How to be resilient

Helen Brice is a psychotherapist and founded Stimmung Therapy in 2010 to provide discreet and confidential psychotherapy for DJs, all genres of musicians, songwriters, composers, actors, broadcasters, writers, artists, theatre practitioners and designers. She writes on behalf of the ISM Trust.

Resilience is something that comes up a great deal in my private practice. Clients sometimes want to become more robust to life events, and less prone to falling apart so as not to put themselves back together again, particularly when it comes to their profession.

First, I pose the question: what is resilience? Here’s one online dictionary definition:

1. the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress;

2. an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

Contrary to popular supposition, resilience is not never falling apart. Nor is it being fiercely independent, or never experiencing embarrassment, shame, guilt, sadness, depression or anxiety. Nor is it being unaffected by misfortune.

Rather, resilience is ‘bouncing back’ after disappointment; trying again having failed previously, coming back for more when you’ve been rejected, continuing even when you’ve been disempowered. Furthermore, resilience is being judged, and getting over it.

Here’s what might threaten resilience and mental health in the workplace: harassment, being verbally attacked, continuous criticism, denigration, consistent digs that can be plausibly denied as ‘teasing’, being given the ‘cold shoulder’ from colleagues and/or bosses, being ostracised or excluded.

Psychological resilience can be associated with sensitivity; some people are born sensitive, so their resilience, and they’re ability to ‘bounce back’ from adverse situations, from misfortune, from setbacks, is already impaired.

Musicians, performers, actors, writers, anyone who creates something that the public is going to witness, see, read, hear are resilient in their work all the time.

Resilience is being able to show a bit of vulnerability, because vulnerability connects us to people and says, ‘You and I are the same.’

Resilience comes up in my work as a psychotherapist working with musicians and creative people when people have become thin-skinned due to a loss of confidence; or if they’re in a toxic workplace environment.

We need resilience because it’s important for maintaining, or building self-worth, self-confidence, and for effective management of conflict.

If you find yourself being excluded or ostracized or ignored, despite working in difference environments, then it’s worth considering that there could be something in your character style that is inadvertently attracting this behaviour from someone.

So, what can you do?

- Ask a trusted friend whether there is something you might be giving off inadvertently to attract this behaviour from another.

- At early stages, having made a personal log of it, face the intimidator. Make a personal log of this interaction too and follow it up in an email to HR/Management with the dates and times of the ‘assault’ as well as your interaction with the perpetrator.

Imagery Techniques

Imagine donning a ‘golden cloak’, a ‘Teflon coating’ as a layer of resilience before being in the presence of the person by whom you are intimidated or feel over-powered.

Coaching

An experienced skills coach in practical mindfulness can help you to

hone your awareness of emotions, physical sensations, thoughts, urges, and memories/images with mindful observation and description.

This is useful for three reasons:

1. Research in the behavioural and scientific world shows that labelling an emotion brings the intensity down by about 20-30%;

2. Naming physiological experiences is a gateway to being able to recognise emotions; labeling what you experience through your five senses also keeps you out of your head, which is useful when you experience any unwanted emotion intensely (so you can choose to leave out thoughts when you practice this);

3. By owning the experience (by saying ‘I’) and by using the script ‘…am aware of the emotion’, or ‘the sensation’, and so on, this distances you from the experience in a non-dissociative manner. You are therefore more likely to gain control in your response to a situation, and it clears your head to decide as to whether to speak up, to walk away, to tell someone to stop, or report an incident to HR, and so on.

Techniques to lessen the threat

Switch on your ‘Safety System’. This is a technique born out of Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory and a skill honed by Professor Tom Lynch, which he calls The Big 3 + 1. When we experience threat, we tend to get tense. This includes the face, which becomes frozen of expression. When your face is flat, your Safety System is off, and the message to your brain is, ‘There’s a threat here,’ over and over. As soon as you start moving the face, you switch on the Safety System, and the message to your brain is, ‘There is no threat.’

Here’s what you do: breathe with your diaphragm, do a closed-mouth smile, wag your eyebrows and if sitting down, lean back. (It’s a good idea to practice eyebrow wags in the mirror; you need to be able to be subtly raise and lower your eyebrows at the start of each phrase you speak, for example.)

You can also use Unique Mindfulness Meditation to invoke calm and peacefulness (not on Headspace or other Apps). Find out more about this on my website: stimmungtherapy.com

If panic attacks or time off work have settled in, then a different kind of coaching is necessary, and some deeper psychological work may be required.

Helen Brice

UKCP MBACP MUPCA (Accred) FRSA