Building Personal Resilience:

A Guide to Positive Living

Edited by Dr. Iris Jackson

Building Personal Resilience: A Guide to Positive Living

Building Personal Resilience is also available in PDF format.
You can download a copy by clicking on:
Building Personal Resilience Adobe Format
If you do not have the free Adobe Reader software,
download it by clicking on

Chapter	Topic	Page #
	The Psychologist’s Introduction	3
1	Developing a Happy Family: Resolving Couples Conflict	6
2	Developing a Happy Family: Raising Resilient Children	16
3	Developing a Happy Family: Dealing with Parent/Child Conflict	30
4	Attention Deficit Disorder: Disease of the '90's	38
5	Helping Children Cope With Separation and Divorce	44
6	Helping Children Adjust: Custody and Access Issues When Parents Separate or Divorce	52
7	Managing Stress at Work and at Home	59
8	Overcoming Depression at Work and at Home	67
9	Managing Anger at Work and at Home	77
10	Workplace Diversity: Cultural Differences	87
11	Living Free From Addictions	99
12	Consulting a Mental Health Professional – Counselling, Psychotherapy and Medication	107

Important

v The information and advice presented herein are guidelines only and not meant to be a substitute for professional diagnosis. If you feel you suffer from an illness described, see your health care professional.

v Please also note that this information has been derived from a variety of sources pertaining to clinical psychology.

The Psychologist’s Introduction

Dr. Iris Jackson

It is my hope that you will use this book to improve the quality of your life, to develop insight into yourself and others and to increase your compassion for people going through some of the problems and challenges described in the following chapters. Some people will use this book as a manual, reading relevant chapters as they go through their lives. Others will read this book out of curiosity and find that it helps them understand and empathize with people they know who are going through some of these problems. Still others will consider this book as a stepping-stone to becoming all that they were meant to be.

Here, I would like you to contemplate with me the concept of self-improvement. The human growth movement of the 1970’s has matured and many of us are interested in actualizing our potential. One look at the “Psychology” section of any bookstore illustrates how many of us are seeking to help ourselves develop as complete, whole people.

I have spent many years providing psychotherapy to people, reading the scientific literature and introspecting about my own life experiences. Any good psychotherapist or counsellor will tell you that we learn as much from our clients as we do from our textbooks and scientific journals. When a client asks me “What am I aiming for? How will I know that I have achieved my goals, other than that I will feel better?”, it causes me to analyze and synthesize my professional experience to articulate a reasonable and well-reasoned answer for the client. As a result, I have developed the following list of “adult capabilities” which we, as psychologically mature adults must develop in order to be mentally healthy and happy. As you read them, you can assess yourself and see what areas you might want to work on to more fully be yourself and be happy.

Adult Capabilities:

1. The capacity to deeply experience liveliness, joy, vigour, excitement and spontaneity, without using alcohol, drugs, sex or other people to augment our experience. Also, the ability to relax without using these negative strategies. This entails finding and maintaining a balance of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of our life.

2. The capacity to feel entitled to self-fulfillment, pleasure and support from others to achieve our ends, but also to keep this sense of entitlement within reasonable limits.

3. The capacity to identify our own unique wishes, to initiate the actions necessary to fulfil our wishes, and to assertively express ourselves. This is the capacity to self-activate, to generate our own excitement and make the things we wish to happen constructively.

4. The capacity to defend our individuality, our actions and our wishes even when attacked and criticized for them. This capacity builds the ability to maintain our self-esteem and self-confidence at a good level on our own, without excessive shoring up by others. This also means living true to our beliefs and our perceptions of reality.

5. The capacity to emotionally connect with others without losing our sense of independent self. This is the ability to find common ground with most other people and allow mutual rapport to develop without feeling threatened. This ranges from the spontaneous rapport of a chat with the bus driver to the deep connection of marital intimacy.

