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!
