Building Resilience in Recovery

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@allceus.com Counselortoolbox you I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on building resilience. Over the next little while, we're going to talk about what resilience really is, explore the characteristics of resilient people, identify how we can help people become more resilient, and highlight activities which can help people deal with unpleasant events when they happen. So resilience is really a personal process. It's not just an endpoint or something you do. It's sort of a way of living. And we're going to talk about that now. For those of you who are, you know, as old as I am, you probably remember Weeble wobbles, and this is kind of what we're talking about. Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down. You can push them down. You can push them down hard and they just pop right back up. That's kind of what we're talking about when we're talking about resilience. It doesn't mean that life isn't going to knock people down, but they're able to pop back up. Resilience is a process or a lifestyle that enables people to bounce back in the face of adversity. A dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity. So resilience is not going to be the same across situations. Resilience means you have this toolbox of tools and you're capable of using them and implementing them when necessary. And there are things that you're going to do. Sometimes you're going to do more of one thing, maybe more distress tolerance, because there's not a lot you can do to change the situation. Other times you may do more problem solving skills or interpersonal effectiveness and garnering that social support, depending on the situation. But resilience means that you've got a full toolbox and you've got the energy to implement those tools. Now, one of the keys for a lot of our clients is that resilience develops over time as people are exposed to and successfully navigate stressors. So if children are raised in the environment, in an environment where they never are exposed to adversity, where they always get their way, where they always win, where they always this, then when adversity comes and they can't control it, they may not have developed the skills to be able to get into their wise mind and have problem Solving skills and tools in their toolbox in order to, you know, deal with that stressor. You know, think about growing up as children. You know, little tiny children on the playground. Some of their first adversity is somebody takes a swing that you wanted to get on. You know, yeah, that's not a big thing in our lives now. You know, obviously we're not going to get upset if somebody steals our swing, but to a three year old, that's a big deal. So having the three year old figure out how to successfully navigate not getting something that they wanted or falling down and skinning their knee or something else that happened, they come through it, they realize, okay, I can handle this. Now, you know, we don't explicitly talk with 3 year olds about the tools that they use to get through things, but as children grow, we talk more and more about how they're taking part in solving those problems and dealing with adversity. I remember, you know, when my, when my children were younger, they would get upset and we would talk about how they were feeling and what was going on and maybe how to successfully deal with that situation or that feeling that they were having. But you know, you have to wait till kids are a little bit older to do that. As you do, they start to learn that. Okay, yeah, that's right. I do have these tools back here that I can pull out. I'm confident and I'm confident in my ability to navigate life. The central principles of resiliency theory include looking at risk factors and mechanisms, which a lot of our clients have, a lot of people have. When you look at the ACE Adverse Childhood Experiences survey, you realize that a lot of people, or a lot of things that they consider adverse childhood experiences, most people have gone through some of them. So most of us have been exposed to some risk factors. Now the cool thing is if you go back to the last slide, if you are exposed to those risk factors and you successfully navigate them, you know, you kind of thumb your nose at it and go, you're not going to keep me down. You develop skills, resiliency, tools to go, you know, I can make it. Despite the fact that then there's vulnerability factors. And it's kind of difficult to differentiate between risk and vulnerability factors unless you get way down in the weeds. And we're not going to do a lot of that today. But think about dialectical behavior therapy. When we talk about vulnerabilities, vulnerability factors are those factors that make you more likely to react strongly and negatively or unhelpfully to adverse situations. So cognitive Distortions, cognitive impairment, current mental health issues all make people more vulnerable to not being able to deal with stress, you know, to being that weeble wobble that just gets knocked down. Protective factors and mechanisms are those things that help people take on stress. Your emotional regulation skills, distress tolerance, problem solving, social support, yada, yada. We're going to talk about a lot of those. Those are the things that we want to have our clients look at ahead of time and go, you know what? I need to build these up before there's a problem. You know, ideally I did it before, you know, long before. But if they're in our office, if they've got depression, if they've got anxiety, you know, they may not be as resilient as they can be. So let's look at how to build some of these protective factors to help them proactively and preventatively with future stressors. So some of the risk factors and mechanisms are things that they've identified. They being researchers that have identified, can cause distress in early life. And they basically create a situation where the child does not develop the skills and tools that they need for whatever reason. Poverty, prematurity, residential mobility and lack of family or community ties. An addicted or dysfunctional family environment. If the parents don't know how to cope, if the parents can't teach coping skills, then Junior's not going to learn them. Junior's not born with inherent coping skills. I mean, he'll mutter through and he'll probably figure it out because we're inherently resilient. But in order to be truly resilient and happy, you know, Junior may need a little bit of help. Illness, if there's