Embrace Adversity and Grow Your Resilience

Everyone has adversity and trauma in their lives. If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time avoiding situations that you feel will cause trauma or pain. But life isn’t about just taking the easier road. Life is about challenges and setbacks, gains and failures. Today we’re going to talk about embracing the adversity in your life, and how much more fulfilling your life can be if you take the step onto the difficult roads. I also want to talk about how we can embrace adversity will help you grow your resilience just as much as growing your resilience will help you deal with adversity.

What constitutes adversity? That’s not such a simple question, as we all have different triggers. I suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, and that could keep me from living the life that I want to live. Because I have pretty severe social anxiety, I could just hide in my house all the time. But that’s no kind of life. Embracing the adversity I’m facing is risky. That’s why I’m here to talk to you today about taking risks.

Identifying Adversity

We spend a lot of time avoiding pain and fear, and it really isn’t healthy. A life lived eschewing any discomfort isn’t a life lived to the fullest. We miss out on so many opportunities just because of fear. Fear of missing out, fear of pain, and fear of difficulty are all things that keep us in our comfort zone. Some fear is good and healthy. For example, I have fear that a car will hit me if I stand in the road, so I use the crosswalk. This is a rational fear. I also have fears that I will freak out in public and embarrass myself. This is an irrational fear.

Winnowing through what are irrational fears and rational fears is not always easy. Fears are many times what keeps us safe. For this reason, it can be difficult to tell the difference between a fear that truly safeguards us and one that restricts us. Pushing past our irrational fears and taking risks is what makes for a full life. It’s beneficial to us to push past our comfort zones and into achievements that we never thought possible. I’ll use myself as an example.

My Story

Because of an assault that I was involved with in my twenties, I suffered a great deal from anxiety and fears. I was afraid to go out by myself, and afraid to even drive a car alone from place to place. Because I depended so much on others, I felt like a burden, and I was so sick of feeling this way. But what was the answer? How did I overcome being afraid all of the time, of everything?

By building my grit, growth mindset, and resilience. By taking lots of baby steps (and I mean tiny baby steps), I am slowly getting back to where I can take care of myself. It’s been a long road, with lots of setbacks. I take two steps forward and one step back all the time, sometimes in the same day. Last week I drove to a store by myself. I had a total breakdown when I got home, but I did the dang thing. While it seems like a small accomplishment, that’s taken years of work. By working to change how I react to daily setbacks, I’m growing my resilience day by day. And that resilience is helping me in turn deal with the next setback.

Risks = Building Resilience

When I say take risks, what I mean is, what seems risky to you in this situation? I’m not talking about going out and taking insane, irrational risks. I’m talking about risks that get you out of your comfort zone. When we get out of our comfort zones, we open ourselves up to the potential (and reality) of failure, of setbacks. How we deal with those setbacks is a demonstration, and practice, of our resiliency. By growing our resilience through practice, we increase our confidence that we can handle the next setback better.

For me, risks mean things like setting goals, and following through on them. Going to that social engagement, even when I feel like I can’t do it. Pushing past the fears and anxiety and taking that first step of independence. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone and living in and processing the resulting uncomfortable emotions will grow my resilience.

We have to start doing things because they are hard. Not avoiding them because we might experience discomfort. What I’m talking about here is called exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is used to push people out of their comfort zones by putting them in situations that will expose them to the fears they have, in an otherwise safe environment.

How It’s Done

I use exposure therapy as often as I can, even daily. It’s the only way I’ve found that I am getting better. Now, I’m not suggesting that this will work for everyone. If you have a doctor or a therapist, please keep doing what they are suggesting, and please, for the love of God, take your medication if you are prescribed some. What I am suggesting is that you push past your comfort zone in small ways each day. For example, I started by going out into the yard by myself (I told you, the baby steps were tiny).

By setting small goals for myself that I could achieve with some determination, I was building my confidence to try the next thing. By journaling my goals and reporting back to myself, I was setting myself up for success on a daily basis. If you want some insight into my journaling journey, you can find it here. I was able to do small things every day that were real accomplishments for me. Because I used my own behavior as a yardstick to measure my success, not other people’s, I was able to see progress and feel that I achieved.

One Step at a Time

By charting my progress, I was able to see that in tiny increments, I was getting better every day. I didn’t always reach my goals, but I always tried. Because I had been building my confidence with small successes, I was able to keep trying even after failure. I was able to recover from the failure and try again, so at the same time I was building my resilience. I still have so far to go, but now I can look back and see that I’ve also come so far.

Everyone has their fears and anxieties to overcome. You can find more information about building resilience in this article about it by the American Psychological Society, called The Road to Resilience. This is a great article for someone who’s struggling to take that first step.

I challenge you to do something today that’s outside of your comfort zone, whatever that may be. Chinese philosopher Laozi once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” And I’m here to tell you, that first step is a doozy, but totally worth it. Until next time!