We will all experience suffering at some point in our lives. Perhaps through illness, heartbreak or death. Difficult times are inevitable, often hitting us some idle Wednesday afternoon, unexplained and unexpected.
No matter how careful we are, how honorable a life we lead or how hard we try to avoid pain, in the words of Buddha, life is suffering so it’s inevitable it will affect us all eventually.
For some, suffering will be an old friend, to others a frightening new foe.
We cannot change the things that happen to us, we must each accept that. Fortunately, we can change the way we respond to them and this is where building resilience is key.
What is Resilience?
def. the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.
It’s important to point out resilience isn’t overcoming pain nor trying to forget it ever happened, instead it is growth and personal development through suffering and adversity.
Author, psychologist and resilience specialist, Chris Johnstone designed the Self Help SSRI Model to help each of us improve our resilience. It’s important to know this isn’t a model to be used solely during times of suffering. Instead it’s an exercise we can begin right away and shape into our everyday lives, like building an army to fight an inescapable war.
The model works by exploring, building and utilising four key areas –
- STRATEGIES
By identifying coping strategies that work for you, you will be better informed when suffering arises. These strategies provide specific steps to change things and help us cope. They might include reading self-help books or learning to reframe a problem. Adopting a growth mindset, volunteering in your local community or taking time for yourself in the form of yoga and meditation.
- STRENGTHS
Knowing our own personal strengths, means we can best exploit them during difficult times. For example, strengths such as courage, creativity, faith, flexibility, perseverance and love will all help when experiencing adversity.
- RESOURCES
These can be social, spiritual, educational or professional. Think about the resources around you, write them down and use them wherever possible. Consciously build and nurture a strong support network including friends, family and perhaps a therapist and don’t be scared to ask for help. Resilient people aren’t afraid to ask for help and understand that we all need support at some point in our lives.
- INSIGHTS
Using wisdom and insights can help us move forward in our adversity. Keeping a strong faith, understanding that personal growth can come from trauma and crisis can be a turning point can help provide comfort amongst the pain.
Why not take half an hour this week and write down your key Strategies, Strengths, Resources and Insights? Love and help yourself to master the art of resilience.
Like an Oyster creates a precious pearl when a toxic grain of sand enters its shells, you two can shape something beautiful.
Technotox 
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Thank you kindly for the simplicity of your explanation. Simple explanations are golden, I find, in a world where not many of us traumatized people can even pay attention to the different sources that would help us begin to understand how to get us out of where we are, confused and scared and babbling at best when we try and open our mouths. Out of fear, of course. – in relation to having a hard time concentrating or expressing yourself, I find the way you explained this “system” fair. – i find, though, that allot of the universally acceptable articles I’ve been reading about the idea of progressing to a healthy psychology lacking in the option that the reader may have a serious ‘condition’. It’s not to say that for some it is less the case that these instructions need be followed, however in those cases, sometimes there’s no contouring having to discover and go through the actual cause of sufferance, or the cause for the amplification of sufferance.
(Denial?)
In your article, you make mention of all of the above in a way that makes me feel understood but that doesn’t linger on the disability too long as to switch on my obsessively. (Our* obsessively – because “we” don’t ignore it when someone is recognizing our deepest sufferances)
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