illness in the family or in the child, that prevents them from developing according to what we consider the normal pattern. So we want to look at all of these things and what risk factors might have been there and did they have an impact? You know, some people, like I said, can. They may grow, come up in an impoverished environment. I grew up, you know, there were days we didn't have two nickels to rub together. We were impoverished. Does that mean that I was not going to be able to deal with life on life's terms? No. There were things that compensated for that. So I don't want to say that every child in poverty is going to fail to be resilient. That's not true. But these are factors that we want to look at and go, what might be going on here that we could preemptively look at and intervene? Both of my children were micro preemies. They know that children that are born that early tend to have risk factors for other developmental delays. So, I mean, the Department of Children Services uses Medicaid Part D, I think, or whatever with all premature children to provide early intervention services. So those are the types of programs we want to advocate for in our community that can help people who are impoverished have the resources they need, help children who are premature get the therapy and whatever else they may need in order to be developmentally on par with children of a similar chronological age. If there's a lot of residential mobility, and this is true in impoverished neighborhoods, this is also true among, you know, military families, for example, where they move every couple of years. Does it mean that the child is inherently unresilant? No. Some of the most resilient people I know actually were from military families because they had to learn to cope and deal. Addicted and dysfunctional families, like I said, you don't learn coping. So these are all things that when we're doing our assessment, we can look at, we can see, you know, what may have gone awry. When I look at resiliency, though, when I'm looking at an adult client, I don't focus really here. This is where I look at for prevention efforts, for grants, for going out into the community. What I'm looking at when I'm talking to adult clients is addressing any current vulnerabilities they have and any current preventative factors we can bolster. Vulnerability factors are those traits genetic predispositions or environmental or biological deficits which may cause heightened response sensitivity or reaction to stressors, which is basically a long way of saying emotional dysregulation, if you want to kind of distill it way down. People with cognitive impairment, for example, fetal alcohol spectrum issues and, you know, it's on a spectrum. So you may have people who have just a mild impairment to major impairment, lack of social support. People can only deal with so much and carry so much on their own shoulders before they have to, you know, ask for help. So if they don't have social support, they may be at that breaking point. Emotional dysregulation, whether you want to consider it, you know, wherever you want to think about how it comes to be. If they have difficulty regulating their own emotions, then when life comes at them, you know, it's going to be whatever life threw at them times 10, ineffective coping skills, they never learn them. You know, the great thing is they can learn them now. Mood or addictive disorders in the person. So if they're already depressed or anxious, they're going to have a more difficult time dealing with life on life's terms. And as you all know, poor physical health, pain, especially chronic pain, makes it more difficult for people to deal. Poor nutrition. You're not giving your body the building blocks to stabilize and be happy and make all the neurotransmitters and hormones it needs. Hormone imbalances, you know, your sex hormones, your thyroid hormones, these can all make people feel anxious or depressed and will make it harder for them to deal with new stressors as they come in and lack of quality sleep. So these are things, you know, just from the get go, we can look when we're talking to our clients and we can say, all right, we're in here. What small changes can we make in here to start mitigating these vulnerabilities? We might not be able to eliminate them, but we can start teaching some effective coping skills. We can start, maybe they need to see a psychiatrist to try antidepressants for a short course to get the energy to do what they need. But we can start looking here and saying, okay, here are some relatively easy positive forward changes. When we start doing that, we give hope. And what is hope but energy to bounce up? Hope is something that fuels resilience. Protective factors and mechanisms enhance or promote resistance to stressors. Rudder 1987 and there's some resources in your class if you want to read some of the academic articles suggests that protective mechanisms may operate in one of four ways. Reducing the impact. So when something bad happens, the person can deal with it and instead of them it knocking them completely down, it just kind of brings them to their knees for a second and they get back up. Reducing negative chain reactions to risk factors. So when something happens, something negative happens. Protective factors can step in and prevent further harm. Yes, it knocked you down, but it doesn't mean you need to go out and start drinking again. But it doesn't mean you need to self injure. But it doesn't mean, okay, so we're going to take all those secondary reactions that you know to the stressor that may be unhelpful reactions to stress and protective factors say, okay, let's do something different. They can promote resiliency traits such as confidence and competence and it can set up new opportunities for success by having people look at things a little bit differently and go, okay, you know, I lost that job. Now I can look at it as a complete failure and a devastation and yada yada, or I can look at it as a new challenge, a new opportunity to succeed and I can figure out now that life has handed me lemons, I can figure out how to make the best darn lemonade possible. There are two types of protective factors and assets, which are things that reside within the individual resources like social support, community based opportunities to learn and practice skills. And this can be in, if you have prevention groups or intervention level groups, it can be volunteer opportunities. It can be a whole bunch of things that offer people the opportunity to practice these new resiliency skills and