#354 - Rebekah Lyons | Resiliency

All right, guys, anxiety is real. We all know that. But sometimes we feel like we have to avoid it. We have to put it under a rug somewhere, not talk about it, and it will just go away. But with the guest I have on today, such an amazing woman. She is incredible. She is not only a national speaker, bestselling author, host of Rhythms of Life podcast, she understands anxiety. She walks her talk. She's a real deal. And she's going to come on today to talk about something we all need to hear right now. This is a very important part of the conversation, how to develop resiliency in the tough times. So I'm super excited about Rebecca Lyons joining me today. Rebecca, thank you.

Oh, thank you, girl. It's exciting. It's fun to be with you again.

Oh, I love sharing time with you. You are just so authentic, so real. That's one thing I love about you, is that you. You know what you're getting into. Like, when you have a conversation with you, you're not gonna, like, play a game. You're not gonna skirt around issues, and you're. And I think that's the beauty of it is that the things we need to deal with, we're just gonna bring it all up. You know, we're just gonna. It's kind of like, let's declutter some junk drawers right now in our cart.

For sure.

Yeah. So, first of all, you have a brand new book out. It's called Building a Resilient Life. How Adversity Awakens Strength, Hope, and Meaning. Now, what's. What's beautiful about this is something I hold is. And I know this is kind of funny, but I always think the most flexible person wins. Like, I always think when anything comes in my life, how can I be flexible with it? How can I be resilient? How can this be working for me? So I don't know if this kind of, like, underlies what you're doing here, but what made you even go into this?

Oh, my goodness, girl, I love that you're starting with that phrase. It's so good. It's so good. Well, I, you know, this obviously came in the throes of, like, my last book. Rhythms came out about six months before lockdown. And then everyone had a lot of time to really put rhythms in their life for mental health. And about six weeks into Covid, I remember just, I was on a mental health summit, and obviously, zoom, because we were all at home and it was for next gen, and my kids are that age. They're 22, 20, 18, and then I have a nine year old we adopted. So apparently we're in all the stages back in third grade. But launching those older kids and watching what happened with them and their peers in that, then how suicidal ideation, even in tweens and teens, just tripled in those first three months of COVID I thought, whoa, we really need to pay attention to this epidemic. It's not just a pandemic, it's a mental health epidemic. And what are we doing about this? And so I really wanted to research. I went on a bike ride right after that, that, that summit, and I just heard, the gift of resilience is that it awakens the human heart. And I was like, wait, what? It awakens? It does awaken, but I don't know, that always awakens good things. But what it did is as I kept began to unpack it, I realized adversity does awaken. It awakens what you're made of. It awakens what, what's worth fighting for it. It can awaken, obviously, death, despair, and desperation. But it also usually tends to yield towards hope. Right, because pain will become purpose if you let it. That's the caveat. And so I think what happens is that when all this went down so quickly, I thought our kids really need to know what it means to have tough times. But then I just research and realize, well, I need this too. Clearly, we all need this, because as parents, we begin to spin out if our kids are spinning out. And we don't always know how to even actually retrain their brains, much less our brains. So I went back to just the definition of resilience. I've just studied. I'm like a study nerd. I research for a couple of years around this topic. There's tons of psychiatrists, psychologists, talking about resilience and so popular culture. If you don't mind, I'm just going to share this. There's a chapter in here called resilience. Really? What is resilience really? And I went to this thing called Aesop's Fable about the mighty oak tree in the reed. And he says, why do you not plant your feet deeply in the ground and raise your head boldly in the air as I do? The reed responds, I'm contented with my lot. I may not be so grand, but I think I am safer. The tree scoffed and said, safe, who shall pluck me by the roots or bow my head to the ground? And that same day, a hurricane swept through, tearing the mighty tree up by its roots and casting it uselessly on the ground, while the little reed, though bending to the force of the wind, never lost its footing. When the storm passed, the reed stood straight upright again, stretching tall. And I thought, okay, there's two definitions of resilience in the Oxford English Dictionary. The one in 1600s that said it was like to rebound or recoil from the Latin word resilience. But in the 1800s, they came back and said it's actually to resume that original position after a season of being compressed or bent low. And I thought, oh, okay, so what we're experiencing now is a season of compression.

Just.

Just imagine all of culture and this, like, collective panic attack where we're just being contracted. Right. We're being squeezed from the outside in and like, whatever's there, good or bad, it's coming out, right?

