When Things Go Wrong, Build Emotional Resilience

In honor of our Back to Basics course launching on MONDAY, MAY 5th, we are featuring a very special guest blogger! Olympia Rusu, our Back to Basic co-founder, is a certified holistic nutritionist and homesteader forging a simple life close to nature with her husband Ephraim on their St. Basil Farm in Pinnacle, NC. She will also be leading our Masterclass on Finding Beauty and Wholeness through Pain and Suffering on Saturday April 5th at 10:00 am CT. You will not want to miss it! Click HERE to register. You can find additional blog posts by Olympia at her beautiful website, https://saintbasilfarmnc.com/

As we have all experienced various trials and difficulties throughout our lives, each of us have felt that loss hurts. To feel out of control, to feel like you’re wandering, or like you just can’t catch a break. I’m sure many of you have similar sentiments you can relate to of loss and hardship. In some ways, I have felt that way for quite a few years now as my health issues have been a fairly consistent source of unpredictability. In this time, I have learned that the feeling of loss, despite the pain, provides tremendous value to my life. That’s actually putting it lightly. As I reflect upon the lives of the saints, I see that suffering, pain, and losing my life for the sake of Christ is the essence of Christian life. It may sound a little extreme to state the reality of the Christian life so bluntly, but my personal experience confirms it too: I am far more resilient, more patient, and more trusting of God’s plan for me than I used to be.

Mother Siluoana, author of, God Where is the Wound?, talks about how so much of our suffering occurs because we do not utilize the resources we have been given to see the benefit of working through the pain, stress, and loss in our lives. She says:

It is painful to realize that we do not put to use God’s grace, His holy teaching, and we choose to suffer instead. It is astonishing how skilled we are at creating our sorrows which could be avoided so easily. As if our hidden goal was to suffer! What are we focusing on when we choose risky behaviors or behaviors that prove to be dangerous? It seems we are addicted to a state of stress! We love our enemies, in a perverted sense. But if we wake up and we want to be free, we discover that we have a remedy against these enemies – if only we want to use it! We have the Lord who gives us His mercy, His care, His Grace! Let’s use this remedy so that we can uncover our hidden motives for these destructive choices represented by our passions: pride, vanity, gluttony, envy, rivalry… Let us uncover them and offer them to the Lord so He can heal them.
Mother Siluoana, p 130 God Where is the Wound

When we come to Christ for healing, He shows us the way to overcome our pain and see that the coal can actually turn to gold. While coming to Christ through prayer in every moment, we can begin to reframe and see that all things work for our good. In modern psychology, this change of mind says that we can redefine “stress” as good (eustress) or bad (distress). The main difference is really more of how we perceive it. Despite the old model in psychology that says stress and the brain are hard-set and unchangeable, new psychology relating to neuroplasticity says that the brain is constantly adapting and able to be changed and rebuilt depending on what the individual chooses. Thus, stress, if we choose to lean into and accept it, can build what many call emotional resilience.

Emotional Resilience

Emotional resilience is the ability to accept that “our perception of stress is more important than stress itself” (McGonigal, How to Make Stress Your Friend TedTalk 2013). Indeed, “it is the meaning we attach to our experiences that makes them stressful or stress-free” (Liz Lipski, Digestive Wellness). This is crucially important as we must grow in our awareness that stress is not a fixed entity that is out of our control. It’s something that God providentially utilizes in our lives to help us grow. Take each opportunity to trust God, choose humility and patience, and intentionally work through the “Emotional Resilience cycle,” and we will develop a healthier perspective in the midst of suffering and hardship. The Emotional Resilience cycle is to accept ourselves and the situations presented in our lives, grieve the losses of hard things, seek out the good, and then choose gratitude.

Acceptance

A central part of building emotional resilience involves accepting what is. Acceptance involves facing reality, realizing your limitation, and relinquishing control of the unknown/unchangeable. Then, you’ll be able to move forward with changing what you can control. It sounds simple, right? The key to acceptance is that we actually take the time to sit with ourselves so that we can truly know ourselves. In order to truly live in reality, we must see the deepest extent of our brokenness, our circumstances, our failings. This is what it means to be human.

Acceptance and knowing ourselves doesn’t just mean looking at our brokenness. When we only look at the evil in our hearts and lives, we will fall into despair. Rather, we also have to look at the reality of being created in God’s image. Elder Ephraim of Arizona wisely reminds us in The Art of Salvation,

“Wretched soul: know thyself. Realize how nobly you were created by God! Understand that you are eternal, that you will never die, that you have the privilege of immortality. You are not like the body, which will die some day. It will perish and become food for the worms; it will decay and rot. Of course, it will be resurrected during the second coming of Christ; however, if the body has not received the grace of God during this life, its resurrection will be unto perdition. My soul, you are something heavenly, something exquisite and something noble. You have been created in a special way by God. You will leave this world, and you will return to Him, as Christ revealed: “I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. Again I leave the world and go to the Father.” Your homeland is not down here. Your homeland, o soul, is in Heaven because you are imperishable. Everything up there is unchanging; it does not lose its magnificence, beauty, splendor, fragrance, and divine grace.”