challenge their cognitive distortions and whatever it is that you're talking about in therapy. And one of the things I ask a lot of my clients to do is when we talk about a new skill in group or in individual, I say, okay, how can you use this? Where are you going to have the opportunity to use this over the next week? And I encourage them to keep a log and they review that the next time they're in group or in session. I it's one of the first things I ask. I say, you know, last week we talked about addressing your all or none thinking by looking for exceptions. So tell me three times that you did that last week and how did that work? So I really want to make sure that they don't just talk about it and then go off into life itself and not actually implement it. So we want to encourage people to learn and practice wellness programs that support biological health. And that's just a really big garbage term for. Think about Maslow's hierarchy. People need to have health. I mean, like I said, if their hormones are out of whack, they could have some anxiety, they could have some depression. And this is not just estrogen, this is thyroid hormones, testosterone, progesterone, a whole host of hormones that are involved in feeling happy and feeling calm. But they also need good nutrition so they can give their body the building blocks. They need safety so they can sleep at night and not worry that somebody's going to break in or not be sleeping in their car or on the street. So we need, when I say wellness programs, I'm really talking about that whole set of social service wraparound programs. That's essential because if you've got somebody who is hungry, in pain, sick and sleeping on the street, the last thing they're really worried about right now is addressing cognitive distortions. They're worried about getting a roof over their head and being safe. So we want to advocate for people to find resources in the community. Your local United Way is a great place to start to find out what resources are available and some of your food pantries also may have other local resources that United Way doesn't have. Unfortunately, we don't have one database that really covers everything because it relies on voluntary inclusion. So don't be afraid to go out and ask, you know, some of your state funded mental health clinics that are out there. If that's not where you work, you know, where can I refer somebody who has housing issues or financial issues. If you live in a university town, especially one with a law school, you may have free legal services. With one with a dental school, you may have low cost dental services. So there's a lot of stuff we can help people reach out and access so they have the ability to feel good about themselves, to sleep well and have a good strong foundation, to start being resilient. So the six Cs of resilience, coping, control, character, confidence, competence and connection. Now connections are your social support and that's more of a resource. The first five are internal assets and we're going to talk about those now. So coping, this is one of the things that, you know, we talk about over and over in counseling. So this isn't a new surprise. Not going to spend a lot of time on it. Coping helps people effectively balance negative and positive emotions and manage strong impulses. So there are, you know, most of you who've been here before know that I lean more towards ACT and DBT approaches. So emotion regulation is one of those coping skills that helps people prevent or mitigate vulnerabilities. And a lot of times we forget to mitigate. We say we want to prevent it. You want to get good nutrition, you want to get enough sleep so you are physically charged and able to handle life on life's terms. But what happens on those days that you wake up and you are not on your A game, you didn't sleep well, you're feeling like you got hit by a Mack truck. Well, you can't just go back to bed usually and say, I'm going to start over again tomorrow. So how do you mitigate that vulnerability? Knowing that day you're going to be a little bit more sensitive to stressors that are going on. Or for example, if you have a crisis in your family, a death in the family or something that throws you off kilter, you can't make that go away, you can't prevent that. So when you're having a knot on your a game day, how can you mitigate it? So you can deal with life as well as possible. And part of that involves self compassion and I encourage clients to really think about that because they tend to overlook self compassion. They're like, I'm just going to put my head down and muster through. And I'm like, well that's great, but you got to be kind to yourself. What would you tell your best friend? What would you want to tell your best friend to do in this situation? What would you tell your child to do? Well, let's look at that because you're typically. Clients are typically more compassionate with other people. We want to help them learn distress tolerance skills because a lot of people don't have them. So they don't have to act in their emotional mind, develop problem solving skills. Not everything can be changed. Some things happen. If there's a death, you know, you can't change that, so there's no problem solving there. You can't go back and think, well, let's do some things differently and raise Jim Bob from the dead. Ain't gonna happen. So distress tolerance is more where the person probably needs to focus and dealing, you know, to enable them to deal with those really strong emotions when they can't change the situation. So how can they accept it radically, accept it is what it is and improve the next moment? The other next characteristic is control and autonomy, a sense of personal identity and ability to act independently, to exert some control over one's situation. This goes back to that acceptance and commitment therapy basis that we talk about a lot. Who are you and who and what is important to you? So I asked my clients this at the very beginning. I want to know what our destination happiness really looks like. So where are we going? If you're thinking about treatment planning, you know when the person comes, a person comes in and they say, I'm depressed. And you say, okay, well what's your goal? To not be depressed? Okay, well, yeah, but what does that look like for you? What? Instead of looking at not being something, what are you going to be instead? Tell me what life is going to be like when you reach this goal. What's important to you? What if you only have a certain amount of energy and you have all these