Demonstrating resilience doesn’t mean that you’ve never experienced adversity. It also doesn’t indicate emotional numbing and pretence. Resilience calls for a combination of vulnerability and courage—the courage to admit that you need help and the openness to access and use the service honestly. Persons might need help in various situations: family dysfunction, personal tragedy, relationship breakdown, healing from grief and loss.
Additionally, many live in societies where the trauma is ongoing. For example, the trauma of racism is never-ending; therefore, developing resilience in the face of these realities is crucially important.
Here are seven ways you can cultivate resilience that will help you cope with trauma.
Safe space
One way to build resilience is by finding a safe space where you can bring both joy and pain. Your safe space can be a small group or friendship circle that you can access for support when dealing with difficulties.
Peer-led groups can also be kind nurturing spaces; therefore, if you cannot find a group that meets your needs, perhaps you can research how to become facilitators of such a place or invite a therapist to help start one and move it to become peer-led.
Women only safe space
Women need safe and dedicated spaces for their healing. This is necessary because sometimes the pain that women experience and need to heal from is perpetrated by men. While these are not male-bashing places, they give women the chance to talk about their pain without censure or filtering.
It’s a space where you can take all of yourself and connect with others with similar experiences. Groups such as this also allow members to learn from each other and grow together.
Safe relationships
Cultivating safe relationships is crucial to helping you stay afloat when tragedy hits.
All safe relationships have good boundaries, and they have excellent conflict management and communication skills. Persons in safe relationships can express their needs and ask for what they want. Cultivating safe relationships help you to identify the people in your life that can offer support through difficulties.
As you move to become more resilient, you might have to leave some people who don’t serve who you are becoming. Some people help you maintain the place of stress and distress—emotional numbing and harmful cycles. Healing and resilience building will highlight the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships. Knowing the features of healthy relationships will help you decide who should be in your life.
Safe relationships also include having trustworthy people. These are individuals who can hold you during difficulties, and they are not judgmental or critical.
Safety in your body
The mind and body connection is an overlooked way of building emotional strength and resilience. Your body can help you maintain a good balance in dealing with trauma. Body safety means that you develop a special connection between your mind and body that will help you. For example, recognising your body’s call for rest, water, good nutrition is crucial. Being able to hear and give your body what it needs is genuinely unique.
Some women are not used to their voices being acknowledged or their concerns validated when they talk about how they feel or share what’s happening to their bodies. This attitude can influence a lack of trust in self which could lead to women also ignoring the signals that their bodies give to stop.
Building resilience also includes learning how to trust you and listen and become friends with your body, giving it what it needs at the right time and being attuned to get cues for what it might need next.
You might also have to work at silencing negative voices that might shame you into not feeling tired or glorify overwork. Becoming friends with your body might mean changing your circle of friends that see tiredness as a badge of honour.
Safe activities
Resilience building could also include finding activities that are safe for you. Activities that encourage strength building, using your body as well as your mind. Activities that you are comfortable with but that would also stretch and challenge you.
Engage in activists that encourages movement to help the body relieve stress and maintain relaxed muscles.
Safety in your thoughts
So far, I have talked about resilience building concerning your body and safe relationships. However, emotional strength also includes mastery over your thoughts.
Because frequently, the things that we struggle with, such as personal or family hardships, can overwhelm us. On the one hand, we learn how to deal with trauma and tragedies from our families of origin. And on the other hand, our thoughts about traumatic events and how we feel about ourselves also impact our beliefs.
Some of us learn a view of self that was problematic not because we thought so but because of what caregivers reflected, and we adopted it. Therefore growing in resilience will also mean learning how to tackle and overcome negative automatic thoughts.
Safety with self
Safety with self is the ability to go inside and be with you just as you are.
Maya Angelou said, “I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find a home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we do.”
Find a home within you. That comes with facing all of you and being comfortable with what you discover.
Resilience will also include finding a supportive community to help you deal with the parts you are not happy with. The hurt, unfulfilled woman needs a safe place to heal.
Reliance building can be fun and engaging. Incorporate it into your everyday life and grow in your ability to manage stress without distress.
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