Internal Emotional Check Up: Resiliency
Resiliency is about having the strength of helping someone else although you feel miserable and distressed. Resiliency involves sacrifices, hard work, hope, optimism, and survival skills.
You may possibly be in awe of how you would regain your strength after hardships have turned your life upside down. There are stories of bravery and human resiliency that might give us all the energy to look around and look beyond our own conditions.
Being a therapist it is my privilege to hear and witness various stories of strengths and resiliency despite all the odds. At times there are narratives and life experiences that make you question how on earth this person would ever be able to recover.
Moving along, we might recall comments, feedbacks, and stories of older generations who fought the deepest and darkest human despair of the time. At times, we hear those people confirming on moments they had lost all hope while they were willing to do anything to stay strong.
Considering the cultural shock and the tremendous amount of traumas that we Iranians have experiences and still witness on a daily basis, it is significant to open up this dialogue with reference to our own resiliency, the Iranian one. Why not?
As a child when we would fall on the ground or when we hurt ourselves, our grandparents would comment that: “You fall and become stronger” or “she would grow and forget’ or “he will become stronger now.”
Back then, we had no idea of those comments and feedbacks we would hear from our elders.
Every culture creates its own domains or definitions of resiliency. For us Iranians we learn to become stronger and become resilient through some hidden words, unspoken poetries, wrapped language in metaphors and cultural restraints.
We become stronger We eat the apple that should not be eaten; the uneatable apple however tastes better than many of the eatable ones.
Resiliency starts there when people think of how: “That did not last and this will not last either.’
This is a marvelous sentence, a metaphor that comes from a common sense that has place in archetypes we have been passed on through the history. This sentence offers peace in the moment, mindfulness, hope, strength, and a positive energy.
Through our silent, peaceful, and internalized fight with the darkness, we may try to explore our own hope for a better future. When “That’ did not last means that “This” will for sure not last, so why losing hope?