6. The capacity to cope adaptively with our emotions, issues, events, and people in a positive way. This capacity involves accepting rather than fighting our emotions, and developing ways to re-think things so we can turn adversity into opportunity.

7. The capacity to soothe painful emotions. This is the capacity to modulate, reduce and soothe emotional pain and provide ourselves with comfort on our own.

8. The capacity to experience ourselves as the same individual across time; a sense of continuity of self that allows us to feel that it is, indeed, “me” in that particular experience just as it was “me” in another. Also, the capacity to recognize others as the same even when their moods change. This capacity also involves letting some old selves go when we outgrow them.

9. The capacity to make a commitment to an objective, a goal or a relationship and to persevere, despite obstacles, until we reach the goal. Conversely, the capacity to know when to let go of commitments that have become wrong or bad for us. This means making a strong commitment to ourselves as individuals.

10. The capacity to be creative, to change old familiar patterns into new, unique and different patterns; to connect surprising, different and unusual things (idea, associations, events) to produce new and original things (ideas, events, associations, solutions, products). This is the capacity to be productive in a way that expresses ourselves in all our uniqueness.

11. The ability to see things clearly and in perspective in order to make choices suitable to our personality and circumstances. To develop a sense of humour to help us cope with difficult situations and thereby keep a sense of proportion. The ability to laugh at ourselves and allow our self to be human, not perfect.

As you review the adult capabilities, you may find that there are a few that you could work on that would help you improve yourself and result in being more adaptable, having more fun and being happier.

The Building Blocks of Self-improvement

I view the building blocks of self-improvement to look like this:

To get to proactive coping (at the top of the pyramid) we must develop a solid base of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-regulation and self-discipline.

· Knowing ourselves is harder than we think. It is difficult to look honestly at ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses. Sometimes we need help seeing ourselves as we are, and having feedback from a trusted friend, family member or counsellor is very useful.

· Self-acceptance actually helps us grow and self-actualize. It is one of life’s contradictions that we are better able to change in a positive way if we accept who we are now rather than criticize ourselves.

· Self-regulation refers to getting enough sleep, eating nutritiously, getting regular exercise and not overdoing these things (at least not very often). Our minds and our bodies are one, and if we do not regulate our bodies appropriately we soon find that our moods and even our thinking become unmodulated too.

· Self-discipline is required to make us get into a reasonable routine which allows self-regulation to be possible. Self-discipline is different from will power. Will power is like a whip we use against ourselves and, as many of us discover, when we try to use will power to achieve a goal, very often we encounter a resistance that operates with equal intensity against our goals: a sort of “won’t power”. Self-discipline is gentler and is based on scheduling and routines that make many repetitive jobs in our daily lives automatic. This leave us time and energy to do other more creative things and keeps our energy resources filled up so that we can work, love and have fun.

Information refers to all of the new ideas and knowledge about others and how the world works that we can get from reading, TV, friends, family and counsellors. Indeed, counsellors can help with all the building blocks of self-improvement, which leads us to hope, without which we would do nothing. With the first six building blocks in place, we can not only cope in a proactive way that prevents many problems from developing, but also enjoy life knowing that while problems may crop up, we have the resilience, stamina and creativity to deal with them.

Chapter 1

Developing a Happy Family: Resolving Couples Conflict

Dr. Karen Davies

If we find ourselves in adulthood as part of a couple, then clearly we have made a choice sometime during our lives that we wish to share our day-to-day lives with another person. If we are a member of a family with children, then we have made an even bigger decision to share our lives completely with a small social group! In either case, we have come through our adolescence and early adulthood and concluded that we do not wish to live completely on our own.

Living with others provides us with countless opportunities to learn about ourselves, and also about the people with whom we live. Our lives can be dramatically enriched through our participation in the development of our children. Likewise, since we as adults never stop developing and changing, living with another gives us the opportunity to share in this process with another significant person.

If we can experience our partner as a ‘best friend’, most of the time, as we live through all the exciting, sometimes trying and difficult adventures of adulthood, then this very special ‘other person’ can be a constant source of comfort and support. Likewise, we can provide that same comfort and support to our partner.