things coming at you and you've got to pick and choose what to spend your energy on. What are you going to spend your energy on? What is most important to spend that energy on in your mind? So this is often a weekend assignment or maybe a week assignment for people to really think about. What is it that they want their life to look like when they're, when they're happy, you know, what's going to be different? What are they working towards? What are Their goals. Now there's going to be some long term goals, you know, achievement, success. You know, maybe they want to have a, they're young and they want to have a family. Well, that's not going to happen in the next six months. But what do they need to do if that's important to them? Well, score. Okay, so what do you need to do to get you from here to that point? What things can you do to change in this situation? The situation or reaction to the situation? So you know all the things that are important to you, you have an idea where you're going, you know what you're going to spend your limited energy on. And then life throws, throws you a curve ball and you're like, ah, so what do you do? Well, first thing is I encourage people to ask themselves, what can they change the situation? You know, if there's a death, like I said, you can't change that situation. It's not going to go away. But if the situation is you're really unhappy in your current job, well, that you might be able to change. Okay, if you can't change the situation, can you change your reaction to the situation? So looking at, you know, if you're really upset about something, I want to validate that feelings are normal. Your body does those for a reason. Fight, flight and depression or sadness. Those are there to help protect you and help you survive your initial feeling totally normal. These feelings that you hold on to afterwards, what is their function and are they helpful or unhelpful? If they're unhelpful, how can you change the reaction? For example, you know, going back again to if somebody passed away in your family, you're upset that they passed away. And then you spend the next two or three weeks beating yourself up for all the things you should have done before they died or should have said to them, or shouldn't have said to them or this or that or the other, that reaction to the situation, is that helpful? How can you deal with that in a way that uses your energy to get you towards the things that are currently important to you? And you know, there's a process of grieving and forgiveness, don't get me wrong, but I encourage clients to really look at how they're using their energy and whether they're just stuck and stewing and kind of like flailing around in quicksand, or if what they're doing is a productive way of working through their grief to get move forward in their life. Character is the next one and a sense of purpose and future. So We've been talking about this already a little bit. Purposeful action means making realistic plans for a meaningful life based on what's important to you. So I have clients, you know, if you do it in a group, it can be really fun because a lot of times clients have some similar goals. So you can put the goals up there on the board and you can identify some that are common to most people in the room. And you can say, okay, now what are some realistic plans? What do you need to do order to help you start getting closer to this goal? Maybe it's closer relationships with your. With your family. Okay, so what do you need to do to start working toward that? And it can be going to counseling to deal with your own issues. It can be finding time to spend with the family. You start brainstorming ideas up there. And the cool thing about this is it gets some energy going in the room and people start saying, okay, I can see how these different things are important, and I might have overlooked this other thing over here. And then they leave the group with a plan or the beginning of a plan for achieving that goal, that one goal in their life. And then you encourage them to kind of do the same thing for some other goals in their life and bring it back to the next session. So they're identifying where they want to spend their energy. And every time. And I encourage clients to do this throughout the week as we talk about purposeful action. Every time they start to get upset, they start to get angry, they start to want to run away. Whatever it is. I want them to take a deep breath and just ask themselves, is this reaction getting me closer to or farther away from what's important, or is this worth my energy? Whatever works for them and encourage them to really start becoming more mindful of how they use their energy. Most people have 15 anger situations per day. That's a lot. That's a lot of energy that's wasted if you get stuck fighting with that anger. So how much more energy would you have to work towards the things that are important if you started letting go of some of the stuff that really was inconsequential, like the person who stole your parking space or cut you off in traffic, or the person who took too long ordering at the lunch line or whatever it was? And I also encourage them to notice positive, forward moving thoughts and behaviors in themselves and others by keeping a journal. And I asked them to do this at the end of every day and sometimes at the beginning, depending on the client. What positive, forward moving thoughts did you have? Today or are you going to have today that will help you keep going in the face of adversity? So if they wake up and maybe they're struggling with depression or generalized anxiety, they wake up and they're not having a good day. You know, it's a three on the scale of one to five, with five being a good day. And, you know, they're like, wow. So I would ask them, what positive thought can you start telling yourself that will help you keep going, that will help you be resilient again? Sometimes there's some compassion in there. You know, all right, this is not the best day, but I can do these sorts of things, or I'm grateful that it's not as bad as it was yesterday. So encourage them to really start looking at their cognitions they want to have, or I want them to develop a sense of purpose. What they're doing means something, and it's effective. So, you know, the confidence and the character, they're all kind of building on each other, and then there's confidence. You can tell yourself a whole bunch of things, but if you don't believe it, it's not going to do a lot of good. So have them list their strengths. A lot of times when I do this in group, I have them do it on a sheet of paper, and I give them a number. 