the Joshua tree and the violets (both of which grow in the Mojave Desert) represent the perfect synergy that we must cultivate for ‘Antifragility’. The ability to thrive in a harsh environment and forgive easily when our vulnerability is attacked or taken advantage of.

The concept of Antifragility was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder.

Dr Gabor Mate said in a conversation with Jay Shetty in their 2022 video The root cause of trauma and why you feel lost in life:

‘Vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded.’

By this, he means how much can we be hurt/abused/made to suffer and still maintain connection with ourselves, our resiliency, and our wellbeing. It is not about how much we can tolerate; it is about how much we can go through and still maintain our sense of rightness within ourselves.

This is where the concept of Post Traumatic Growth comes into play. Post Traumatic Growth is a theory that explains this kind of transformation following trauma. It was developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, in the mid-1990s, and holds that people who endure psychological struggle following adversity can often see positive growth afterward. [Collier, 2016].

The outcomes of post traumatic growth generally fall under 5 catagories:

1. Personal strength

2. Spiritual development

3. Closer relationships

4. New possibilities

5. A greater appreciation of life

I’m sure we have all seen one of those remarkable stories of human achievement after disaster. The movie 127 hours details the real life story of Aron Ralston who severed his own arm to free himself when he got it trapped under a boulder while rock climbing in the Bluejohn Canyon in Utah. Now, we can all agree that severing your own arm to save your life would qualify as a traumatic event. Yet Ralston went on to write a book, have a movie made about him and he now tours the US as a public speaker.

When we go through trauma, it can be very hard to approach future problems with resiliency. It can often feel like old wounds are being opened up and we are not equipped to deal with the struggles that life throws us. Yet it is not only possible to grow and become stronger from our trauma, but it is an essential part of building resiliency.

For me, my tattoo has two meanings. I got it to represent my father and the love and acceptance I have for him. Yet it has come to represent something bigger, Antifragility and Post Traumatic Growth.

Learning to love yourself

Princess Diana once said: ‘Every one of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.’

Learning to love yourself is an important skill to cultivate because without loving yourself, you cannot seek to love others. When you hate yourself, you deny yourself so much. You tell yourself that you are undeserving of kindness and even of having your basic needs met. Not feeding yourself properly, not staying clean or living in a clean environment, and immersing yourself in distractions are all the hallmarks of someone who is struggling with self-love. Author and speaker Byron Katie said that she spent over a decade trapped in depression and self-loathing to the point where she was sleeping on the floor because she didn’t feel that she deserved to sleep in comfort. People do awful things to themselves when they hate themselves, things you would never dream of doing to anyone else. Why? Because no one has the capacity to hate anyone more than they hate themselves.

Your journey with yourself is a long one and unlike your spouse or even your children who can leave at any moment, you are with yourself for life. A lifetime of experiences that only you will experience, and every moment should be a teachable moment, good or bad. At the end of it, every experience should bring you closer to yourself. It should be an opportunity to learn more about you; your thoughts, your feelings, and your reactions. It should teach you how to handle yourself and understand yourself, as negative and ugly as this can be at times, taking ownership over your feelings and actions allows you to know yourself enough to figure out a) how to accept yourself and b) how to change it should you need to.

Total acceptance starts with identifying both your strengths and weaknesses. You then teach yourself to believe your good points and accept your bad points and love yourself anyway. Simple right? Sure, but it’s not easy. Everyone judges themselves harsher than they judge others and making yourself comfortable with your negative traits and loving yourself in spite of that takes time. It takes years of daily practice and effort to cultivate a loving relationship with yourself. The task may seem daunting, especially when you are starting from a very low place, but it is a task that must be undertaken. Many people are able to function without a shred of self-love. However, this is like being a bottom high addict. Despite keeping up appearances, you are still poisoning yourself. Little by little, day after day, as you slowly smother yourself with self-loathing, you will be setting yourself up for a big fall and for a state of potentially irreversible damage. This can have a profound impact on those around you. Self-loathing is visible to other people. Seeing someone slowly deteriorate through self-hatred can be too much for people to bear because just like watching a loved one slowly kill themselves through a heroin addiction, self-loathing will eat away at yourself and those around you. It is selfish and resistant to love from others. It’s like loving someone with a void inside of them…you can’t give love if you have no love for yourself.