Yeah.

Things kind of try to avoid or dust under the rug. The resilience techniques we put in place prior or did not put in place prior is now what we are reaping the effects of. I thought this compression doesn't often have an end date. Sometimes we live with some chronic form of stress, chronic form of residual trauma. Maybe because it wasn't resolved in our youth, we put it in a bucket to, you know, to compartmentalize, to maybe disassociate, because that helped us survive as kids. But now as adults, that bucket has not been revisited and all of a sudd. And we're acting out in ways because there's some containers over here that we'd rather avoid, but we need to actually re enter. And so as a result, we don't know even how to help our kids because we're still navigating our own stuff. You know, marriages that imploded because we had no choice but to face one another or kids that, you know, just finally they lost their coping mechanisms. And so this just is what happens. I don't need to continue to state the obvious. And so I thought, okay, if we're not people who bounce back, right. I mean, we would love that, but that's that like saying we can be tossed against a wall, back and forth, back and forth, and not eventually become cracked or deflated. And that's just not true. We're not.

Right, Right.

In fact, I write we're not people who just bounce back. It's this idea of. It says popular culture limits us to this. And while I appreciate it, it's broader bouncing back acts as if it's simple and quick. But we're not people who simply bounce back. We experience trouble, we endure unspeakable tragedy. And Ambiguous loss. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to heal. We develop wounds and scars, but resilient people experience this pain with honesty and bravery. And they become stronger, not to fight the resistance, but because of it. And so as a result, I think I just started to go, okay, what are the places in our lives that have been hard? So that year for me, 22 years of being a mom of a son with special needs, born with down syndrome when I was 26. He turned 20 that year with COVID and he had the hardest year of his life, which therefore meant all six of us had the hardest year of our lives.

Absolutely.

And you're only a mom is as sad as her. Her saddest child. Right. And so you are bearing the empathy and the weight of a burden. And he was largely non verbal. And so he would take this out on himself, like hitting himself, banging his head and like he didn't have words for what he was encountering, which was a new school, a new home, like a different way of seeing things, a new sister also with down syndrome. That kind of displaced him as the one that got a lot of attention it all. And then losing all his community at school, his. His routines, like every kid, he's so social. That was like something that would help regulate him. And so as a result, it just kind of spun out. And I just remember going, okay, I want to. I want to figure out what does it take to rebuild a resilient life? Not just for Kade, for me and for you.

Yes.

Yeah, for me. And so I just went back to a lot of psychiatry, a lot of scripture. I do want science and faith to collide. I am a person of faith. I really take encouragement from the scriptures. And there's a chapter in there that says in Second Corinthians 4, 8, it says, we're pressed and we're crushed. Remember the theme? Compressed, right? Repressed. And we're crushed. But we're not destroyed. We're perplexed. But we're not given to despair. Why? Because we carry light shining in our hearts. And that is why, why we never give up. And I thought about the broken reed, right? The one that bends low, that weathers the storm, usually is the one when you surrender, when you yield, when you learn, you seek to understand, you ask God for counsel, you go to others. All of a sudden you're like, we can do this, right? We find our legs. And so the book slowly unfolded through lots of research into five rules of resilience to build. Because I like creating frameworks for the reader because it's tangible, it's actionable, it's practical, it's not overwhelming. And quite frankly, to build resilience is just these small, steady steps of risking gently, predictably, with controlled environments, with supportive networks. Just like a child, you're like, go out there and kick the ball, right? Well, that activates their stress response because it's novel and new and they're a little nervous. But then they do it in a safe, predictable environment. They're cheered on and they retreat. They go back out and they do a little bit more, and then they do it a little more like, so schooling is like this. Athletics is like this music band. Anything you learn, any skill you acquire over time. Speaking on a stage is a resilience building strategy. And so if we want to raise resilient kids, just like we want to become resilient adults, we have to activate those stress response systems in moderate, controlled, predictable ways with supportive networks around us. And then over time, if we do that over and over and over and over again, we realize that the hard things that were so scary at the beginning are now no longer hard.

Yeah, that's so powerful. And I love that you give people a framework. Personally, I feel like one of our biggest problems is we think we shouldn't have problems. Like, I really do, if we. Because all things work together for good. We know that God loves us. And for those who are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good. I remember one year, I always, like, seek around the end of the year, I seek out, okay, what is my.

Word going to be?