10, 15. I want you to list 15 strengths that you have, and most people don't get there, and that's okay. And after 10 minutes, I'll call time and we'll start writing strengths on the board. And I encourage them just to throw out ideas of what strengths would be, and we write those out on the whiteboard. And then I usually take a break, and I say, okay, during the break, I want you to look at what we wrote up on the whiteboard and add strengths that you didn't think of that you have to your list in order to get to that 15. Most of our clients probably minimize their strengths and highlight their weaknesses. So this is one of those times. We can start encouraging them to look at their strengths and highlight them and go, okay, I can do this. When they face stressors and they get upset or they get frustrated or they have the urge to do something, I encourage them to ask themselves, in what ways does your response to this make sense? You know, if you get fired from your job and you just want to run away or you want to go have a drink just to forget about it, or you want to scream, that's not necessarily the healthiest response. But in what ways does that make sense? Well, it's an overwhelming stressor. You want fight or flight. It has kicked in. Your body doesn't want to deal with this right now. So it, you know, it makes sense. Now the question is, even though it makes sense, it's not the most helpful response. What would be a more helpful response? So the next question can be, how have you gotten through similar situations? Maybe you haven't been fired from a job before, but you've lost something or you didn't. Maybe you tried out for the football team and you didn't make it. So you've been disappointed. How have you handled that? And it's not the same. I understand your job puts food on your table and there's a whole lot of other responsibilities that are associated with it. But let's look at some similar situations where you've encountered something that was kind of devastating. How did you get through it? And I also encourage them to look at what helpful and self defeating thoughts are they telling themselves about this situation. So they get fired, they get upset if they can take out a piece of paper and just start jotting down all the thoughts that they're having. No censorship, don't even have to make a column of good thoughts and unhelpful thoughts. Just jot them down for three minutes. At the end of three minutes, go back and look at those thoughts and see how many were helpful. You know, highlight those and see how many were self defeating or catastrophic. Rephrase those or reframe those to highlight the person's strengths and underscore your confidence in them and their confidence in themselves that this really sucks right now, but I can get through it. Competence is the ability to mitigate emotions and successfully problem solve, which is great. You know, confidence, confidence and competence are seen the same, but people can be really confident and not very confident. When I was in grad school, one of my professors one time said that the a lot of interns come out of school, they go into their first internship and their confidence is way up here and their competence is way down here. That is the limiting factor because, you know, their confidence will help pull them up a little bit, but they still have a lot of skills to learn. So we both highlighted their strengths. We've bolstered their confidence. Now we need to help them actually practice implementing this and say, okay, this has happened, it feels catastrophic right now. What are your options? What did you do correctly so far in this situation? You know, you took a break, you called for and you asked for help. And what prior successes have you had. How much progress have you made in dealing with your depression or managing your emotions over the past six months as you've been learning these new tools? And then we move on to alright, now we look at your options. What do you need to do? Do you need to use some of the skills we've learned? Do you need to ask for help from someone? Where can you get social support? People who have competence and confidence don't feel ashamed or don't feel embarrassed by asking for help. They're able to say, you know what, I've reached my max here and I need a little bit of support in order to build competence. We want to help people get out of their own way, allow themselves to take chances. If you don't step out of your comfort zone, then you're never going to know what you can achieve. So encourage people to try it. You know, try it for an hour, try it for three hours, just see it. Just give it a little shot, see how it works. Encourage them to notice what they do and praise themselves for all the stuff that they do do well, even if they make some mistakes and provide constructive criticism to themselves for what they did so they can go back retroactively, retrospectively and look at a situation. You know, come into counseling on Tuesday, you're like, okay, tell me the most stressful thing that you experienced last week. How did you handle it? What did you do well and what are you going to do differently or better the next time? And how's that going to happen? I always start out with, what did you do well? Because, you know, I don't want to start out by saying, well, what was the most stressful thing and how did you screw it up this time? No, I want to look at what were your strengths? Nobody's perfect. So how can you improve upon this? Encourage people to strive for authentic success. What does that mean? That means success as they define it, not success as their parents define it or the media defines it. What does success mean to them? Because that will help them feel more competent and purposeful in everything that they do. Encourage them to act in their wise mind because a lot of times if they're acting in their emotional mind, if they're acting reactively and on urges, they're not going to think it all the way through. They're going to make unhelpful mistakes. So providing those distress tolerance skills to encourage them to act in their, you know, wise mind, where they're not overly driven by emotion and feeling, that they just have to make the pain or the, the anxiety Stop is going to help them be more successful, which will increase their feeling of competence. Encourage them to stop lecturing and second guessing themselves. The shoulda, coulda, wouldas need to go out the door. You know, build competence means look