Resilience is Everywhere

I recently had the pleasure of being on Corinne Dobbas’ Body Image Podcast, where a main topic that came up was resilience. Corinne asked me about my own experience of resilience in my life, and how it played a role for me, and my answer surprised me.

I hadn’t thought of my answer ahead of time really, as I like being as spontaneous on podcasts as possible. However, glancing over her questions before the podcast I had assumed the answer that would come to me in the moment would involve all of the different things that helped me on my recovery journey, and that continue to help me weather the ups and downs of life without turning to my eating disorder any more.

However, what felt the most true in that moment was to start at the very beginning, before the eating disorder had manifested at all, and to truly see how each stage of struggle in my life, starting from a very young age, was matched by a coping strategy to help me get through. And, while many of these coping strategies could be labeled as ‘maladaptive’, that the truth was, looking back with empathy and compassion at the younger versions of myself, all I saw in them was resilience - a young child navigating a difficult, scary and unpredictable world as best as her young brain could.

I told Corinne about how, when I was very young, I now know that I didn’t feel as emotionally safe and connected to my parents as my anxious temperament needed. I came to this realization only with the help of therapists and through my own insight upon reading parenting books for my son now. And so, my resilience caused me to seek a sense of belonging in my next outward circle, with my peers at school.

However, as Gordon Neufeld expresses so well in his book Hold Onto Your Kids, one of my favourite parenting books, peer relationships are inherently insecure and destabilizing, and again my anxious temperament could find no respite, no safety, no assurance that the world was okay, that I was okay. And so when things came to a head and I felt my popularity at school crumbling at the age of 12, my resilience caused me to come up with my own set of rules, my own standards, that only I could control, that would assure me that I was safe in the world, that I belonged, that I was good enough and loveable. And what would this criteria be? To be thin, to be disciplined, to not be lazy. Because didn’t society make it clear that regardless of anything else, these traits were looked up to, that if you could embody these traits, then you belonged in society, people would look up to you, you wouldn’t be outcast? That is the message I had picked up even as a 12-year-old. And so, I found my own way to feel safe and in control, when my system at home and at school hadn’t been enough.

And years later, when I truly knew I needed to move on from using my eating disorder in this way, that I needed a deeper, more unconditional, more sustainable, more true and life-affirming way of feeling good about myself, my resilience planned a solo trip to India to try to find myself. And although it wasn’t as simple as this, this trip did start me down the path that would ultimately deliver to me everything that I had needed all along, yet was unable to source internally until now - a sense of self acceptance, self compassion, of knowing who I was apart from my appearance and my accomplishments, and of being okay with her. Of feeling safe as her.

Resilience does not start when you begin the recovery journey. Resilience is what has kept you alive up until this point, that has caused you to find ways of coping with the terrifying feelings of not feeling good enough or safe or like you belong. And sometimes these ways might not look like we think they should, sometimes they will have downsides all of their own, and we will eventually need to find replacements for them when they pose ongoing unhappiness and threat to our lives. However, I believe that each version of us was genius at the time, that we came up with just what we needed in the best way that we knew how then, and that self-sabotage does not exist. Everything we do is from a place of resilience, whether it looks like it on the surface or not. I see this in me, and I see this in everyone else whose stories I have been honoured to witness and hear.

To our ongoing resilience in this life, and to having so much compassion for each past version of us that has gotten us here.

With love,