Accessing Resilience from Adversity
By: Dr. Denise Renye
A mountainous landscape with vibrant orange and yellow tones fills the scene, highlighting a small figure standing atop one of the peaks, emphasizing the vastness of the surroundings and the journey of facing trauma and healing.
What we’re witnessing in the world right now, especially in Israel and Palestine, is the infliction of trauma and the activation of trauma. People throw that word around a lot these days, but to be specific, trauma occurs anytime a person’s nervous system is overwhelmed and affects their ability to cope on a physical and emotional/spiritual level.
Trauma can be from war, a car accident, abuse (sexual, physical, verbal, financial, or emotional), sudden death or experiencing a near-death of your own or someone important to you, miscarriage, repeated childhood neglect, poverty and class differences, racism, etc.
Trauma can be a one-time incident, or it can be multiple incidents over a period of time. Trauma is also inherited from your ancestors. And maybe it’s imprinted from other lifetimes. Who knows? There’s a lot to unpack with trauma which is why there are so many books and courses devoted to it. It’s one of my specialties too as a Bay Area trauma informed therapist. One place I like to start with trauma is encouraging my patients and clients to take the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) test.
Researchers learned that 10 specific traumatic childhood experiences, or ACEs, could be linked to a higher likelihood of health challenges later in life such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems. Studies also show the likelihood of these negative effects increased with the number of “ACEs” a child experienced.
Not every kind of trauma is listed in the ACEs test, but it offers a starting point to learn more about one’s self. Sometimes people who come from traumatic backgrounds have trouble recognizing their childhoods weren’t so great. They use denial as a coping strategy because seeing the truth can feel too threatening.
What often ends up happening for a person from a trauma background, whether they’re in denial or not, is they start to experience symptoms such as anxiety, depression, addiction, perfectionism, and/or more. Sometimes the person starts showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This could be in the form of dissociation, which involves feeling disconnected from oneself or one's surroundings; or it could be in the form of hypervigilance, which is a state of increased fear and sensitivity to threats either real or perceived.
To be clear, these are not states you have to live with. Healing is possible with effort, and you can turn adversity into resilience, or the ability to bounce back from hardship. You can live a happy, healthy, whole-person kind of life. For people who experienced ACEs, I recommend inner child work (among other things) to support their healing.
You can be the parent you needed and perhaps didn’t get. While you can’t rewrite history, you can heal by giving yourself a “do-over.” You can reimagine an upsetting situation and provide a different outcome. This form of active imagination may work wonders because the body doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality. When you imagine a different outcome for yourself, you are essentially reliving the experience and rewiring your brain to think about it in a new way.
This is how you heal trauma – you give your nervous system a new experience. You let your body-mind know it’s safe to be in the world. You process whatever happened to you in such a way that it’s no longer quite so overwhelming. When you do, you may be able to view the traumatic event(s) from a different lens, perhaps as if it’s a movie you watched instead of something you lived. If you’re able to create some space in this way, you may start to act differently.
Journal Prompts
Reimagine Your Past: Reflect on a past experience that impacted you. Close your eyes and imagine how it could have gone differently to provide the support you needed. Write about this revised scenario and your emotional reactions.
Safe Space Visualization: Think about a distressing memory. Visualize yourself in a safe, peaceful place, and write about how this exercise affects your emotions and understanding of the mind-body connection.
For more support, check out the resources below and subscribe to my newsletter.
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Resources
Adult Children of Alcoholics and other Dysfunction. www.adultchildren.org.
American Society for the Positive Care of Children. “Take the ACEs quiz.” https://americanspcc.org/take-the-aces-quiz/. Accessed October 19, 2023.