at what you did, identify why you did it, what your part was in it, look at the big picture. You know, you can armchair quarterback or hindsight is 20 20, whatever you want to say until doomsday. But let's look at what you did and what you're going to do differently or better the next time if anything needs to be done better. And encourage people to rely on assistance and feedback from others to help meet new challenges. The first time you go rock climbing, you don't just go on, go out there and slap on some rappelling gear and go, okay, I'm going to do this. No, you go out with an instructor and generally, even after that you go out with the belay, you're not going to be climbing by yourself. So you're getting assistance from others to help you meet new challenges as you climb the rock wall of life, if you will. That doesn't mean you're weak. That means that you recognize where your skills, where your competence ends. Your confidence is up here. So in order to move higher in competence, you may need a little bit of assistance, and that's okay. Resources of those with resilience, a safe environment so they can sleep, financial stability so they can get access to food, housing, medical care, you know, like we talked about, and connection and social support not only to others, but also to themselves. If they are not acting authentically, then they may not feel a sense of confidence, competence, pride, purpose in what they're doing. So we want to encourage them to make sure that they have a connection with themselves, that they're being mindful, that they're asking themselves on a regular basis, ideally a couple times a day, what is it that I need? How do I feel right now, what's going on and what is it that I need to improve the next moment and keep moving forward? Think about when you're on a road trip. You know, you're driving along and you know, I don't know about you, but it seems like every time if I'm not paying attention, I'm not being mindful. As soon as I pass a rest stop and the next one's 40 miles away, that's when I have to go to the bathroom. What we want to encourage people to be checking their own personal gauges as they're going through their day. Do they need More gas? Do they need to take a break because their legs are falling asleep? Do they need to give themselves a mini vacation? Do they need to refuel? Do they need, what is it that they need to keep going in a positive direction so they don't run out of gas or have some. Create some other crisis and encourage them also to develop. It takes energy, I know, but to develop social support with other people. And depending on whether it's an extrovert or an introvert, you know, some people may be good with only having one to five, you know, really close friends. Other people may have 40 besties, whatever it is for that person, but make sure they have someone that they think they can call at 2 in the morning or, you know, if it's their spouse, wake up at two in the morning and go, hey, I'm really struggling right now. Activities to develop resilience, enhance relationships with social supports. So this is one you can put up on the board and go, okay, how can we do this? What do we need to do to enhance relationships? And it's not all about just spending more time with people. Sometimes it's about being a more effective communicator, being a better listener, developing relationship skills, setting boundaries. You know, there's a lot of stuff that goes into relationships. See crises or stressful events as challenges or opportunities. Just encourage people as soon as something happens to go, okay, what now? What's the next step? Or how can I accomplish this? Think about scaling a wall or some sort of hurdle. You look at it and you're like, well, not going around that. I'm not going under that. So I need to figure out how to get over that. It doesn't mean that life stops when you hit that obstacle. It means it's a challenge to figure out a new way to get over the obstacle. Encourage them to practice radical acceptance, which is just accepting what is is and going, alright, this is good or this sucks, or this makes me angry. What's the next step? What do I need to do to improve the next moment? Teach them how to develop realistic goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time limited and move towards them. Too many times people create these goals that are ambiguous. You know, I want to feel better or I want to get in shape or I want to be happy. Well, that's great, but what does that look like? And once you see what that looks like, then you got to say, all right, what are the smaller goals? What is something you can achieve this week to help you move towards that goal? Encourage Them to take decisive actions in adverse situations instead of sitting on the fence and feeling powerless. Decisive action can be empowering. It may not be the best decision all the time, but you learn from that. Look for opportunities of self discovery after a struggle. Ask people, what did you learn from this? How did your life change for the better and for the worse? And what can you take away from this in order to integrate it into into your life narrative? You know, this was a plot twist in this chapter. So how does the next chapter open? Encourage them to develop self confidence and keep a long term perspective considering the event in the big scheme of things. You know, this really stinks right now. I guess it was two months ago. We got hit by a small tornado and it took down significant sections of our fencing, which isn't a huge big deal if you don't live on a farm. But you know, the donkeys don't understand not wandering around in the road. So that was, you know, huge. All of a sudden we had 450ft of fence we had to repair and I was totally overwhelmed at the moment. First cup of coffee hadn't even started yet. But I took a breath and I was like, alright, in the big scheme of things, everybody's safe for whatever reason. They went into the barn last night, which is a blessing. So we got this. This weekend's gonna kind of suck, but in the big scheme of things, it's gonna work out okay. Encourage them to maintain a hopeful outlook and care for their mind and body throughout the process. You know, if they are, think of them as a, as a vehicle. You know, you can't take a vehicle and drive cross country if you haven't been putting gas in it and changing the oil and making sure that there's air in the tires. It's just not going to work. So you need to make sure that people are trying to take as good a care of themselves as possible so when things happen, they've