I used to think that resiliency was about being able to “bounce right back” from something difficult.
For me, that conjures images of Elasti-girl from The Incredibles: she stretches, she gets bombed by something, and then she immediately comes back to her pre-bomb shape. Sort of like those women who have a baby, and then two days after giving birth, they are back to their pre-pregnancy clothes and looking adorable. (I had my youngest son seventeen years ago and I am still not back to my pre-pregnancy weight.)
I have come to believe that the idea of resiliency being able to “bounce right back” is a fallacy. It’s more about rebuilding.
When we experience a loss or a trauma, we are stripped of so many things – it impacts our identity, our sense of self, and our sense of security. Bouncing back from all of that is impossible. It takes purposeful rebuilding to get back to a place of safety – to feel like you have sure footing again.
A couple of years ago, I experienced several traumatic experiences back to back. I tried to find some version of my life to hold on to, but I couldn’t. I kept asking myself why I couldn’t just “bounce back.” I thought it meant that I wasn’t resilient because I couldn’t just be okay with everything that was happening. What I did do was rebuild. Slowly. Very purposefully. I rebuilt my sense of identity, my values, my beliefs, and my relationships within the construct of what I had learned through my trauma. It was a long process and it was extremely painful. And I have come to recognize that the long, painful path of rebuilding is what resilience really is.
Think about a prize fight: you get knocked down again and again. Somehow, you get back up even though you are beaten and bloody, and you keep swinging. If you get knocked out, you have a team of people around you who can help you put yourself back together and help you decide if you are getting back in that same ring or moving on to something new.
That team is a part of your resiliency plan.
Whether we are talking about rebuilding, or starting over, or resilience, we have to acknowledge that individually, we only have so much emotional bandwidth. We have to acknowledge that we can’t just “bounce back” all by ourselves – we need people who can help us find our way back.
Some people have described this emotional bandwidth as your “emotional bank account.” When we are feeling healthy emotionally, we are able to make deposits into our emotional bank account. We can learn new strategies and “deposit” them into our account. We can develop new communication skills and deposit them into our account as well. Maybe we have a conflict at work and we have to dig deep into our emotional bank account to find the strength and the skill to use empathy and see the problem from someone else’s perspective – that might be a withdrawl from our emotional bank account. Maybe we are struggling within our marriage – another withdrawl.
The point here is that all of those deposits and withdrawls leave us with a balance – that’s the bandwidth we have to work with each day.
Now, let’s say we are in the middle of a global pandemic (withdrawl), you are suddenly having to work from home and help your kids with doing school from home (withdrawl), your spouse is furloughed (withdrawl), and you are watching your retirement savings disintegrate (withdrawl). This can lead to your emotional bank account being overdrawn – and no matter how much you may want to bounce right back, you can’t. This does not constitute a failure on your part – this is science.
Dr. Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist from Rockefeller University who died in January, 2020, is responsible for much of the research about the hormone cortisol and its relationship to stress in the body. His research regarding the impacts of chronic stress and trauma and the impact of generational trauma is also widely known. We know from Dr. McEwen’s research and other supporting research that the amygdala and pre-frontal cortex, which control things like learning, working memory, and self-regulation, are incredibly impacted by stress and trauma.
Basically, overdrawing your emotional bank account means you are less able to handle the everyday stress that is coming at you – let alone the stress level that comes with a global pandemic.
What does this mean for us in the context of what is happening in the world today?
It means that there is no returning to “life as we know it.”
Resilience moves us forward, not backward. As we grieve for the things and the people we have lost, we also can see the things that have truly mattered through everything that is happening: relationships, connection, families, safety, creativity, supporting our communities.
I think that is where we will need to end up after everything we are living through with COVID-19. We will need to rebuild. Slowly. Very purposefully. We will need to make sure that our lives moving forward are aligned with our sense of identity, our values, our beliefs, and our relationships. Hopefully, we will be able to move forward with a stronger sense of what matters and how we want to spend the time we have left here on this planet.