Resilience – what is it again?

Regular subscribers to this blog may have noticed a gap between this post and the previous one, and what seems to be a diversion from our exploration of “Gifts” for crisis and challenge. I’ve been taking a bit of time, experiencing, and reflecting on, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on my life and my recovery post cancer, and trying to get my head round some of the more confusing and unsettling aspects, most of which are in the territory of “change and uncertainty”. I’ve decided to share some of my thoughts, and some ideas I have come across that have proved useful to me and helped me to “be” where I am in the present, letting go of the past, and reining in my tendencies to manage uncertainty by planning, planning, planning. Maybe some of this will connect with where you are – let me know if it does, or if it doesn’t.

It seems to me that somewhere in the development of modern human beings, we’ve lost our connection to fragility, vulnerability, and mortality. In recent generations, medicine has seemed to offer us safety, a cure for everything, a means of defeating death, extending life and suppressing illness. Even cancer – the C word, spoken only in whispers in my childhood, bringing only a hopeless sense of oncoming pain and death. “There’s so much they can do these days”, was the refrain that often accompanied my sharing of my breast cancer diagnosis with others. And this is true, there is a lot “they” can do. And there are still very grown up choices that have to be made by the patient, presented with statistics, survival rates, recurrence risks, side effects and limitations – what treatment path will I take? I found it deeply disturbing to hear time and time again that I “needed” to agree to a particular treatment in order to extend my life expectancy, and that I shouldn’t worry about side effects because the dangerous ones don’t appear for five years or so. I’m 52. I wasn’t planning on dying from heart failure before I am 60, following chemotherapy, or in 6-8 years discovering that I have a lung tumour caused by radiotherapy. But these are the choices that come with medicine – cost benefit analysis, quality of life versus longevity, risk versus survival. I no longer believe in medicine’s magic, or its ability to protect me from the side effects of living, and I’m beginning to understand the concept of “living to the full” within a perspective that accepts illness, suffering and even death itself as a part of the human experience.

I hear people saying similar things about COVID-19, wanting safety and certainty in a situation where the risks are only partially known, and the consequences of “safety in lockdown” are complex and include unemployment, separation from loved ones, being trapped with abusers, starvation, depression, anxiety and suicidality, and a potential future epidemic of serious health conditions that have gone unreported, uninvestigated and untreated. How do we as individuals work out when it is safe to come out – no matter what the government says? And what kind of a world are we coming out to? Unknown, unprecedented, unforseen, uncertain. Too many “uns” for comfort.

So here’s the challenge. How do we live with discomfort and uncertainty, and is there anything to be gained from it?

Resilience is the label for our capacity to:

• be with discomfort (which can include moving into it for a while, and then moving away, blocking it off, distracting and disconnecting from it, before coming back to it again),
• face uncomfortable truths (knowing the reality is there, recognising that we have feelings about this reality)
• allow ourselves to feel, express and let go of those feelings (without getting overwhelmed)
• cooperate with the experience it in whatever way is useful
• allow crisis to transform us, instead of stoking the fires that keep us in the old patterns

Often there is a need for collapse. This is one of those uncomfortable truths I mentioned. Sometimes we have to allow ourselves to crumble, to stop “coping”, to “break down”, and to “stop”. There is often a need for some literal or symbolic death before there is space and energy for something new to develop. And this dying and letting go needs time and attention. It cannot be rushed, and sometimes it happens piece by piece over a long period of time. Brian Walker developed a model of resilience from his studies of Australian bush fires – noticing that fire and the devastation that comes with it has potential to “clear out” the system, trigger dynamic new growth, and create transformation of the landscape. Rosemary Napper has frequently taught a development of Walker’s thinking – shown in the diagram below.

In my own life, to enable me to truly discover my real Self, I needed to stop, to stop overdoing, overthinking, overworking and over-giving. I had had several significant health warnings before my cancer diagnosis; responded to each of them during the crisis, but rapidly went back to my old way of doing things once I was physically “better”. I was circling the loop between “conservation” and “disturbance” repeatedly, driven by internal Parents demanding obedience and internal Child selves terrified to disobey. I would make small adjustments to the level of driven-ness I allowed, but fundamentally I was responding to some very deep seated beliefs about myself and life that were founded on fear, trauma and scarcity, rather than truth. Breast cancer and its treatment forced me to face these underlying beliefs that were slowly killing me – and it did that by taking away my work roles, my physical competence, my plans for the future, and the illusion that I can prevent bad things happening by being a “Good Girl”.

Over the past year, I have had to crumble, several times, being challenged to let go time and time again – let go of the calendar, the bookings, the commitments, the structures, the financial certainty, the life certainty, the recovery plan, the return to work plan and finally the identity that was based so desperately on trying to be Good. I have been in the pits of loss, despair, and awfulness, many times. And I am coming back to life again. Slowly, steadily, and with much more awareness of the times when I start to succumb to the urge to try and put things back how they were before. If I were a dry stone wall – as in the short film you can watch below – I needed to have all my stones pulled down and to build a new structure to live in. https://www.facebook.com/BBCNI/videos/579558176293170/ That requires some letting go, surrendering to being with the disturbance, the disruption and the collapse, and hanging in there as the rebuilding work that takes time and thought and processing is underway.

I am rebuilding, looking at the pieces that are all bits of who I am, trying to work out how to put them together in a stronger and more resilient way. I have different foundation stones now – or maybe they are the old ones reshaped, given a “true edge” that will be stable and enable the rest to balance well (and yes, the stone masons of the Mournes do indeed call these “butt” stones – maybe that’s why I am also developing my yoga, pilates and walking practices, to reshape my butt…….but I digress). The structure of my personality is largely the same as before, but I am filling myself with what the stone masons amazingly actually call “heartening” – the small pieces that give strength, anchoring, balance and levelness to my living. I think my personal “heartening” comes from the various gifts of crisis that I have written about here in this series of blogs – slowing down, stillness, breathing, letting go, beauty, gratitude and gentleness.

Has your personal structure been destabilised through the COVID-19 experience? Are you crumbling, crumbled or teetering on the brink? Maybe you are consciously or unconsciously aware of the disturbance that this situation is creating in your life – challenged to make sense of how life is now, and how it might or might not be in future, adjusting or not to new patterns, processing fears and losses, unsettled, not sleeping, or dreaming vividly and disturbingly. From the safety of social distancing and the internet, I can say “Good” – and metaphorically duck your responding swipe at me. That’s not to deny that fear and grief and loss are truly awful, and the human cost of this virus is devastatingly high, but being shaken to our core can also be productive and reconnect us to living, growing and becoming in ways we have forgotten, if we can bear with it and give it time.

Reshape your foundations and find your heartening as you sit with the rubble for a while. Don’t let anxiety or discomfort rush you into the rebuilding until you are ready; a wall built on fear and scarcity is only going to fall again in future – take it from me, I know. And breathe into the heartening you discover – have a look at my previous blogs if you want some ideas about how to do this.

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In the meantime, stay well, be gentle with yourself, and as a wise man once said to me:

Enjoy what you can, and survive the rest.