Resilience… things you’ve been through where you realise you have built so much more resilience than the average person

[ThiasTime]

For me it’s having been a lone parent for the first two years of DD’s life. I had a c section and then three days later came home alone and just had to carry on. I had family support emotionally but nothing practically.

So many friends and family have had children since then and even the smallest thing can cause them to feel stressed or irritated or upset or tired. I have sympathy and always try my best not to let what I’ve been through stop me being compassionate… but the reality is that 95% of things people mention they struggle with with a newborn or small baby was really the tip of the iceberg for me when doing it all alone. Anyone else feel like this about experiences they’ve had?

But then when half my Sainsbury’s shop wasn’t delivered last night I went into total meltdown down, so my resilience is quite selective. DH gets called away with 24 hours notice meaning I need to rearrange a whole holiday? No problem. Accidentally left the freezer door open? Catastrophe.

My resilience is the only reason why I got through so many ACEs relatively unscathed. I say relatively because I am massively mentally unwell, but according to all professionals I've worked with, I function far better than average for what I've been through. So yippee I'm not an addict and can forge meaningful relationships with others!

I have lived through years (decades) of constant neglect and abuse and come out with good qualifications and an ability to function well in society. I have trauma issues, but I manage them well enough that only my partner knows.

I have been raped and abused by multiple people - they all dead and I'm still standing and living well.

I have been beaten so much that I have no fear of pain. I am either dead or carrying on.

I have had credible death threats and faced them down. I goaded that man until he was too confused to know if he should kill me anymore, while he still held an axe.

I have been bereaved by parents and partners, both suddenly and unexpectedly and got through it.

I have done all that by 35 and I have a good, responsible job, where I support, love and care every single day. Frankly, I'm fine. My kids are well brought up, happy, safe and secure and have been shielded from that shitty world.

I have sat in ICU and willed my new, caring, supportive, loving partner back to life and supported him through his new disability.

I am teflon. I am a Valkyrie. I cannot be beaten. I have watched the people who tried to destroy me crumble and break. I am the family matriarch in training. A fucking queen and the world can hear my roar.

Same here, not as great as people think, my resilience came from having to compartmentalise (not something I was aware i was doing at the time to cope with being diagnosed with a life limiting illness and watching my dad die traumatically in front of me) and that has made me a very very numb person with lots of walls thst have to come down for anyone new to me. I hate it.

I think it’s very silly and quite insightless to imagine there’s an objective scale of resilience and you’ve reached a higher level than everybody else. There’ll be plenty of other people whose challenges would make yours look like a walk in the park if that metric were employed.

More time spent developing empathy may be useful.

@Anonym00se @MsBette thank you I can relate to this and have thought for a while I would like to do something about it. Maybe CBT though I’m not familiar. Would you be happy to share what has worked at all?

Leading up to the birth of my child I experienced circumstances that very much threatened his chance of survival and increased risks to me too.
As it became clearer what a dangerous situation I was in I began to panic and spiral. And then I managed to snap myself out of it. I told myself that the only thing I could control was my own sense of calm and that I owed it to my baby to be as calm as I could and not let the panic and anxiety overtake me. And it worked. I was able to regain calm and self control.

I had never before been able to have self control and resist anxiety in stressful situations before that, but since I accessed it in that moment, I've been able to do so many moments since.

I don't know if this is particularly different to the average person- it's possible I was just weaker to the anxiety beforehand- but it's marked a huge change in my own life and self assurance and control.

What a life. If you ever share any more publicly please let us know. You sound incredible.

My resilience in the face of a lifetime if adverse events has grown me into one of those stunted bushes you see clinging to the side of the cliff - battered by wind & salt & growing with barely any soil. If I hadn’t have needed to be so resilient maybe I’d have been a beautiful specimen tree growing in a sunny park somewhere.

I take no pride in resilience - what’s the alternative? You keep going because there’s nothing else to do. It’s shit & I’m 50 now & I’m tired.

Because the 'hard times' you describe in order to be superior over your less resilient friends sound like a life of luxury to some of us. Come back when you've experienced some actual hardship.

