“The Resilience Factor”

    I found The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte to be an informative manual on how to improve one’s resiliency and bounce back from life’s many setbacks. Both Reivich and Shatte have worked extensively with Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania and it shows in the way that this book elaborates on many of the ideas that Seligman presented in Authentic Happiness. The first chapter provided the “groundwork” and pillars upon which the research behind this book was built upon. Many of these pillars mirror those of positive psychology such as; focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses, reaching out and teaching resilience skills to children to avoid depression as adolescents and adults (49-62).
    While at times the text was repetitive in nature I also found that the repetition was helpful in drilling the important aspects of the book into my memory. The case studies provided realistic examples of situations in which using the skills of resilience would be beneficial.
The most refreshing concept of the book for me was the idea that human beings are capable of change and the book then goes on to outline specific exercises that can be utilized in order to determine non resourceful thought patterns and affect positive change and resiliency (40). While this is not a new idea, this is the first book that we have read this quarter that provides the reader with the tools to back up it’s claims.
    The first skill that is taught is the ABC’s which was briefly touched upon in Authentic Happiness and I have been using ever since in order to better understand my emotions in difficult situations. I found the B-C connections chart to be extremely helpful in helping me to decode my emotions and assign a belief behind my most common negative emotions which include guilt and anxiety. While I have always joked that my guilt stems from eight long years in the Catholic school system I can now recognize that it is often due to what I believe to be breaches in self regulation and commitment (78).
    The chapter on avoiding thinking traps was helped me to become more aware of the styles of thought that I commonly use that undermine my resiliency. I gravitate toward s personalizing, magnifying negative events and mind reading but have been known to utilize all eight traps. I have already begun to try and crawl out of these traps by looking for alternative, external sources for negative events rather than personalizing everything and trying to focus more on the positive and be less pessimistic.
    Oftentimes emotions are not justified by the events that precede them and therefore one can benefit by learning to pay attention to his or her “ticker tape” beliefs in order to give cause to feelings and actions. When this happens to me I am now able to probe deeper in order to try and locate the “iceberg beliefs” that are behind my reactions. The five questions on page 139 are extremely useful in helping one get to the true cause of an emotional disturbance. I used some of these techniques in talking my boyfriend through a particularly difficult day this week and felt that I was able to help him get to the root of his problem.
    In the Challenging beliefs sections I came to recognize why and how often we use mental shortcuts but also why it is advisable to take your time to sort out a problem as opposed to going with your gut and taking the easy way out (147). instead of taking the shortcut one can look for the multiple reasons that could have led to a negative event and decide which they think is most logically likely. In identifying my own explanatory style I have begun to learn to look for other causal factors than the tried and not so true.
I will most likely use the skills of Real time resilience and calming and focusing rather than getting out a pen and paper every time I have a bad day but I can also see how drawing the charts and graphs could be helpful in an especially challenging situation. I identified with the statement that, “ Ruminators, in fact, might be quite good at ABC because they spend a lot of time focused on their emotions and behaviors. The problem, however, is that they do nothing constructive with the information” (201). I have found that using calming techniques helps me to stay calm and focused during events that cause me to stress and catastrophize and have been practicing real time resilience without knowing it since reading Authentic Happiness.
    The last three chapters dealt with ways to use the skills in the book in order to become more resilient in different arenas of life. Each time a book that has a chapter on parenting skills I’m tempted to skip it and then later realize how useful much of the information is in helping me to put my own childhood in perspective and teaching me concepts that will be beneficial either as a parent or a counselor. I was able to label my parents parenting style as being laissez faire and indulgent and make a connection between parenting and managing styles in business. While I have no children of my own I was able to not that during the time I was a retail manager I treated my employees in a very laissez faire manner which may have led to them to become less self reliant and to rebel (261). In the chapter on work I was able to realize how I had used the skills of resiliency in the past to change the corporate culture when dealing with a manager who believed she had “tried everything before”. I also came to realize how my tendency to mind read may have been detrimental in the past in terms of my belief that my company tended to promote men more readily than women. Not to say that there wasn’t an element of sexism at work but that I may have believed it to be stronger than it truly was.
    I believe that I have learned many invaluable tools in this book that will help me in all aspects of my life and lead to more resilience in the future. The challenge lies in remembering the skills and putting them to use when the situation calls for it. Just as anything in life that is worth doing, improving one's resiliency takes hard work, practice and determination.