Surviving This B****** - What Science, Psychology, and I Have to Say About Resilience

By Anthony Guerrero Short, MPH MS

Ok we’ve made it through 100 days. Look around and take a deep breath and try to find peace or solace in the fact that you’re still here and somehow still able to take time to read a blog. You’ve made it this far. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to persist and push through the next four years and whatever this unknown future holds. As our institutions are dismantled and discredited, as our safety nets cut, and as our communities attacked and vilified, we’re charged with the need to develop more grit than we thought we needed to have. 

Grit and resilience can be thought of as similar but I’ll posit that they have distinct definitions. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the ability to successfully adapt to adverse conditions, “especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” I think that coping, the individual mechanisms which we implement to address and overcome an adverse situation, is practiced resilience at the micro-level. Consistent implementation of positive and rewarding coping strategies develops resilience. Angela Lee Duckworth has studied resilience and the unique concept of grit, and her research suggests that grit is applied passion and perseverance to a long-term goal, with significant effort over a long period of time, and grit is for marathoners, not sprinters. Her studies with Chicago Public Schools students show that grit is not connected to talent or ability, but a mindset, usually known as “growth mindset”, which emphasizes the ability to change is not fixed. 

Now, I’ve been in many corporate spaces that put “growth mindset” on walls and meeting minutes and all-hands and my eyes roll every time. But there is a truth to this that I do accept - grit is the commitment that you can make a difference in something, so long as you stick to it. We all have different terms or visions for it, whether it’s the Midwestern “stick-to-it-ness” or in my case, I use spite as a powerful tool to motivate myself. Nothing gets me going more than knowing that my current “enemies” are still making moves and I simply refuse to lose. As a queer person, a trans person, a Latine person, I have been surrounded by communities of people whose whole lives revolve around grit and resilience - it is in the very fibers of our being. We know how to fight. It’s how we made it this far. 

But grit and resilience are more than just a deep passion, perseverance, commitment, spiteful, powerful, and closed-fist fight to keep going. There is a deep emotional tenor of acceptance, care, love, and compassion that is necessary in developing resilience and grit in a true healthy way. You can’t simply hammer away at a blade to strengthen it, it must be tempered and quenched. 

Dr. Gabor Mate has a unique perspective on trauma and resilience, having studied it significantly in childhood development, and states that trauma is not just what happened to you, but also the emotional impact and context around the trauma, specifically around how we feel cared for, supported, and held through this trauma, where it compounds when we feel unsafe and incapable of nurturing a supportive emotional response to trauma. Researchers in childhood development and resilience at Harvard note that the developing brain relies on a feedback loop between a caregiver and a child, wherein a child relies on the comfort, support and care of a caregiver during a traumatic or adverse experience - children with a supporting and nurturing parent during trauma develop healthier and more robust adaptive responses. 

In the greater context of points to everything, we are going through a collective trauma, and in this dynamic we are both child and caregiver. In my opinion the ability for us to persist, resist, and survive relies on two things: creating community with each other in a revolutionary way, and facing our trauma with compassion to nurture each other through this. My colleague Sam Bennett, LCPC aptly put it “Resilience isn’t about avoiding hard feelings—it’s about staying connected to ourselves through them” and I’ll add that it's about staying connected to each other. He notes that frameworks like Acceptance Commitment Therapy can help us recognize and face our internal emotional responses and make room for them without judgement. Internal Family Systems (or “Parts” therapy) can allow us to address these emotions as something distinct and a part of us, and address them with compassion.

I can doom scroll on my phone watching the world burn around me OR I can implement a few things I learned from therapy that I've actually done: 

I am doom scrolling because I’m anxious. I feel that anxiety deep within my gut, my throat, my eyes, and it feels overwhelming. I feel hopeless and afraid that I can’t do anything. I make space for this feeling, and put down my phone, and sit in a comfortable space, and simply let hopelessness and fear sit in me. It hurts, and it makes me feel so empty. Usually this feeling subsides briefly. Enough for another part of me to emerge. Someone more nurturing and loving, and I see my hopeless child curled up within me and I care for them. I reassure them, and try to ground them in the moment. I’ll call my dog over and I’ll pet him. I’ll speak to myself reassuringly to remind myself that this hopelessness is temporary, and that I (and others) are capable of so much more than what my hopelessness feels. By then hopelessness will feel smaller or dissipate. And then I’ll call a friend. I’ll ask them to be with me. To hold space (YES HOLD SPACE * pinky finger and all) with me and care for me in that moment. 

And then I’ll eventually have room again for new feelings, usually of optimism, and in my specific case, the very powerful part Spite. “I’ll be damned if this expletive takes me down” and then I get up and I’m back at it, and I’m ready to do something about it.

Resilience takes time and effort.  Resilience takes self-examination, care, and compassion. Resilience takes a community fighting for each other and nurturing each other.