TBF I have just had cataract surgery, a ten minute procedure and I am still a quivering wreck so obviously I haven't retained my resilience sadly.

It's not a competition

I was a single mum to five kids under the age of ten. I had no money, we lived in a cold, draughty house with no heating and damp. I was miserable, lonely, stressed to the limit, hungry and quite often on the verge of walking away and just leaving everything.

It didn't make me resilient. I had no choice. I couldn't move, I couldn't work more, I couldn't change my circumstances, all I could do was endure. But it has made me very very grateful for the way I can live now - in a warm house with enough food and a largely stress free life. And I am ferocious glad that all my kids grew up wanting to work hard and never find themselves in that awful situation themselves. So they are all earning well and know what they want from life.

So no, it didn't teach me resilience. But it did teach me to be grateful for what I have now, and just how bad life can be for some.

Resilience isn’t linear, ive been through a horrific long grueling cancer treatment and people have commented on my resilience but i think its bullshit I don’t have any more than anyone else and realistically most people will get through the big, hard stuff when they have no choice, because you just do.
Being exhausted and tired and moaning about baby stuff isn’t a lack of resilience or that they wouldn’t cope if life was harder, it’s fairly normal, kids are tiring no matter what the set up and feeling tired or stressed in the moment doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be more resilient if needed.

I once read something that our resilience only kicks in with the really big stuff and you cope, even though the smaller stuff might tip you over the edge.

You dont want to get too tough, where you start judging others for being less resilient

I don't think coming home on my own after an emergency c-section with twins and raising them alone with no emotional or practical support from anyone built resilience in me per se.
I think I have always been a pretty tough person who has just got on with things. Being dragged up in extreme poverty in a household where all manner of abuse was a daily occurrence was my foundation for resilience.
Posts like these can easily become 'Hard Times' one upmanship and I am not really sure that being a single parent to one kid for a couple of years really builds more resilience than the average person has.
I think, as Mums, we just get on with whatever card we're dealt. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Yep.
i been through a lot ….. but though I’m a strong woman and got through it I do feel a bit battered … and would always help anyone struggling ( because you never know what really below the surface)

You never truly know what’s going on in someone’s life though when they moan about the small things?

My life looks easy with my lovely partner and 1 small child but I’ve had an eating disorder for 20 years ( in a much better place now) and suffered from acute anxiety and stress. Also used alcohol to self medicate.

Bad sleep is a big deal for me as over the years I’ve learnt it’s a trigger for my mental health decline, sometimes I moan about poor sleep to family and work colleagues and joke about it but never tell them the truth.

My resilience has improved a lot in the past couple of years but I still have bad days. I find things like booking health appointments for myself and small plans really overwhelming and sometimes panic over them.

People at work always say how happy and smiley I am and upbeat but on some days I am feeling a bit broken to be honest! They never know this as I don’t let them in.

A lady I work with who is so lovely and smiley was abused as a child, you wouldn’t know unless she told you?

@MrTiddlesTheCat But I was referring to one specific scenario, which was parenting a baby alone. I didn’t say that was the most resilient thing to have ever happened. I also didn’t say I was superior… I’m not sure where you’ve got that from.

"She said everyone she knew was happy during the war, she said everyone had a job to do and everyone shared their losses with everyone, no barriers to connection I guess."

One thing is that old people tend to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. Perhaps she only remembers the good times.

Another is that I agree with you about facing things together v being or feeling alone. It struck me when people were telling us not to complain about lockdown because others had suffered through a war. In the war, the people who survived usually had other people, they weren't left totally alone as people were in lockdown.

@Mintygreenleaf Therapy is really individual, and what doesn’t work for one person might be brilliant for someone else so don’t be scared to try something different if one thing hasn’t worked.

But for me (ACE score of 10, and my childhood was just the start, I’ve endured worse in adulthood. My diagnoses included cPTSD, GAD, Panic Disorder, OCD and PMDD) my experiences are:

CBT: Very helpful for symptom managements, but for me it was a sticking plaster. It’s great while you’re practicing it but I see it like being on a diet. If you reach a good place and stop doing it, you’ll quickly end up back in the same position. You need to do it for long enough that it becomes habitual.

