Resilience is the ability to bounce back when bad things happen to you. Resilient people can cope with stress or crisis and adapt as needed to difficult situations. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel the punch or go down for the count. It means you have the capacity to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start again, perhaps learning from what went wrong, and ending up stronger when the next setback occurs.

If you have an eating disorder, you probably don’t have as much resilience as you need. It doesn’t take much to throw you off and it’s hard to rebound. In fact, your eating disorder symptoms represent how you’re trying to fill in for missing resilience. Recovery is fundamentally a process of building in the skills and capacities that help create this missing resilience. This makes recovery a great opportunity: If you continue working on recovery after your symptoms have diminished, you’re likely to emerge from your eating disorder stronger than when you started! You will also have greater protection from other psychological woes  such as depression, anxiety or addictions.

In Eating Disorders for Dummies, I identify vulnerability factors that put a person more at risk for developing an eating disorder (pp. 61–68). In recovery, we can identify “resilience factors,” that is, strengths and capacities that make you less at risk for an eating disorder, less likely to relapse. As you will see, resilience involves developing a good balance of external and internal resources. Resilience factors include:

• The capacity to connect with others Loving, caring relationships are valuable buffers to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It’s important to know how to create and nurture such relationships and to call on them for support in times of distress. For many people with eating disorders, learning how to establish trust and feel safe in such relationships is a very healing part of recovery.
• Emotion management skills Learning to manage uncomfortable feelings is a key recovery competency. Emotion management includes the skills of self–soothing, the ability to center or ground yourself, and the capacity to tolerate uncomfortable emotions or experiences even when you can’t do anything to make them better.
• Efficacy, competence Being effective and competent is already in overdrive for many of you with eating disorders. For others, a sense of floundering in life is one more experience of being you that keeps the eating disorder going. For example, turning to dieting for missing structure and rules is usually a set–up for the next round of eating disorder symptoms. Becoming more effective and competent in managing your life includes being able to self–reflect, to delay gratification, to contain impulses, to develop and follow through on personal goals and to be a self–starter.  These capacities add up to feelings of independence and confidence that you can rely on yourself when necessary.
• Flexibility Flexibility includes being able to role with the punches, change course as life events demand, and accept when pursuit of perfection is undermining your quality of life. To be flexible doesn’t mean caving in or being weak; it means being able to adapt. It includes expecting change as part of living. Flexibility also involves the willingness to let go of habitual ways of thinking or responding and to experiment with new approaches.
• Perspective Having perspective means being aware of the relative value of things, for example, knowing that how you feel is more important than how you look or that your health is more important than being thin. Perspective also means being able to hold onto the bigger picture; for instance, knowing that even the worst feelings are temporary, or that your mistakes are just a part of a larger life experience that includes many things you’ve done well.
• Self–esteem, feelings of worth When you have a positive view of yourself, setbacks feel like an expectable part of life rather than a revelation of your inadequacies or lack of worth. Self–worth means knowing you’re valuable just because you are, not because of how you look, what you produce or who likes you. Self–esteem includes being able to recognize and value your personal assets and accept your flaws, even while working toward self–improvement.

Just how you develop these resilience factors in yourself will have your own personal stamp on it. Individual or group therapy can be great places to work on resilience factors. Relationships with trusted friends or family can support your efforts to become more resilient. Some people find spiritual practices make a significant contribution to their resilience. Others focus on the cultivation of attitudes that fuel resilience: faith, optimism, gratitude, a half–full rather than a half–empty glass, seeking to learn from mistakes, and so forth. Self–care—healthy eating, exercise, sleep, recreation—can make a big difference in resilience.