At the same time, however, living with another person inevitably means that there will be times of disagreement, argument and perhaps serious conflict. If we find ourselves engaged in ongoing, seemingly unresolvable conflict with our partner, then day-to-day life can be difficult and stressful. When faced with serious problems, we can feel quite alone, overwhelmed and unable to explore possible solutions and make good decisions.

Differences of opinion and points of view are normal and healthy in relationships. We come together as two separate people, each with our own unique set of ideas, values, needs, wishes, expectations, beliefs and personality styles. Because we are separate people, there will inevitably be times when some of these are different from those of our partner. The existence of differences does not automatically mean that there will be conflict. However,

· how we express our differences,

· how we respect these differences in one another; and

· how we find acceptable resolutions to differences,

can all affect whether or not we will experience serious conflict in our relationships with our partners.

The general emotional tone in a home and in a family is largely determined by the manner in which the adults conduct their lives. The more we are able to create an atmosphere of mutual trust, support and cooperation, the more likely it is that our children will feel safe and secure in their own lives with us. Children are particularly sensitive to the ‘feel’ of things, and if there is a constant underlying tension between their parents, children will inevitably perceive it and respond with behavior that, in some way, reflects their own feelings of discomfort and anxiety.

Just as we teach our children how to tie their shoelaces, ride a 2-wheeled bicycle, get along with their brothers, sisters and friends, and the innumerable other tasks of life, so too do we teach them how to work out differences between themselves and others. As they watch us argue, debate, discuss and resolve disagreements, our children learn how to listen, respect, negotiate, and consider different ideas, points of views, wishes and needs.

Likewise, in our own families as we grew up, we were all exposed to the ways in which our parents resolved their inevitable differences. Some of us were fortunate enough to have good role models for conflict resolution, and we learned throughout our childhood how to deal with differences. However, for many of us, our parents were not particularly skilled in this regard, and thus we have come to adult relationships with a lot to learn!

What Distinguishes Healthy Conflict from Destructive Conflict?

Most of us have memories of arguments or debates in which we tried to defend our own personal point of view in opposition to that of another person, perhaps another family member, a co-worker, a friend or even just a passing acquaintance. Healthy arguing or debating is a way in which we can clarify some of our own beliefs and values about different things. If you have to discuss and defend something that you believe in, you have to think about it, and do your best to organize your thoughts and then put them into words.

It is not required that the other person agree with you on every point in order that your views be considered valid and important. In many instances, agreement isn’t necessary at all, and sometimes the resolution to the difference is simply to agree to disagree. Such a resolution allows for a mutual respect between partners that each person has a right to their individual views and beliefs. Such respect is a fundamental building block for any relationship between two individuals, whether they be intimate partners, friends, family members or co-workers.

Sometimes, though, agreeing to disagree just isn’t possible in an intimate partnership. Sharing a life with another person requires the sharing of many different things:

· the many details of the day-to-day running of a household, including meal preparation, housecleaning, tidying, general household chores inside and out;

· taking care of children and children’s activity schedules (if there are children);

· continuing the relationships with parents and other extended family;

· maintaining relationships with individual friends and friends of the couple;

· career development plans and needs of each person;

· various work-related issues;

· day-to-day financial management as well as longer term financial planning; and

· individual needs for ‘free-time’, fitness, physical affection and intimacy,

· some couples and families also have significant medical issues to cope with as well.

Many of us have very busy lives, and sometimes it seems as though there just isn’t enough time to fit everything in! When we experience any significant conflict with our partner, the task at hand seems to grow ever larger, and the energy available to deal with it seems to diminish. While ‘many hands’ can make most tasks go more quickly, ‘fighting hands’ slow everything down and make the completion of even simple tasks much more difficult.