got the energy to deal with it. And encourage people to eliminate drains on their energy reserves. You know, some things just aren't necessary right now. I personally don't watch the news that much because I just find it exasperating. You know, I scan the headlines, I keep up with the bare minimum I need to, to be what I consider a competent citizen. But the rest of it, I don't get down into the weeds because there's so much that's out of my control that it's not worth using my energy on. That's my choice. But I encourage people to look at what things in your life right now just suck your energy and don't move you forward. So when unhappy events come along, we want to look at a concept called hardiness. And kielbasa proposed it back in 1979, and they found that people who are more hearty tend to recover faster, not only from psychological stuff, but also from things like open heart surgery. So people who are hearty tend to have commitment to various areas of life which give them a sense of purpose, that they can carry them through turbulent times. So maybe they're committed to being a parent. And this other thing over here really stinks right now. But I have my family, I have my kids, I have the support of my friends. You know, it's not ideal, but if I focus on this, I'm committed to these things that are so important. I can deal with this. Control. Understanding what is and is not within one's control, including thoughts, reactions, behaviors, and the environment. Again, understanding that feelings are natural, nurturing feelings may not be helpful. You know, holding on to that anger, nurturing that grudge may not be helpful. So encourage people to look at, yeah, that initial feeling of being really enraged, that was totally normal and natural. Holding onto it three weeks later, how is that helping you? What can you do to let go of that? So you're not using so much energy on this situation. And sometimes, you know, anger or fear or something can fuel positive actions. So, you know, if you were enraged about something and you're using that anger to motivate you to take positive steps to solve the situation, well, that's one thing. If you're just sitting there stewing on the anger and being ticked off, not so much. So we want to look at control and we want to look at challenge. Viewing the situation as a challenge instead of a threat. Accepting that change is a normal part of life. We talked about the person who got fired from their job. Well, yeah, that can be threatening because you don't know where your next paycheck's coming from or where you're going to be working. So do you perceive it as a threat and terrifying or as a challenge and curiously motivating? You know, it's a normal part of life, people. You know, when we talk about the death, it's a change. Now the challenge is dealing with it and figuring out how you're going to integrate that into the next chapter. This chapter closed. So how does the next chapter open if that person was really important in your life? One of the challenges can be, how can you keep that person's memory ever present and pass along their legacy. So encouraging our clients to maintain that idea of what's important in their life, you know, that ultimate goal. That's their commitment, making sure they focus their energies on the things that are within their control and have that positive view that, you know, okay, this is not the end of the world. And they view it as a challenge, a new puzzle, a new, you know, find some metaphor that works for your client to help them see it as a challenge. If they are a athlete, you might make it akin to doing a tough mudder or doing a 50 mile endurance run. If they are a pilot, you might make it akin to learning how to fly a new type of airplane or something. Encourage them to look at it as something that's exciting in a certain way because it's going to allow them to grow and experience something new. Bolster your reserves. You need to be as energetic and as healthy as possible to handle stuff that comes at you. Otherwise you're just going to get worn down and burned out and that Weeble wobble ink won't get up no more. So positive health behaviors. Already talked about those. Recreation, yes, it's important. Schedule it in relaxation. That's important too. And purposeful action. Avoid wasting energy. So encourage people, you know, they have to have time to rest and recharge. You can't just drain, drain, drain, drain, drain. Go to sleep for six hours and get up and expect you're going to be recharged. You need to have some happy in there. You need to have some belly laughs in there in order to help, you know, balance out the stress, the good with the bad. Encourage people to have a crisis plan. So when the stuff does hit the fan, what do they do? How do they get into their wise mind? How do they redirect anger or fear impulses? If they're feeling like they want to rip somebody a new one, encourage them to find a phone book or some other papers that need to be shredded and shred the heck out of them ripping the paper. If they want to run away, they just want to escape. Maybe they can go on a run or a walk or a hike. They want to get something off their chest. Go bench press something. It doesn't always work, but sometimes if you can help them redirect that fight or flight energy that's telling them to go into something that is positive. Freud called it sublimation. It can help get them regrounded. Identify and address the problem. Creating a happiness plan. So what's the problem and how do I want it to resolve? What is it going to look like in a way that can make me happy? What must be done? Who are the social supports that I can rely on and how can I make boundaries acceptable? All of this needs to be done before the crisis so they have something preferably written down that kind of walks them through the process of, okay, identify and address the problem. They have their list of what's important to them and they can start working through that. They have their list of social supports that they can rely on, so they're not thinking, okay, who can I call? And they've already practiced setting boundaries and going, you know, normally I would love to help you move, or I'd love to watch your kids or whatever you're asking of me, but right now I can't because I've got whatever else going on. And encourage them to practice making boundaries acceptable so they're not feeling like they've got to, you know, squeeze blood out of a turnip when they're already just totally drained from the crisis. Encourage them to develop learned resourcefulness