110: Recovering Resilience
Posted: September 11, 2020
“Safety primes neuroplasticity: a sense that as you move through this, you’re okay and you’re safe.”
When was the last time that you experienced letdown, hurt, or even a traumatic event?
How did you rebuild yourself and your life after the event?
A significant part of the human condition is experiencing negativity in our environment, then that energy infiltrates itself into the brain. Brains tend to have a negativity bias. This means that one negative response from another person has more power over our minds than all the positive interactions within that same relationship. Whenever this happens, life and relationships must be rebuilt, no matter how small or large the damage was.
This is resilience. While resilience is largely an innate skill, it’s still possible to build it and strengthen it through various exercises and strategies.
In this episode, Linda Graham talks about how to build and strengthen resilience. She shares some deep insight into the wiring and functioning of the brain when stimulated with negativity, and how to learn to bounce back. Linda also shares how therapists and non-therapists alike can implement various strategies, mindsets, and somatic tools to refine the skill of resilience as well.
Take a listen to Linda’s thoughtful and practical strategies, tips, and tools to bouncing back into life.
About Linda Graham:
Linda Graham is a psychotherapist and award-winning author. She is passionate about guiding people on reliable paths of personal growth, self-transformation, and building relationships. Her professional specialty areas include helping reverse the impact of stress and trauma, cultivate mindful awareness, and ultimately recover a sense of resilience. Within her private practice, she integrates modern neuroscience, mindfulness practices, and relational psychology into her international trainings on resilience and wellbeing.
Some Questions I Ask:
- How would you define resilience? (4:59)
- How does our brain’s capacity to respond to stressors become derailed? (6:53)
- Why is it difficult to develop resilience? (12:00)
- How can we address the brain’s negativity bias? (19:05)
- What are the 3 Levels of Disruption, and 5 Intelligences? (21:20)
- Where should someone start with finding relief and building resilience? (27:10)
- Why individuals respond differently to the same stressors. (4:23)
- Where an individual’s resilience originates and how to install new circuitry that increases the capacity for resilience. (7:22)
- How resilience is strengthened through post-traumatic growth. (15:41)
- How somatic tools help calm the mind and enter back into a space of resilience. (17:10)
- How practicing positivity shifts the functioning of the brain into more receptivity and resilience. (19:14)
- What therapists can integrate into their practices from Linda’s book. (29:13)