The best place to start is with a plan of action. This is going to be a daily exercise. See it almost like studying for a degree…that lasts for the rest of your life. There is no end point to this, and it must be practiced every day. Here are 5 important things you can do to start loving yourself today:

1. Make a list of all your good and bad points – this can be very difficult to do at first. You may find that the list in the ‘good points’ section is significantly shorter than the points in the ‘bad’ section. Keep a journal and write this on the first page. The point is to force yourself to accept yourself completely. By learning to believe your good points and sitting comfortably with your bad points, you put yourself into the headspace of acceptance. There is nowhere to go so the only options you have are to either run from it (which causes the situation to get worse) or change it. But the first step to changing is acceptance. Accepting who you are in this very moment and learning to love the process of self-improvement is how you learn to get better and achieve self-love.

2. Do CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is really effective for building self-esteem. It requires you to work through it and as long as you stick with doing your homework, it can be transformative. I would recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for dummies and supplement this with counselling or psychotherapy sessions. Yes, therapy can be expensive and can take a long time but is worth it in the long run and can offer you a perspective that you never previously thought of. For more information on the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy on changing your mind, check out Ruth Parchment’s post on ‘The link between CBT and neuroplasticity’

3. Keep adding to your journal – daily journalling helps to alleviate stress and allows you to examine your thoughts and feelings objectively. It is a perfect way to keep up with your CBT homework and provides you with some comfort when you feel you have no one to talk to.

4. Keep your affirmations where you can see them every day – take a whiteboard marker and write on every mirror in your home reminders and affirmations. Use ‘I am’ and ‘I can’ statements like ‘I am a kind person’ and ‘I can achieve whatever I put my mind to’.

5. Help others – contrary to popular opinion, self-hatred is a more selfish mindset to have than self-love. People who hate themselves obsess about their perceived bad points and unintentionally push people away. When you love yourself, you don’t question it. It is evident in everything you do that you are not thinking about yourself because you don’t need to…you already know. Altruism is a wonderful antidote to self-loathing because you are willingly giving yourself over to a selfless act of helping others. This earns you appreciation, esteem and favor among others as well as a sense of pride and purpose within yourself.

There is only one of you and there is no escaping that. Your life is worth living and you are worth loving, the most important factor in that being you loving yourself. No one can provide the love and support you need day to day. No one can meet all of your needs. Expecting anyone to is relying on them as a life support system and will eventually burn them out. Only you can love you unconditionally. It starts today.

An addicts mindset: why getting and staying sober is so hard

‘Addiction is a choice’. That was a phrase I’d heard thrown around many times…I’d even coined it myself a few times. It’s funny how you are so quick to pick apart others for their faults while you convince yourself that you might have issues, but at least you’re not THAT bad. That mentality only serves to fuel a Jeremy Kyle-esque sense of morality where we turn addicts into social pariahs who need to grovel and forever live in shame, which makes it harder for people stuck in that existence to find their way back. If you are being told you're a terrible person, how is that sending a message of hope that there is something for you when you're ready to fix things? Why would you even want to?

People who don’t understand the nature of addiction can’t understand how difficult it is to free yourself from that vice. As if the mental and physical need for it weren’t enough, the mindset it creates is a view of reality that is so distorted, you become convinced that things aren’t that bad and even that you’re on top of your game.

This is because addiction turns you into a liar. The lies you tell others are nothing compared to the lies you tell yourself. At least you can sound somewhat convincing to those who don't know you that well. It makes you lie to yourself about your situation. Two of the biggest lies I would tell myself was ‘I choose to get high, I don’t need to. It’s a lifestyle choice, not an addiction’ and ‘well I’m drinking wine and not chugging frosty jacks so I’m not really an alcoholic’. This would keep me in a mindset where I was constantly defending my actions; even when those actions included drinking 3 bottles of wine on my own, half laughing half crying as I binge watched some god-awful Netflix series until 3am.

