Your Resilience Is Within You

When life tears us to pieces or the mind leads us to the inexplicable drift of anguish, there is only one option: to rebuild ourselves. It is also necessary to remember that each one of us has a great capacity for recovery. Inside is that essential material to unite each broken shred of self-esteem, in our heart is the lighthouse that will take us back to balance.

When we refer to the concept of “recovery” as such, there are various considerations. However, the moment we refer to mental and emotional health, it seems that the issue becomes somewhat more complicated. Let’s take an example. When someone breaks an arm, suffers from the flu or is convalescing after surgery, no one has a problem saying “cheer up, get well soon, get well”.

Now, but what happens when what we have in front of us is a depression or an anxiety disorder? If we go to the dictionary, the term recovery is defined as “the act or process of regaining health after illness or injury. ” What happens then to those who are not living with a viral or infectious disease or a broken bone?

Beyond what we may believe, few challenges are as complicated as the one faced by  all those people who deal with a mental health problem. His wounds are not seen. They do not carry crutches, it is also rare that they request leave from their job.

Moreover, sometimes this healing process is not even started because they do not dare to ask for help or are not aware that this discomfort actually hides a psychological disorder. Thus, as a study carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals,  almost 50% of the population with emotional and mental problems never receive treatment.

Your recovery capacity is within you: the connection with the Self

The resilience is within you, but you may not have figured it out yet. Because life sometimes hurts too much and leaves us cornered with no other resources than fear itself and the feeling of being part of a tower of Babel. It is in those moments when we most need expert help for one reason: to understand what is happening to us and to know what strategies can help us to get out of this crossroads.

The first thing we must understand about any recovery process is that returning to the surface involves introducing changes, cutting off inertia. We are forced to go beyond those limits where comfort and many of those attachment relationships are contained, those that lead us to feed back vicious circles of suffering, anxiety and unhappiness.

DW Winnicott, famous British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst used to say that the path to emotional healing is to reclaim one’s human dignity to reconnect with the true self. Sometimes, people get carried away by inappropriate internal dynamics, configuring, in some way, a “false self”.

This idea is in turn related to the theses of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers. As he reminded us in his books and approaches, people are forced to “update” constantly. In his line of thought, he recommends that we put aside harmful or exhausting beliefs and states to awaken the full potential of our being. The one that lives inside us in the form of seeds waiting to be cared for to germinate …

Keys in the recovery process

Every road to recovery needs adequate support. We are clear that it is a priority to have expert and professional help. We also know that it is always advisable to have by our side people capable of understanding us, of offering encouragement, affection and understanding. To one side must therefore be left those who judge or those who voluntarily harm with their words.

Likewise, a crucial aspect needs to be made clear to us. Beyond that expert and facilitating environment, the recovery process depends only on ourselves. Ours is the courage, the effort, the joining or not of wills in those days where what you want is the silence and the gloom of a room.

Let us see, therefore, what are the keys in any journey towards recovery.

• Find hope and a reason. People commit ourselves to the therapeutic process because somehow we hope to get out of it better than we enter.
• Understand what is happening to us.  As a preliminary step, before starting any type of intervention, the smart thing to do is dedicate our resources to knowing what we are facing (depression, anxiety, lack of social skills …). Without the knowledge of our “enemy” it is difficult to implement an intelligent intervention.
• Develop a plan. Every recovery process demands a plan that we will draw up with conviction, but this does not mean that we do not include a certain margin for adaptation.
• Reconnect with life in another way. A foundation of healthy habits will always be an invaluable help in the face of any difficulty. Automation allows us to free up resources that we can dedicate precisely to face this difficulty. We talk about starting other practices, meeting new people, putting old routines aside.

• Strengthen each day with our best version. As we feel better, it will be easier for us to value our abilities. We will discover how strong we can become.

To conclude, point out one aspect. This journey, this journey to recovery takes time. We will experience falls and setbacks, however, each step we take backwards serves us on many occasions to gain more momentum. Because recovery is above all a journey of great learning and self-knowledge.