Resilience: Thoughts and Tools for Showing Up in Life

Betül Tatar is a PhD candidate in Psychology at the University of Glasgow and a Masters student in Counselling at Abertay University. She is happiest when travelling, pondering the meaning of life, and drinking Turkish coffee. You can connect with her on Twitter or via email. In this post, she discusses difficult life experiences (including depression and thoughts of suicide) and what she learned about resilience through the process of overcoming her struggles.

My first conscious experience of resilience was in February 2012 when my father passed away from a heart attack and I had to adjust to a life without him. Identifying my experiences with grief as ‘resilience’ occurred to me as an afterthought a few years later. Just as I’m not motivated to learn about all the background work my laptop does while I’m typing this sentence, I had no reason to explore resilience until then – both mine and as a concept. It was simply running in the background for the occasional minor stressors of an eighteen-year-old.

The unexpected loss of my father introduced several changes into my life. I became so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed unless it was essential. To my unwell, overachiever self, it was essential to achieve nothing less than perfect in my undergraduate studies and buy food to fuel my binge-eating disorder. In short, I was committing ‘suicide by lifestyle’, often also contemplating taking my own life. Within this hopelessness, however, I was also experiencing something I loosely described as, ‘the power to show up for life when you have every reason not to’, which is one form of resilience.

Here are some things I learned about resilience by working through and coming out the other side of my experiences, all of which are helpful to push through both the difficulties of PGR life and our personal lives.

Resilience is Lifelong and Dynamic

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines resilience as, ‘an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change’. For me, this means the power to adjust to misfortune even if it seems insurmountable… by showing up to life. In the aftermath of my struggles, my researcher mind inevitably became curious about this showing-up power, and now, here’s what I know about resilience as a young adult and a PhD student: it is a lifelong and dynamic process, rather than a time- and context-bound event.

Resilience is ever-evolving through our interactions with the environment, both inside and outside. This is great news, because it implies that cultivating resilience now in the context of one misfortune may engender a more powerful, quicker and/or prolonged positive adaptation in the context of a future misfortune. For instance, the process of adjusting to the loss of my father has shaped my current experiences of loss, whether it be ending a relationship, quitting a job or moving to a new country.

Resilience Can Be Messy

Resilience gets messy, and when it does, an extra determination nudge (from yourself or another) goes a long way. Although it’s easy to romanticise resilience in hindsight, it’s sometimes very challenging to show up for life.

In those messy moments, a more action-based determination nudge may support the process of resilience. For me in the past, these nudges looked like attending a therapy appointment even when I could barely walk from a binge or even just getting out of bed. Now, my go-to nudges are to meditate for 10 minutes or read one sentence from the random page of a random book.

Tools for Resilience are Personal

Tools for practicing resilience look different for everyone. Although resilience as a concept may be fuzzy for many of us, on a regular basis, it comes with more grounded and practical tools that help enhance our showing-up power.

Local examples include moving for fun at the UofG sports facilities, joining PGR Lunchtime Walks for a midday recharge when they are running (follow @UofG_PGRblog on Twitter and Instagram and watch your email to find out when they start up again), and attending PGR Wellbeing Workshops on topics such as sleep and stress. For one-to-one support and guidance, Counselling & Psychological Services offer both drop-in consultations and blocks of counselling sessions, and Big White Wall is a helpful online service.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of finding tools that work for our individual needs. I am particularly passionate about resilience for introverts because the tools that are publicised are often socially oriented, therefore better fuelling extrovert resilience. As an introvert, I know that social activities reduce rather than improve my ‘showing up power’. When I feel out of place in our extroverted culture, I turn to Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, or her brilliant Ted Talk on the power of introverts.

Resilience is for Community, not just the Self

Resilience may look like bouncing forward instead of back and focusing upon yourself from a place of self-preservation rather than selfishness. Recovering from or adjusting to misfortune may mean finding a new way of living rather than going back to old ways, and that often requires reflection and self-awareness (the information and exercises in the ‘Resilience in Research’ booklet from the University of Dundee are a good place to start/get inspiration for reflective practice)

Having observed resilience in action both in my life and that of my friends, however, the kind of resilience that excites me the most is the one that expands beyond the person themselves. For our community in particular, this may look like being attentive to each other’s struggles and needs (and encouraging people to address them meaningfully). Because most of us are high-functioning perfectionists (and/or highly-ambitious, overworked individuals), attending to each other may require listening for very subtle indicators of distress, or “growing rabbit ears” – a phrase that Dr Irvin Yalom originally used in his book The Gift of Therapy in reference to the therapist-client relationship, but in my opinion also works well here. The Scottish Mental Health First Aid Training and the SRC Mind Your Mate workshop may help with growing those ears.

What do you think? What does resilience look like in your experience? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @betultatar_ and @UofG_PGRblog.