The science of resilience

“It’s ok, Dad, it is part of growing up.” This is what Gab, a six-year-old kid in our family, told his Dad when his Dad looked so worried over the bleeding gash on Gab’s head. We are so careful that we do not permanently damage children’s memories not just about injury but also about other things that life throws our way. We fear that the pain will be permanent, that it will be traumatic. But is there really such a thing as a permanent heartbreak? Can traumas and heartbreaks emotionally disable you for the rest of your life? If so, are we all equally prone to this paralyzing sting?

Gary Stix is one of my favorite writers in the Scientific American and in its March issue, he tackled the science of resilience — the human ability to bounce back after a trauma. I was surprised to find out that his probe on the secret of life of heartaches, etched in scientific studies, revealed that heartaches are simply guests. Unwelcome as they are, consuming our energies and heavy with baggage, they are guests and eventually, they vacate our emotional caverns which they have once suffused with melancholy and flooded with tears.

I liked it that Stix reminded us of the Latin roots of “resilience” which is “re” for “back” and “saliere” which means “leap.” It denotes a journey back — when your heart breaks and eventually goes back to being “whole.” But we all know that our emotional lives do not stretch back like rubber. We know from our experiences that we do fall apart at times and when we do, we feel like glass — shattered and hopeless. This is especially true of these kinds of heartaches as have come out of studies: death of a spouse, jail sentence, death of immediate family member, immediate family member commits suicide, getting into debt beyond means of repayment, homelessness, immediate family member seriously ill, unemployment (of head of household), divorce and breakup of family. After these things, we are never the same but do we remain “broken” for life?

Look back at the times you broke. Where are you now? Do you still feel as “shattered”? At the time you broke, there was a rush of stress chemicals called cortisol within your body that at certain levels could damage parts of your brain that cradles your memories and your emotions. Stix distilled for us the studies that have identified certain proteins that are able to cushion the flood of cortisol in our brains. They found that when these proteins, produced by a certain gene/s are higher, we can count on having the feeling that the Sun will come up tomorrow and indeed ourselves, with it. But we are still far from a pill or shot to reverse a broken heart to enable you to move on with your life, relatively unscathed. If we could not yet have a pharmacological heart mender, what do we do to heal?

Stix uncovered studies on resilience and one whose work stood out was of George Bonanno of Columbia University. He has spent decades studying how people bounce back from deep sorrow. He went so far as to study their facial expressions, including watching out for a trace around the eyes that is the mark of genuine laughter. He observed that genuine laughter consistently burst out of people who have experienced deep traumas. I could only surmise that this is evidence that healing from within is already happening and in fact, the healing happens within six months, said Bonnano. He thinks that our heads are wired to NOT remain marinated in melancholia. It seems that when the brain is overwhelmed with all the chemicals associated with sorrow, most of us seem to gear up for the journey to mend. The normal thing is to move on and for most of us, it is not true that tragedy necessarily cripples you for life. This makes a lot of sense I think in evolutionary terms. If our cave ancestors sulked at every unexpected tragedy and soaked in generous bouts with self-pity for extended periods, they would be distracted and lose sight of the daily survival emergencies they had to address. Those who wallowed and lost focus were left behind and were consumed by the climate, hungry beasts or starved to death. But those who chose to dust themselves off and move on were the ones who survived and whose genes lurk inside us modern humans now. Thus, most of us heal and move on because our ancestors dried their tears so they could see clearly what was ahead. 

But it is also no secret that there are those who cannot heal at the pace that most do. How do we help them? Stix cited studies of trauma processing for adults that largely did not work. While trauma-processing for kids seems to yield benefits, it does not seem to work for adults. Stix cited psychologist Martin Seligman whose work on happiness I have written about a few times over the years. Seligman thinks that the best way to intervene is to strengthen this already innate resiliency we all have, with emphasis on what to live for rather than what you have to get over with. So if you have been singing “A Total Eclipse of the Heart” for 20 years now and wondering why it has not yet helped you heal, you might want to shift to “Here Comes the Sun” and this time, know that you need no special gift to heal. Strum the refrain knowing that it is in your biology to say, “It’s alright.”

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