You know, a lot of people do that. I was seeking this, this word or these words for the. For the next year. And I heard so clearly all things. Now, Rebecca, I'm thinking, here we go, party time. All things are my. Like, I'm finding all the. All the verses that can mirror my perception of all things. All things meaning, like, everything I've envisioned for all these years is going to come to pass. All these things are available to me. It's coming into my life. It was one of the hardest years of my life. And I remember like eight months in, I'm like, okay, God, what is, what is this? All things. Like, I thought this year is going to be all things that I have been working for and believing for and dreaming for are going to come to pass. He's like, let's do a little more work around the all things. And I realized it's going to require all things working together to make my vision and the dreams that God has put in My heart to come to pass. That means the things that are welcome and the things that initially are unwelcome because no one wants to go through pain. I remember hearing someone say, you know what? It's so much easier to avoid pain. Just learn from other people's pain. But here's what happens. Until we go through the valley, we don't know how to scale the mountain. We don't have the fortitude. We don't have the strength. We don't have the wisdom. It is in the storm that you learn the flexibility. So as much as we want to avoid pain, and we all do, right? Pain is such a beautiful builder of the level that we truly want to achieve in life. Why do people go to the gym? We go to the gym to feel pain. Yesterday it was working on the glutes, right? Working on the cheeks and the shoulders. And I came home, it's like, I can't move my legs. I can't brush my hair. Why do we choose that pain? Because we know it's building something in us, right? But emotionally, mentally, we don't understand that life is the same thing.

Yeah, no, that's really good. It's true. I think you got to get comfortable with pain. And then, in fact, that's the first rule of resilience. Name the pain. And the beauty about naming the pain is that pain will always become purpose if you let it. I love your verse about all things work together. I had a similar one, like, in everything, give thanks for this is the will of God. And you're like, really like everything. I don't know that this was your will. Was this your will? Like, I don't know. But it does work for good, right? If we let it. But it does require us allowing the pain to teach us something. It's such a good. In fact, I have a chapter in here called Anxiety. Treat anxiety as a friend. Why? Because it became the teacher that taught me how to overcome. It taught me how to know what to do when it returns. It taught me resiliency. I have so many strategies now, so many practices that I help so many people with now. Because I know what to do when a panic, an acute panic attack, like, sets in just like that. And I wouldn't have known that. I wouldn't have actually. And I'm no longer intimidated by it or threatened by it or afraid of it. Whereas before, like, fear was a bully that just grew because I would always retreat from the places that I wanted to avoid. And so I, in that chapter, say, turn toward the pain. Not way.

Why?

Because it's just, like, cognitive. Like, when you go toward that thing and you overcome, then all of a sudden it's no longer the threat that just looms in your. In the background of your mind. And so naming the pain is that first rule. And it's. It has to happen first. Because if you can't acknowledge what is, then you can't heal what is hidden. Like, you have to own. You have to own it. You have to put it out there. You have to invite someone in. Right. Like, we're not going to build resilient lives alone. You invite somebody in with reciprocity. So it's a mutual sharing of vulnerability. You're not the problem to be fixed. Right. You're a person to be loved. To be loved. So you do this together. And then you get in a rhythm of confession. And like, for me, like, it doesn't mean you're Catholic. It just means, like, you're just. You get in a rhythm of telling the truth, and you tell the truth in a way that speaks life. Like, not like everything is terrible. We might as well quit. No, the truth is, this might be what I'm feeling right now. Thank you for sharing this with me. So it feels a little less heavy. I know that I'm not alone and that this is not the end of my story. And then we can say that to one another and we can walk with one another in it. And sometimes just getting it out of our bodies and our minds, just saying it and getting it out there with some form of movement, too. Regulating rhythms is actually what calms the brain. Then all of a sudden we're like, wow, we can do this. I don't have the answers, but I know I feel a little lighter today, even though the circumstances have not changed.

