Learned Resilience is a Key to a Good Life

So, the next time you’re finding yourself down ask yourself: “What story am I using that is producing this feeling?” That could lead to a healing you might not have even believed was possible…

The study’s authors followed 698 of these children all the way into middle-life, measuring a variety of their psychological indicators, including their general emotional fragility and resilience.

What they found was that more of the children who experienced hard childhoods, as expected, grew up wounded and emotionally fragile than comparable kids who grew up in middle class families without poverty or abuse. But, surprising the scientists, they also found that more of the kids who grew up with challenges were resilient than “normal” kids, and for most in that cohort their resilience — their ability to deal with challenges and adversity as adults — was sturdier than that of normal kids.

In other words, if there’s a normal bell-curve distribution on the spectrum from fragile to resilient, the bell-curve becomes narrower in the middle in the face of privation and abuse. On the left side of the curve, more kids were fragile than among normal kids, but on the right side of the curve more kids were highly resilient than we see with kids who didn’t experience privation or abuse.

The Kauai Longitudinal Study was particularly ground-breaking in that it was the first that did a serious look at resilience over an extended period. It led to a relatively new field within the science of psychology: resilience.

They learned there are several variables that affected how the Kauai children responded to adversity and that predicted resilience.

The first was temperamental, and thus probably the result of genetics. The researchers found that the most resilient of the adults had been characterized by their mothers at age one as “active, affectionate, cuddly, good-natured, and easy to deal with.” By age two they were “cheerful, friendly, responsive, and sociable.” And by ten years old they read better and scored higher on problem-solving skill tests than either their peers from Kauai or middle-class kids of the same age.

The second variable was what the researchers called “protective factors in the family.” The most resilient children had formed a deep bond with at least one adult throughout their childhood. It wasn’t always a parent, but that person gave them a sense of stability even though other parts of their lives were going nuts.

The third variable was “protective factors in the community.” Teachers, pastors, mentors, coaches, etc., offered positive reinforcement and stability for these kids.

Perhaps the most important variable in acquiring and maintaining resilience is found in a relatively new field, narrative psychology, that emerged in part from these kinds of studies and has been heavily influenced by the work of NLP founders Bandler and Grinder.

It has to do with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we stand in the world relative to others, and how much agency we have over our own lives. While we rarely consider our own internal stories, they are often the single most important variable in determining how we respond to the events of our lives.

And those responses based on our internal stories, in turn, often define the ultimate outcome of whatever situation or problem we find ourselves in the midst of.

When something bad happens, some people internalize the blame and further their own misery: “I knew this would happen: bad things always happen to me!” or “I did this to myself!” or “I shouldn’t have let this happen!”

Their stories are fundamentally victim stories, usually heavy with self-blame. Stories like this rarely are useful or productive, yet nonetheless many of us learned them as children (mostly in response to criticism from parents or adults, sometimes picking them up from peers) and our lives are run by them regardless of whether we’re 20, 50, or 80 years old.

Except when we use such stories to prevent ourselves from engaging in truly destructive or even illegal behavior, self-blame and victim stories are like an acid: over time they erode or burn away our self-esteem and our ability to experience resilience.

The kids in Kauai who were most wounded by their upbringings adopted stories telling themselves that their abuse was their own fault, that they “deserved it,” or that they completely or largely lacked any agency over their own lives and responses.

This is detailed extensively, for example, in John Tierney and Roy Baumeister’s book The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. The book is all about the stories we tell ourselves and how to change them.

On the other hand, the kids who became the most resilient as adults told themselves that their abuse wasn’t their own responsibility or fault but, rather, was entirely the fault of the abuser. They had a positive form of “narrative coherence.”

Multiple studies done over the past few decades have found this variable — the stories we tell ourselves about who we are relative to the world — is the most important in determining people’s ability to deal with both adversity and opportunity. It even can affect how quickly we respond to disease or how we handle challenges like chemotherapy.

Decades ago, psychology researcher Marty Seligman did a famous experiment with dogs where he rang a bell and gave them a shock through their feet where they were standing. Dogs normally jump away from the shock, but about half of his dogs were restrained so they couldn’t jump away. After a few rounds of shocks, most simply gave up, enduring the shocks with a whimper but no longer trying to avoid the shock-pad, even when they were no longer restrained.

It's a variation on the old story about how circus elephants are trained, and spawned an entirely new field and discipline in psychology: “learned helplessness.”

Seligman noticed, however, that the more he studied helplessness and depression in animals and humans, the more “grumpy” he became himself. One day he was weeding his home garden with his five-year-old daughter when she said to him, “If I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch!”

It woke Seligman up from his constant immersion in downer stories and stimulated him to study happy people, kicking off an entirely new field called “positive psychology.” What he learned, and details in his book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life.

In his book (and two others), Seligman tells how he developed a course to teach elementary school children how to be optimistic — to tell themselves positive and empowering stories about themselves and their place in the world — and how follow-up studies found that the kids who went through the course, in later years as teens and young adults, were half as likely to experience a major or significant depressive episode.

He also points out how we all experienced complete helplessness as babies, so the ability to feel helpless — and be hurt or even paralyzed by it — is built into the substrate of our emotional psychology. Thus, when some people look at the difficulties in their own lives, or even the challenges the world is facing, they default to being helpless, which usually leads to depression and sometimes even to suicide.

Instead, Seligman and others working in the field of positive psychology argue that we can all learn how to recalibrate our own internal stories from ones of helplessness and victimhood into ones of self-reliance and resilience.

Across the field — from NeuroLinguistic Programming to Positive Psychology to Narrative Psychology to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — the great commandment is to begin noticing our own internal responses to things, the stories we tell ourselves about things that happen to us.

This is not as complicated as it may seem. Simply ask yourself, “Why am I reacting this way?” In most cases, you’ll discover that your own deep consciousness will hand you the story on which you based that response.

My old friend Rob Kall, a therapist who used to run an international brain conference where I often spoke or keynoted, has created an entire website at PostivePsychology.net. There are books and other websites devoted to this concept as well, and the message of most all of them is that we can rewrite the stories that run our lives and thus achieve a higher level of accomplishment, resilience, and, ultimately, happiness.

So, the next time you’re finding yourself down ask yourself: “What story am I using that is producing this feeling?” You may well be surprised, and that could lead to a healing you might not have even believed was possible.