Simple arguments and disagreements about ‘who does what when’ may come and go, particularly when people are tired or overwhelmed by ‘too much to do in too little time’. If these are settled quickly, and both people continue to feel that their views are listened to and respected by the other, there is no long-lasting consequence. However, when these same disagreements and arguments rise up over and over again, and no satisfactory solution is found, therein lies the beginning of more serious conflict that may begin to erode some of the good feelings in the relationship.

Some couples are quite able to identify the ‘same old arguments’ that inevitably end up ‘the same old way’, like running into the proverbial brick wall! Sometimes the argument is so familiar that it feels as though one could just slip in a tape recording after the first line or two, and play out the same responses and counter-responses that have been made so many times before.

If such a pattern of struggle continues over an extended period of time, eventually the predominant emotional tone in the relationship will be one of frustration, helplessness, discouragement, disappointment, and anger. Even the moments of ‘good times’ together will become overshadowed by the lingering sense of bad feeling. If such a situation persists, then it is only a matter of time before the relationship begins to falter, and one or both partners may find themselves actively searching out any number of distractions from the turmoil.

Such distractions may take the form of extra time spent at the office, more and more events planned alone away from the family setting, more time spent with friends, increased use of drugs or alcohol, or even possibly the searching out of another more seemingly understanding and compassionate ‘significant other’. Certainly, many extra-marital affairs begin when one partner feels more and more isolated and alienated from the other due to unresolved lingering feelings of anger, resentment and helplessness. These are times of serious conflict in the relationship that are potentially very destructive for both members.

What Do You Do Now?

The very first step that needs to be taken en route to resolving any ongoing conflict within a couple is for some kind of open, non-accusatory acknowledgment of the existence of the problem. Sticking one’s head in the sand and hoping that it will all go away just doesn’t work! Besides, when your head is stuck in the sand, you will inevitably miss all kinds of other things that are going on around you and also in the relationship, including some things that are potentially fun, exciting, interesting and positive.

Rest assured - the important things that you do not talk about and try to resolve now, will inevitably rise up over and over again, in some form or another, until you do pay attention to them. This is yet another example of the basic fact that life will present us with many, many opportunities to ‘get it right’, whether we are raising children, learning how to work things out with the people we love, or simply learning a new and different task.

It’s best if we don’t try to discuss something important in the heat of the moment, during or immediately after a serious argument when emotions are high. It is hard to think clearly and honestly when we are flooded with feelings of anger, disappointment, and despair. In these states of high emotional arousal, most of us are also much more likely to say and even do things that we do not really mean, and that we seriously regret later.

Very hurtful things that are said or done in such emotionally-charged moments can feel like significant wounds to one or both partners, and it can then take quite some period of time for each person to heal enough to re-engage with the other person. Trusting our partner to do his or her best to safeguard our feelings of comfort and security in the relationship is another significant cornerstone of any relationship, and when this trust is damaged, the process of rebuilding it can take time and some repeated experiences of reassurance. Please, give yourselves a little space and time after a serious argument to let things calm down a little. Then set aside some time to talk.

It really is important that you make some time in your busy schedule to sit down quietly together, preferably not when you are both bone-weary and can hardly see straight, and not when either person has been drinking alcohol or using any other type of drug. Again, in any of these circumstances, we are all less able to think and talk clearly and honestly about what has happened, how we feel about it, what our own part was in it, and what we believe might be an acceptable resolution for the time being.

Similarly, don’t try to have an important discussion about an area of conflict in your relationship in the mad rush before everyone has to be out the door en route to somewhere. It is important that both people feel that there is enough time for his or her views to be expressed, heard, considered and responded to. Furthermore, if you are unable to reach any mutually satisfactory resolution in this ‘rushed’ bit of time, it is quite likely that both people will begin their days in a state of some emotional upset.

Once you have set some time apart to talk, keep distractions to a minimum. Don’t answer the telephone or the knock on the door. The calling party will call back or come back if it is important enough! If you have young children (up to 9 years of age or so), wait until they are settled in bed.