THE META-STATE OF RESILIENCE Part II: Living Fully Today

The core of resilience lies in the meanings you give to set-backs and other undesirable, unpleasant, and challenging experiences. To be able to perform things in a resilient way, you have to interpret any and every experience with sufficient meaning so that it keeps you actualizing your highest and best resources. And because the core of you is you— then at the core of resilience you have to interpret the bad thing, the set-back, the disappointment as —

The Core of the Resilient Strategy

That — that event, that situation — Not me (no personalizing)

There — in that space and place — Not everywhere (not pervasive)

Then — at that time and moment — Not forever (not permanent)

When you keep the evil out of your core so that the bad thing is not about you, not about everything about your life, and not forever, when it is not personal, pervasive, and permanent, then you are able to stay clear of the set-back. How about that! Isn’t that fantastic? Do that and you maintain an inner core that allows you to keep self-actualizing even when life is falling apart. This corresponds to what Maslow said, Self-Actualizing people also have problems. Just because you are living a self-actualizing life does not mean everything is rosy or perfect or wonderful.

This core of resilience now enables you to access your highest meanings (visions and values) so that you can perform your best actions. Even in the midst of the set-back, you are able to access your resources. And that allows you to use those resources to keep bounce in your soul so that bouncing back is easy for you. No wonder you are resilient —flexible, adaptable, focused, persistent, etc.

To be resilient, you have to have something to be resilient with. In other words, resources. It is your ability to access resourceful frames, meanings, states, relationships, actions, language, etc. that enables you to bounce right back when life knocks you down. Then, in that meta-state of resilience you’ll feel and act proactively as you take the initiative to do what you can. This is the great antidote to thinking, feeling, talking, and acting like a victim. You are no victim. No matter how someone has hurt you, take advantage of you, tricked you, deceived you, raped you, robbed you, or whatever— you are not a victim.

One of the persons I “modeled” for the resilience strategy was Viktor Frankl. His story of living in the Concentration Camp in Man’s Search For Meaning speaks about someone who kept the evil out of his core. He never interpreted what happened to him through the lens of personal, pervasive, or permanent. He treated it as— that, there, then. It is that event which Hitler created. It is there in the context this camp, and it is then and not forever. So Frankl not only survived the horror of the camp, he came out of it as a psychologically healthy person.

How did he do that? During his time there, he used that context for maintaining his humanity by giving of himself to others, by finding humor in that context, and by using it for learning and creating more of his Logo-Therapy approach in psychotherapy. He kept that evil contained by imagining himself lecturing to a University Class after the War— it would not last forever. It would one day be over. Talk about resilience!

Now as far as I can tell, after Frankl left, re-married (his first wife perished in one of the camps), lived a full life, created a new form of psychotherapy, etc., and lived to a full life of 92 (1905 to 1997). He never gave any evidence of being traumatized. His core of resilience seemed to have made him un-traumatiz-able — even by the three Concentration Camps (Auschwitz, Turkheim, Dachau) that he experienced! Talk about resilience!

From the core of resilience (not interpreting things against yourself by personalizing, making pervasive and making permanent— three cognitive distortions), the next step in resilience is making your everyday life today meaningful as you recover from the set-back. So you do your best with what you have. And this synergy of meaning and performance, as you can probably tell, is the heart of Neuro-Semantics.

In Neuro-Semantics we focus on meaning-and-performance as the two factors that enables living a self-actualizing life. That’s why the Meaning-Performance Axes make up the Self- Actualization Quadrants. So in resilience, we first apply this to self (your Self Matrix) so that you do not contaminate yourself with the bad thing that happen, then we apply it to your moment to moment life right now so that you don’t postpone life but are able to resiliently live fully now.

I found this quality in Christopher Reeve. He was interviewed for 60 Minutes and other programs after his disastrous fall from the horse that left him a quadriplegic in 1995. In the years of recovery against impossible odds, Reeve created two foundations, appeared in several movies, made TV appearance, spoke at numerous conferences, was an political activist for research, had a son, etc. He made the most of the life that he had and set visionary goals that kept him motivated and inspired. In spite of everything, he lived his life fully in the moments that he had. Talk about resilience!

This is the power of this richly complex meta-state. How do you create it? That will be the subject of the next post here on Neurons. To your highest and best resilience!