Yeah. And that's the problem. We think the circumstances have to change. And I was coaching someone the other day, and it was like, I am going to be so glad when this is over. And I know there are people listening or watching right now that are like, actually, that is true. Like, when this period is over, when this pain has passed, when this whatever, like, whatever you're calling this period, you're saying, I'm going to feel a certain way at the end of it. That's going to be relief. However we are, all we. All we have is right now. So we think it's going to be better there than it is here. But we don't understand. We have the power to make here as beautiful, as powerful, as free as we want to, because in every moment, we still have the all sufficient one within us. So we are sufficient. And it's almost like that. Like, I call it getting out of your time zone. Like, I think a lot of people when it's, they, they do a couple of things when they're in pain. First, we buffer from it. Okay, let me scroll, let me turn on the tv. Let me like distract myself, let me eat or something. We buffer from it. Or we step out of our time zone, which is I'm going to go in the past and feel guilty. I'm going to go in the future and feel anxious instead of. I mean, Jesus was like, why you don't have tomorrow? Like, chill, bruh. Like, you don't have tomorrow, you have today. So if we can send ourselves in today and move into like getting that rhythm into today, like right now, I'm okay. I actually am okay. When I take my eyes off the circumstances and look inside, I'm sufficient. I'm enough. It's okay. But we don't want to do the work. We think that somehow magically, circumstances are going to change. We don't understand that everything outside of us just came from within us. So let's do the inside work. Why do you think people continue to push that off? Like, it's so valuable to do the work, but we don't always want to sign up for it unless we have pain and we have to.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people have a hard time approaching that work alone. So when you name the pain with someone, then that person allows you. It helps you. The rule two is shift the narrative. So if you're able to name it and then you're able to go, okay, how do I. How have I. Can I invite someone to help me think differently about this? How can God show me how to think differently about this? Once you begin to shift that narrative, because you've said it out loud and now you're like, okay, I don't know that that's exactly true. It's just been swirling in my brain a alone for a long time. Now that I'm sharing it, I want to change the narrative. And that narrative shift then gets you ready to do the third rule, which is embrace adversity, which is very much doing the work. It is all about resistance training. It is about retraining your brain. It is about preaching to yourself. It is about going to the gym, moving your body, doing regulatory rhythms, all these things. But you are not really ready for that if you haven't named the pain. Right?

Yeah.

So it is a process of we're all in process. This process is something we're going to live with our whole life. And you might have mastered it in this one area, but then something new comes in that's really hard. Maybe it was your work at one season of life, another season, it's like your kids or it's your marriage and you're like, oh, I get to start this over. I get to name the pain again. I need to shift the narrative. And now I need to go embrace this head on. And I'm going to do it not alone. I'm going to do it with these incremental steps that help me grow, grow in my strength. And I like the resistance training that you mentioned. I talk a lot about the gym, right? Like we don't just run in for the first time and like throw some barbells in the air. Like we probably started with bands and, you know, we probably didn't just do 20 pull ups. We had like the extra ones that helped us get up a little higher so that we felt like we were trying. I'm like that in the gym. I feel like I'm walking in sometimes as an amateur going, I never thought I could do this six months ago. But with just small measured steps, like I said earlier, just these small measured steps that are controlled and predictable and planned with supportive people. I mean, that's the gym, right? Everyone's like, go, you can do this. You know, yeah, whatever, whatever your group class is. I was like, you're right, I can do this. But I wouldn't have thought that three months ago sitting on the couch, watching something and feeling really like discouraged about my body. So it is a collaborative thing. It takes time. People want to do the work if they're not alone in the work and if they're encouraged to, to keep going. And that I think is what we can all do for one another. Sometimes I'm the one offering the encouragement, sometimes I'm on the one receiving it and needing it for myself.

Well, I think that also boils down to, you know, we have to be open and honest and we have to share it like at first, like nothing can happen, no healing can happen without that first awareness. Like we first do, like, okay, this is real. I'm have, I'm struggling. This is real. But I think we really have to look at who we're sharing that with because I call them mean girls, you know, for the movie. Like we don't want to share them with other people that are just going to like dump on it with us. Like, we don't need help on dumping on things, right? We're really good at that. We have this innate skill on how to see the worst in every situation. And so I'm very choosy about when it comes time, like you say, to name the pain, to be aware of it, to say, okay, here's what I'm dealing with. Believe it or not, I'm a flawed creature, and this is real. This is a pain. Choose the people who will saddle up next to you and say, okay, I really want to fight with you to see your freedom, and we have to have those people. Like, I'm a firm believer that everyone needs a coach, and everyone also needs their posse. You know, we need those people who are like, all right, come in the gym with me. Step in the ring with me. Go down this dark alley with me. And by the way, you may want to take off your hoops, because we might need to be fighting. Like, that's the people that I want in my corner. So you need to look and see who are those people that I can fight in, and are they really what's best for me? And how do we find those people? Like, what do you do if someone feels like, Rebecca, I know I'm struggling right now with anxiety, or I feel like I'm. I'm not moving like I should through this chapter of my life. I'm buffering a lot. I'm cushing myself. I'm numbing myself from the pain. If we were like, I know we only have a few minutes left, but what would be the thing that you would say, okay, first, let's just. Let's just camp out here. What would you say?