Counselling: Complete waste of time for me. I don’t want to pay someone 60 quid an hour to say “Oh you poor thing, that must have been dreadful”. No shit. I imagine it’s good for people who need to improve their self awareness but I am already extremely self-aware. I knew where my trauma came from, but not how to stop it savaging me at times.

Psycho-dynamic Therapy: Changed my life. I literally needed to sit with someone who would pick the scabs off, and dig and dig (who I also trusted and felt safe with). I needed that person to challenge me and be really tough, rather than someone to just listen and nod. It took three years and a lot of pain, but it’s like I’ve been broken down to my constituent parts and put back together in a much healthier, better-functioning way. I am a different person now. My biggest regret is not doing it decades ago.

I’ve also had EMDR and brain spotting, which were great and I find meditation really helpful.

I have tried so many therapists over the years and got nowhere. Eventually I was recommended one in Australia (I’m in the UK). It meant getting up at 4am for zoom calls but she was phenomenal. I will always be indebted to her. I have no diagnosable anxiety disorder any longer and I’ve finally found peace. I hope you do too. x

Agreed. My DH tends to be amazed at how I just ‘deal’ with the big things, and my Mother used to lump everything onto me with ‘You’ll cope, you always do.’ (She knew there was no-one else to cope if I didnt).
I have had a chronic medical condition since childhood and acquired another eight years ago and I think that to a certain extent they build resilience because…you just have to get on with the crap that they throw at you, they aren’t going away. It also has to do with how I was brought up. That doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, it is just how I am.

On the other hand to take your point, I can go from 0 to 100 over tiny things. I recently broke my arm - no biggie, missed an event I had worked hard to take part in for months - went along and cheered everyone else on.
DH suggesting I could have hung out the washing last night and dumping his tea dishes into the sink and never ever loading the bloody dishwasher, while Im sitting here with my cast and painkillers - I went ballistic.
He now thinks I’m depressed. 🙄

Some people just cope better than others. I think I'm a coper. On the outside my life is perfect but:

Parents who detested each other and divorced when I was 12, when it was unusual.

A broken engagement because I came home and found him in bed with a close friend if mine.

Secondary infertility: many losses, one at 17 weeks, one at 12 and one at 27 (dd was born 51 weeks later). Those 51 weeks were dark.

The death of my beloved grandparents and my father within a two year period when I was 40.

DD's struggles with MH: eating, cutting, overdoses (now recovered).

A very complex and stressful job.

The only time I have broken down and wept was when dd was three weeks old and we had run out of washing up liquid. I cried for eight hours. There have been no tears left for more than 26 years.

Most people who know me say "you're sooooo lucky" In many ways I am.

My only true point of irritation was with a mother in the playground when dd was about 9/10. It was early December and I had dropped one child three miles away already and was about to dash to work, when this lovely stay at home mum with a lovely life, had a big whinge up about how stressed she was with Christmas planning and organising. Every bone in my body wanted to say FFS get a grip, your boys are at full-time school, just get yourself organised. I didn't. I suspect my life might have broken her.

I tell you something else.

Being applauded for my "resilience" makes me squirm. People mean well but the danger is that it can make one feel less inclined to be vulnerable when one needs to for fear of being judged.

My best and closest friends have helped me most by sitting with me in the dark, and letting me direct them as to the support I need.

Talking about resilience can leave one feeling under pressure of unrealistic expectations. Sometimes I am numb, sometimes the gentlest touch feels like a scald.

I have had my grief and struggles over-ridden by other people's grief, especially in regard to my late DP. It skews and hinders the process. It amplifies all the horrible painful feelings one has and adds bitterness into the mix, which has to be dealt with to prevent worse fallout. In my experience.

Sharing a burden is one thing, appropriating it is another.

It is all very complex.

Time and space sometimes turns into self defensive isolation.

It is exhausting, often defies logic, and sometimes survival is resilience in itself. But it's nit a badge of honour, it's a war wound.

Acknowledgement and solidarity are good objectives, imposed expectations are not, and that seems to be the new meaning of resilience. And I have issues with that.