and become their own MacGyver. When efforts to change something successful, then expectations are often generalized to other situations. So if you've had successes in the past, encourage people to generalize those successes to the present. Even if they're not exactly the same situation, they use their creativity and their skills before to accomplish something. They can do that again. Part of that is how people perceive a crisis. Representation looks at what needs to be done. So in the big scheme of things, you know, I lost my job, I need to get a new job. Well, yeah, I need to feed my family. I need to, whatever it is, have them make a list, okay, these are all the things that need to be done. They're representing the problem. Then they evaluate the problem and go, okay, what are my options to solve this problem and can I do this? And this is where that positive self talk and viewing it as a challenge really comes in handy. It's the yes, I can do this. I've done other things. You know, maybe their options that are available are not ideal, but if they can view it as a stepping stone, you know, they may not get another $80,000 a year job right away, but if they can get a job and maybe get set up on with some programs to help them get food stamps or whatever, is it where they want to stay forever? Not necessarily. But is it going to meet their goals of what needs to be done? Yes. And then they can build from there. And the final step, once they have all that out, figured out their options is to choose one and take action. Throughout all of this, we want them to focus on previous successes to develop that self efficacy and confidence. Remind them to find others who are similar and have succeeded. You know, other people they know who have lost their jobs or, you know, dealt with death or whatever their current crisis is. Again, encourage them to elicit positive self talk and supportive statements from other people and from themselves. What did I do? And encourage people to, you know, give them encouragement and help them manage physiological arousal through radical acceptance and distress tolerance. If they feel like they can' their own emotions and their own body, they're not going to feel like they can control anything out there either. So if we can help them manage their emotions, we're not going to necessarily help them be happy as a clam. But if we can help them manage it so they don't feel powerless and out of control, then they'll have more confidence that they can keep moving forward. So steps to support others Take stress breaks. Remember your comebacks when things get challenging. Identify your strengths and your resources. I tell people to do that ahead of time. You know, don't wait till life sucks. Make sure that you know that you've got strengths and resources that you can rely on. And go back and look when you're in crisis, you're not going to remember all the nuances. So do this with a clear head. Take care of yourself physically, even when life sucks. Because if you're stressed out and you're miserable and then you're not getting sleep and you're drinking a lot of alcohol and you're not exercising, it's just going to make things worse. So deal with or address the guilt that may come with taking care of oneself physically. Sometimes people feel like feel guilty if they're exercising and you know, if they're not looking like they are on death's doorstep after something bad happens. But it's important for recovery for them to take care of themselves. Practice radical acceptance, recognizing that each moment is the possibility for a new beginning. What's going on right now is really unpleasant. But in the next moment, what can you do to improve that? What can you do to start moving forward? View adversity as an opportunity for growth. Practice optimism. Focus on small positive changes. If they've got generalized anxiety disorder and you know they're going, they're saying, you know, I don't feel like I'm ever going to get better. Encourage them to keep a log of how they're feeling during the day. If they're having fewer hours of feeling anxious that's improvement. If they're having, you know, less nausea, it can help them identify the fact that, yes, we're not over the hurdle yet, but we're making forward progress. And that keeps the hope and motivation and momentum going. Encourage them to focus on what they can control, such as changing the situation, causing the distress. If that's not possible, controlling the meaning of the situation in the big scheme of things, how important is this and how much personal responsibility do I have for it? A lot of our clients take everything and it's all their fault when in reality, you know, there are a lot of other factors contributing to it. So we want to look at what is the meaning of the situation and or control the stress response. Sometimes it's a bad situation, you are responsible, you can't change it. So the only thing you can do is control your response to it. Staying angry and miserable without action isn't going to help. So we want to encourage people to practice relaxation, verbal and written expression. Get those feelings out. Let's figure out what's going on and start making a plan to move forward to inspire hope. Resilience is the learned art of bouncing back in the face of adversity. Early risk and vulnerability factors may have prevented some of our clients from developing necessary protective skills, skills and resources. Programs aimed at preventing risk factors or mitigating their impact help build resilience. Like I said, having the caseworker come in and work with my kids when they were micro preemies helped them develop, get back on that developmental scale so they were on par with other children of a similar chronological age. And encourage people to develop resilience within themselves at least once a day by asking themselves the simple question, what did I do well today? Finally, there are six competence, confidence, character, coping, connection and control in resilience. All of these can be a group in and of themselves. So, you know, it might be something if you want to do a series on building resilience that you could do a group series in your practice. Are there any questions? All right, everybody, thank you so much for being here today. If you have any questions, comments, please feel free to email me there. Or you can email supportce.com and they pass it over to me. Otherwise, I will see you on Thursday. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com, providing 24. 7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.