Building Resilience One Paragraph at a Time

Source: Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

Stuff happens. Our days cannot all be sunny. We will always have to deal with people whose personalities rub us the wrong way. Everyone suffers loss, experiences grief, and goes through their own stresses in life. We can’t avoid pain and trauma and loss altogether. But we can fortify ourselves with the tools we need to transcend these obstacles.

How can writing about negative experiences help me?

It is a grand irony that the very experiences that cause us the most pain are also the ones with the potential to be the most rewarding. Cultivating a daily reflective writing practice can help us through these difficult times with clarity accrued and wisdom gained. Reflection can help us mine those painful incidents for potential growth and learning. Writing about negative experiences, then examining our thoughts and feelings about them, allows us to work through difficult situations. We discover strengths within ourselves and, in so doing, develop the confidence and skill to manage similar future situations with new awareness and insight.

Why bother writing when things are going swimmingly?

Writing about positive encounters also has a role to play in resilience-building. As we write, we can reflect on the friends and family who support us, learning to appreciate people and events that may have been taken for granted before our daily practice brought them to the fore.

How can writing help me build resilience?

Resilience is characterized by the ability to be flexible, motivated, and resourceful. But resilience also includes qualities of creativity and imagination. A daily writing practice can help us flex that creative muscle, pushing us to view situations in new ways, to craft a meaningful narrative from difficult circumstances, and to identify our own inner resources even as we are drawing upon them. Concretely naming the attributes we possess deeply but may not have identified and owned allows us to tap into those same inner resources in the future.

Some aspects of resilience can seem like innate personality traits we have little control over. Things like persistence and optimism sound more like something we’re born with than something we can acquire, but our writing practice is integral in cultivating these qualities. Persistence requires determination and commitment to our work. Writing from others’ perspectives helps develop empathy, which is essential in deriving deep meaning from our work.

Our ability to reflect with our writing is perhaps the most important aspect of resilience. Writing about negative experiences, then examining our thoughts and feelings about them, allows us to work through difficult situations. We discover strengths within ourselves and add to our personal growth by developing the confidence and skill to manage similar future situations with new awareness and insight. Writing about positive encounters also has a role to play in resilience-building, as we learn to appreciate people and events that may have been taken for granted before our daily practice brought them to the forefront.

Writing helps us to pay attention to the emotional experience behind the events we find stressful and in so doing, helps us to better understand, process, and assimilate those emotions. New insights gained on the page inform and regulate our future reactions to similar stressors or triggers.

Reflective writing can be an extremely empowering exercise in resilience-building. Identifying inner strengths and marshaling those resources for the future makes writing a superpower we can all use in challenging times.