The worst lie that addiction makes you believe is that without the substance you crave, you are nothing. You romanticize being in this state because you believe it is what makes you feel alive when it is the very thing that is taking you away from reality. You do it because the reality of your situation is too painful to bear. Overtime this causes you to lose sight of who you are. You lose interest in things that previously gave you joy. You numb yourself to things and your passion is replaced by this persona; a character you put on like a suit of armor to defend yourself and your reasoning for doing what you are doing. The longer you are living in your addiction, the longer you must wear the character. Until your friends, family, and even you don’t know who you are anymore.

The hardest thing to come to terms with in recovery, yet is essential to staying sober is…

You aren’t struggling with sobriety; you are struggling with yourself.

When you were drunk or high, you never had to deal with yourself for extended periods of time. You had the luxury of escaping for a while. You smothered that vulnerable, insecure, sensitive, emotional side with this fake personality that made you feel nothing but euphoria, anger and depression which would trigger you to use again, in turn burying your true self deeper and deeper. No one enjoys feeling insecure or vulnerable and being overly emotional comes from relying on substances to deal with your emotions rather than learning how to deal with them effectively. The hardest part of recovering from addiction is having to learn how to deal with yourself. Committing to sobriety means committing to having to sit with very dark thoughts and unwanted feelings. It’s the only way to learn how to manage them.

I still struggle with myself, and the simplest things can make it ten times harder. If I don’t get enough sleep, if I don’t work out every day, if I eat junk food, if I get reminded of a particularly shameful point in my life…it can make me feel like I am trapped in my own head and I feel anxious and tearful and I know that a drink will make those feelings go away.

It can be embarrassing to admit that as a grown up you struggle with regulating your emotions.

There is hope though. In time, you will get better and better at it until eventually, it won’t even be an issue. But it starts with having to accept how you are feeling. And I mean fully accepting it, not distracting yourself with food or mindless crap on Netflix. There are things you can do to make it easier to manage in moments like this. Positive things that counteract your negative feelings. Talking to a loved one can help. I find exercise is the most effective way for me, even just a walk. Yes, it can seem like a mammoth task when you are really going through it but if you tell yourself, ‘Staying here is not going to change anything and when I’m done, I’ll feel different’, that can give you just enough motivation to get dressed and get outside. Then when you get back, I promise you will feel different. Ok, so you probably aren’t going to be up for singing your heart out to ‘I feel good’ by James Brown, but you will feel like you have achieved something and that’s important. This could then motivate you to do something else. It also opens you up to other possibilities. You might bump into an old friend on your walk or see an advertisement for a weekly social walk. The universe gives you opportunities when you look for them…I experience it all the time. Putting yourself in new situations opens you up to new possibilities that could potentially change your life.

Trust that the process of accepting how you are feeling and pushing against your negative mindset by replacing your bad habits with good ones is what will teach you how to manage yourself and your emotions. It isn’t easy and can seem pointless to go for a run when all you want to do is eat junk food and watch crap because that’s better than wanting to drink yourself into oblivion. But confronting your emotions and doing something to counteract them is the only way to gain control over them. The more you do it, the better you’ll be at it and depending on what you are doing to counteract your negative thoughts, you’ll have gained in that area. If you work out, you’ll be fitter. If you connect with friends and family, your relationship with them will have strengthened.

Part of having a growth mindset means doing the things that are good for you even if those things are not directly linked to what you want to achieve. I don’t want to be an athlete, but I run nearly every day and I’m training to eventually run an ultra-marathon. Is that necessary for me to start my own business? Not at all. But the mindset that committing to training for an ultra-marathon puts you in is the same mindset that is needed to achieve your goals. The determination, the tunnel vision, the sheer will power to keep going against every obstacle and doubter.

Don’t feed your negative mindset by giving it more ammunition. Master your emotions by confronting them. They can’t hurt you. Trust the process, it works.

If you are need support with overcoming addiction or staying strong in recovery, you can find loads of information on free support and helplines on the NHS website. If you are in the US, you can find information on rehabilitation and support at recovery.org and drughelpline.org where you can talk to someone 24/7.

Also, you can contact me via email:

thesolutionwellbeing@gmail.com

and I will endeavor to respond within 2 days.

Taking the first step may be just one of many. It may be painful, exhausting and you may be very unsteady. But every step counts towards a better life and one day you'll realize you aren't walking towards it anymore...you're running.