I have been reading a number of books on resilience these days.
I’ve spent the summer reading and listening about trauma which led me to understand that resilience is an important capability for getting beyond my childhood sexual abuse. And it can be cultivated as a skill to use in all aspects of my life!
I look back and I can identify that resilience was the basic quality that got me through all the impacts of the abuse. I didn’t understand it at the time, just knew that I was not willing to give up. Even when I was having suicidal thoughts and envisioned a time in my 20’s where I would no longer be alive –didn’t know how, just knew it as true– I was NOT willing to give in.
Some drive within me kept me going. I saw it as persistence, grit, fortitude, all kinds of ways to try to label the almost indescribable internal energy that kept me going.
With the recognition of resilience as a skill, I am reading to learn ways to explicitly increase my resilience and bring those skills into my life across all my experiences and interactions.
