Resilience Building

Resilience is often defined as the ability to bounce back from stress or traumatic events.

Building Resilience

Deploy positive emotions to counteract the impact of traumatic events. Control one’s emotions rather than being controlled by them.

Resilience Means Re-tooling Your Thinking

Promote emotional health by becoming aware of automatic negative thoughts. Remember ‘signature strength’ stories of those times when you had a ‘win’ experience. Recalling those stories helps drop the negative for the positive.

Resilience Requires Gut Checks

Resilience requires self-introspection and honesty. Unconscious thinking traps may lead one to grievance thinking and grudge-holding. Make a gut check.

Resilience Means Flexibility and Adaptability

Those who are rigid in their responses and expectations have difficulty bounding back from a stressor. Resilience building involves identifying the thinking ruts that trap you and can spiral out of control. Real-time resilience is recognizing the counterproductive thought and shutting it down.

Resilience Means Tolerating Uncertainty

Life is full of change and the unexpected. Change is difficult. Uncertainty fuels anxiety. Anxiety can lead to negative thinking. That in turn can risk maladaptive ways to cope: drinking too much, using drugs, withdrawing from others. Putting things in perspective is the antidote. Bouncing back means mentally reframing the event and not catastrophizing. It also means having adaptive coping mechanisms in the toolbox that work for you such as a friend you can talk to, exercise, meditation, prayer. Resilience means control over emotions. Find what you can control in the circumstance and orient toward it.

Hunt the Good Stuff

None of us is immune from bad things happening in our lives. The journey to control our mindset begins one thought at a time, replacing the negative with the positive even if you don’t feel like it. ‘Hunt the Good Stuff’ as a means to cultivate gratitude. Adopt a policy of gratefulness and a policy of kindness to yourself and others. Forgive yourself and others. Slowly this shift in perspective will uplift you and open up all sorts of possibilities.

Shoba Sreenivasan worked with veterans as a VA psychologist for more than 28 years. She is currently a forensic psychologist with the California Department of State Hospitals and an adjunct clinical professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.