Here is a challenge for you in service of resilience–building: Pick one of the resilience factors above to focus on. Then think of a small, accessible stretch from where you are now in relation to that factor to work on this week. For example, if you pick connecting to others, you might decide to make a list of groups or organizations that would interest you. Next, you might list any external or internal obstacles that interfere with joining. External obstacles might be that you live far from where the group meets or that you worry that it will take too much of your time. Internal obstacles might include shyness or fear of being judged. Finally, you could think about what you’d need to support your reaching out toward such a group, such as working on the obstacles in therapy or talking about them with a friend, or journaling or praying about them. (Notice this step only involves preliminary thinking about this way of connecting. A next stretch might be some small action toward actually working on the obstacles you identified.)

The great thing about working on resilience is that any growth begins to make your life better. And any growth reverberates in every part of your life, not just eating disorder recovery. Good luck!

“Trust your gut.” This familiar advice reminds us to rely on a precious source of wisdom we all possess. “Gut sense” isn’t based on logic or an objective weighing of the facts, but rather what we feel to be right or true in a given situation. It results from living a life and storing lots of experience along the way. Intuition, instinct, hunch, inkling are words we use to capture moments in which all that experience comes together in a conclusion that just feels right. This coming together is often thought of as the intersection of heart and mind. It can be a channel into who we most deeply are and a link to the spiritual.

People who rely on logic alone are usually encouraged to become more familiar with their gut sense of things and put more faith in it. Many a therapy hour has been devoted to these goals. Those of us who practice body–based therapies place a special premium on being able to access the way experiences feel in the body. We rely on these feelings as a gateway to self–knowledge and change.

So it’s simple, right? Just go with your gut. Not so fast! What about when your gut tells you to eat an entire cake? Or to reject food as the enemy? What if it tells you to trust no one, or that you can only be loved if you’re perfect?

Confused now? Time for an important distinction: Gut feelings don’t guarantee a direct line to objective truth. What they give you is an absolutely accurate reading on what feels true to you in the moment. If the accumulated experiences that give rise to your gut sense have been basically grounded in a larger–consensus reality, what your gut tells you is likely to be a good guide for reading the world around you and your relationship to it. For instance, you  instinctively lower your guard when entering a brightly lit street where people are going about their business, while just as instinctively you become wary on a street that’s dark and sparsely trafficked. You have a sense something is off when a person’s body language doesn’t match their words.  Or you just “click” with somebody, subliminally reading a host of cues that tell you: “This is my kind of person.”

Bur we all have characteristic blind spots when it comes to the trustworthiness of what our guts are telling us. These blind spots usually come from early experiences, especially in our families, which gave us a distorted picture of ourselves or how things are in the wider world. For instance, if you were repeatedly let down, your instincts may tell you never to trust what other people promise. Or, if criticism was used as a weapon in your family, your instinct may be that even constructive criticism is really an attempt to hurt or undermine you. These are examples of a kind of distortion known as overgeneralizing from your personal experience: You unconsciously use what happened in your family as a guide to the entire universe.

In another kind of distortion, you can develop a faulty filter for incoming information. For example, if everyone pretended nothing was going on when Dad arrived home rip roaring drunk, you probably learned not to be aware of alcoholic signals  (a misperception known as denial). Or, if abusive language was tolerated without comment in your family, you may not register such talk as inappropriate in others. You could be drawn into relationships in which you are demeaned or disrespected with no alarms going off to warn you: “Get out of here!”

Either kind of distortion, overgeneralizing or faulty filters, causes your predictions and judgments to be off base in certain areas. Your gut sense feels completely true but leads you in the wrong direction. This can sound like pretty discouraging information. You’re supposed to be able to trust your instincts, but it turns out your instincts are unreliable? What are you supposed to do? First of all, what not to do: Do not fall into all–or–nothing thinking! Your experiences may have distorted your gut sense about some things, but certainly not about all things.

All of us need to learn what our characteristic blind spots or distortions are. You can learn about yours in any safe situation that provides you with reliable feedback about your instincts. This might be therapy, a support group, friends, a partner, work colleagues or others from whom you can get a reality check. Reality checks don’t necessarily make long–held distortions disappear. But they can help us learn when to take our gut reactions with a large grain of salt—and conversely, when to relax into trusting them as we were meant to do!