Depression is insidious.

You feel sad, you lose your concentration, nothing is interesting to you anymore, and – to top it all off – your thoughts become stuck in an endless loop of self-criticism.

There are many ways to address depression. Researchers interested in decreasing depression and increasing resilience have found that using a number of intentional activities creates positive emotions and helps reduce feelings of depression.

The first step, though, is to work toward letting go of the critical rumination going on in your head. Why? Because it is very difficult to even consider pursuing intentional activities with thoughts such as:

“It won’t help.”

“Why even bother?”

“I’ll just screw it up.”

These thoughts make your mood bleaker and keep you on the sofa rather than feeling up for trying a new activity or intervention.

So, what to do?

You know that chirping little critic you hear inside your head sometimes? Most of us have one. It’s that voice that says,

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“Why even try? You know you can’t do it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite (loser, slob, dimwit, etc.)”

This voice – this inner critic – is often the main obstacle we face when trying to bounce back in life.

But that inner critic loses its audience and it’s power when we do something that most of us aren’t very good at: showing ourselves compassion.

Did you catch that switcheroo in the title of this post? Usually, it’s “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

But in our society, we tend to reverse that. We find it easier to be compassionate toward others than toward ourselves.

Being nice to others is a good thing, right? Yes, but it begs the question: Why can’t we be nicer to ourselves?

That Inner Critic

You know that chirping little critic you hear inside your head sometimes? Most of us have one. It’s that voice that says,

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“Why even try? You know you can’t do it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite (loser, slob, dimwit, etc.)”

Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion and a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, says this voice probably developed as a means to keep us safe, a basic need that we all have.

Also, she posits that we may think we need this voice to keep us motivated. After all, wouldn’t we just be completely out of control if we didn’t talk to ourselves this way?

You know the answer to that. We don’t need that inner critic to keep us in line.

A top girls’ school in London is currently engaging in an interesting experiment: Failure Week.

This entire week will be about failure and about “the value of having a go rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less.”

I love this. Here’s why: We need to become friends with failure in order to be able to bounce back in life.

Even though there is lip service paid to “it’s okay to fail,” the reality is that there is subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to do exactly the opposite – to be perfect.

Let’s expand a little bit on the idea of acceptance that I wrote about in a recent post. In that article, I talked about how important it is to accept the reality of the adversity you may be facing.

Now let’s talk about the aspect of acceptance that has to do with letting go. Many times when I talk about letting go, I can see people’s eyes start to roll back in their heads.

“Oh great, I’ve fought and fought to keep my house from going into foreclosure, and now she wants me to give up?”

Herein lies the common misunderstanding: letting go is not so much about giving up as it is about giving in. It’s not about just standing by, doing nothing, as your house goes into foreclosure. But it is about giving in to the reality of your current situation and letting go of judgments and expectations you might have about the outcome.

Acceptance.

We hear this word, or a version of it, all the time.

“You’re just going to have to accept it.”

“I think he’s having a hard time accepting what happened.”

But what does acceptance mean in the language of resiliency? It’s a broad topic, one we’ll be discussing frequently on this blog. For now, though, I want to look at the more common concept of acceptance – as the opposite of denial.*

Resilience: The Beginning

Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith sifted through the mounds of data from their longitudinal study and noticed something peculiar. Of the children born on Kauai in 1955, there were a group of them that were at high risk for doing poorly as they grew older.

It wasn’t this group that caught the attention of the researchers, though. It was a subset of this group. The subset, about thirty-percent of the high-risk kids, was doing well. Really well.

They checked the data again. Yes, all of the high-risk children were facing the same types of adversity: parental issues including low education, behavioral health issues, and discord; health problems; poverty. And yet some of the children did very well while others did not.

Why?