Well, the fourth rule is make meaning, and the fifth is endure together, because you can't do this alone. And that's 100% true. And historically, healing would always happen in four ways. Like, this is before technology and the digital revolution, industrial revolution. Over centuries, people would heal by being tethered to community and clan, right? They belonged to a tribe that, like, overlapped in every area of life. And that wasn't just like meeting on a camera, right? It was like actually doing life. Like, literally going for walks, getting water, cooking food, making sourdough, baking bread, doing gardens, whatever. It was like, we did it like that as a huge group of people with. Raising kids together. That's extended family. And the second thing was not just being tethered to people. People, but also the second thing was to have regulatory rhythms in your life, and that meant hard work, like actual Physical work, not like moving my mouth, which feels like work sometimes, but like getting embodied, getting in your skin, getting outside, movement, dance, all those things calm the brain immediately. They just calm it down because people have had to heal from trauma for centuries, and we didn't have. And then the third thing would be a core belief set, you know, like faith, something beyond yourself, deciding what you want, you know, aspirationally to set your eyes on. And the fourth would be some form of medicine. And now we've kind of reversed that. We jumped to medicine first. Then we jumped to, like, cognitive behavioral therapy and a counseling session, as that is helpful. Those both are helpful in seasons. But the bottom two are accessible to everyone right now for no price, right? We can go find someone, like we said, where we mutually are agreeing that, like, we don't have this figured out, but we're going to encourage each other and we're going to show up. And the second thing is we're going to put movement into our lives where we overlap with each other, where we get off of a phone, where we stop living in isolation, and where we find ways to overlap regularly. So I say if you want to name the pain, do it in a way where you could go for a walk with a friend side by side. It's less confrontational, especially if you've got to confess something that you're embarrassed about. Get to the gym together, go get coffee together, raise your kids together, get them, you know, just learn best practices and give it away for free. Right? That's what friendship is like. We've overcomplicated friendship as if, you know, we got to squeeze it in real life. No, they are life. That's the essence of life are the people. They're the prize that God's gifted you with. So see them that way and look for ways that the more you get together and laugh and celebrate and delight in the small things. I wake every morning just giving thanks for whatever comes to mind. It might have still been a hard day where five things went wrong. But we're going to start with what was good. We're going to cling to what is good. Scripture says cling. And the reason it says cling is because our natural state wants to actually reject it and only cling to what is bad. And so we're going to have to really hang on and go, I'm going to fix my eyes and focus on what is good, and I'm going to call it out, name it, and then I'm going to celebrate that and speak life over. The people that God's given me as well.

And everyone can do that. Everyone. Like, I know as soon as I start getting stressed out or it's time to go outside, I gotta go walk the dogs. I gotta go dig in the dirt a little bit. You know, we haven't outgrown that. We're not so industrialized that we can't just get messy and get off very.

It's very therapeutic. It's totally free to pull weeds. It's totally free to go pull weeds from your garden. You're like, why would I do that? I don't know. I just. Trust me. It's kind of exhilarating. It's like. It's a quick return.

It is. It is. Like, just go plant something. You will feel 10 times better. Rebecca, this has been so beautiful. How can people get more of you because you're just such a wealth of wisdom?

Oh, thank you, friend. Just my website is my name. It's really not that It's Rebecca Lyons and it's K A H. It's spelled a little differently. R E B E K A H L Y O N S dot com. You can find the book there. I co host a podcast with my husband called Rhythms for Life Life, and it's all about four rhythms for sustained, emotional, spiritual, relational health. And in general, just. I like, wherever books are sold and usually in some city each weekend, just teaching about, like, how do we put these strategies into our life so that we can flourish, not just survive, not just get through, not just like. Like, just trudge the day. I really think God does call us towards abundance, but it's not cheap abundance, not like trite or crochet.

It's.

It is by actually doing the work in a way that transforms us. That is the goal.

That is the goal, and we are here for it, 100%. Thank you so much, guys, listen, this is your season. It is time to be resilient. It is time to bend and flow with it. You will have such strong roots and you will be blessed like crazy.