 

Grieve Loss

Next, we need to grieve losses of the things that we held on to so closely. This process of taking time for the change in our hearts is similar to when we get a cut or have surgery in our physical bodies. In order for a wound to heal, it needs to be bandaged up many times over many days. This is how grieving in the soul also works as it may take days, weeks, or even years to heal depending on the depth of pain. We use silence, prayer, fasting, confession, speaking with a trusted spiritual father, attending Divine Liturgies, and many other resources to fill the time in which our soul must grieve the losses of what we used to cling to.

Sometimes we cling too closely to the things that actually hurt us, like a child who desperately wants to touch a hot stove out of curiosity or eat copious amounts of candy to satisfy a sweet tooth. Mother Siluoana offers that perspective that “we need the courage to ‘lose’ certain things, certain pleasures, certain comforts… We lose them, like when there is a fire and we lose everything just to save our lives. And we say ‘yes, we lost this and that… But we gained Life!’ So this is the mystery- learning to lose so that we gain something incomparably better than what we lost. But our minds can’t imagine the things of the kingdom and don’t realize what we can gain, except through faith. Our minds know only what we lose, they keep track of what we lose, and many times what we lose are trivialities. But we attach ourselves to them, we become dependent on them.. that’s what we do!” (Mother Siluoana, God Where is the Wound? p. 63)

Seek Out the Good

In addition, we seek the good in every situation. I must clarify that choosing to see the good in a situation does not mean that you are negating the realities of what happened or how you may feel about what happened. That’s the point of accepting and grieving the loss throughout every season! We accept the reality of the pain, but Christ never wants us to turn to despair or stay in the pain. Instead, one way that we can “lift our heads” out of the pain and look around is to choose to seek out the good. There is always good to be found because God is Love, He loves mankind, and is always working all things for our good. The story of the fly and the bee explains this concept perfectly.

“Some people tell me that they are scandalized because they see many things wrong in the Church. I tell them that if you ask a fly, “Are there any flowers in this area?” it will say, “I don’t know about flowers, but over there in that heap of rubbish you can find all the filth you want.” And it will go on to list all the unclean things it has been to. Now, if you ask a honeybee, “Have you seen any unclean things in this area?” it will reply, “Unclean things? No, I have not seen any; the place here is full of the most fragrant flowers.” And it will go on to name all the flowers of the garden or the meadow.

You see, the fly only knows where the unclean things are, while the honeybee knows where the beautiful iris or hyacinth is. As I have come to understand, some people resemble the honeybee and some resemble the fly. Those who resemble the fly seek to find evil in every circumstance and are preoccupied with it; they see no good anywhere. But those who resemble the honeybee only see the good in everything they see. The stupid person thinks stupidly and takes everything in the wrong way, whereas the person who has good thoughts, no matter what he sees, no matter what you tell him, maintains a positive and good thought.”
+St. Paisios of Mt. Athos, “Good and Evil Thoughts,” Spiritual Counsels III: Spiritual Struggle

Choose Gratefulness

Finally, choosing to be thankful for the life we have been given and the good aspects of every situation is the key to freedom and a life of wholeness. Even research in the “secular” world has found that gratitude has been linked to improved health outcomes and can reduce stress (Mullin & Swift, The Inside Tract). When we choose thankfulness and develop a positive perspective over negativity, these thoughts physiologically change the brain’s hardwiring, which is also known as neuroplasticity (Bauman College, Mental Health, 2019). Essentially, our brains have the capacity to physiologically change their “muscle memory” through the process of neuroplasticity. As a person retrains themselves to respond positively to stressful situations and actively think about good outcomes within difficult circumstances, the brain is actually made healthier by producing new neural pathways.

As Christians, choosing gratitude has much more benefit than just a flexible brain. It gives us humility, peace, and a calm spirit. By choosing to be grateful for the life we have been given, we develop a soft heart that can effectively love God and the people around us. Christ always chose the path of love and forgiveness. Even when he was hanging on the cross, He said “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He chose to entrust Himself to God rather than to man, and that is the key to gratefulness.

The Heart of Emotional Resilience

Emotional resilience ultimately stands on two pillars. Patience and humility are sisters who are the best guides through the stresses, pains, and suffering of life. They hold hands throughout every trial, giving us strength to trust God more than ourselves as we “wade it out” in the gift of time. In his letters to Saint Olympia, Saint John Chrysostom says,

“You know very well that nothing is equal to patience; for this is most especially the queen of virtues, the foundation of right actions, the port without waves, peace in the midst of war, calm in the midst of billows, security in the midst of plots, rendering the one who has attained it to be stronger than steel.” (Letters to Olympia, p. 145)

As we navigate various circumstances of our lives, may we remember that Christ is our ultimate guide. Through the cross, we will experience resurrection if we cling to Christ.