It’s one thing to survive misfortune – but wouldn’t it be great to thrive, too? To grow beyond who you were before adversity struck?

You can.

It might not always happen, but the more you are aware that good can come out of hardship, the more likely you are to look for and experience growth.

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It’s hard to bounce back by yourself.

If you look into the research about resiliency, inevitably you’ll find that social support and community are among the factors that help people learn to recover – and even thrive – through the worst of circumstances.

There are many aspects to the idea of social support but I’m just going to discuss four key components here. Utilizing any or all of these elements will help you bounce back more easily and in good company.

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Ever feel like you can’t take it anymore?

There is an essential resiliency skill that will help you not only take it, but bounce back from the really tough emotional times in your life. It has to do with perspective.

Let me illustrate by telling the following story.

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Psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky is the only researcher I know who has written a rap – The How of Happiness Song - about her research findings.

It must make her happy because happiness is what her work is all about.

It’s not only happiness that she dissects, it’s how we become happy.

She has found that there are three basic intentional activities that promote long-term happiness and thus bolster resilience. (I say long-term because it turns out that happiness around things like our life circumstances being improved by material items only lasts for a short period of time.)

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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.

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The next message is always right where you are. ~ Ram Dass

I was sitting on the patio at Starbuck’s the other day passing time before I met a friend for lunch. I had a book with me and was trying to read it but, to tell the truth, my mood was down and I felt distracted from reading by my inner melancholy.

Having lived with depression for a long time, my mind resorted to its gamut of self-recriminations: “You shouldn’t be feeling this way.” “Everything is fine, just stop it.” “You get gloomy too often for no good reason.”

Finally, I caught myself, took a breath to let go of the negative thoughts, and went back to my book and mocha. A flash of pink caught my eye as the patio door opened in front of my table.

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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.

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Your boss calls you into his office. Smiling, you take a seat. You’re sure that long-awaited promotion is finally here and your heart races with excitement.

Instead, your boss sighs, shakes his head, and says, “I have to tell you something.”

Suddenly, your excitement turns to dread.

“I’m sorry,” he says slowly, “but we’re going to have to lay you off.”

How do you get through this kind of shock and loss?

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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.*

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A new approach to increasing resiliency around the onset of a chronic illness is showing promise in a recent research study.

Judith Moskowitz at the University of California, San Francisco has developed a program that is aimed toward helping people who are newly diagnosed with a chronic disorder to adjust by increasing their positive emotions.

The intervention, known as IRISS (intervention for those recently informed of their seropositive status), worked with HIV-positive subjects through one-to-one sessions to help them learn “intentional activities” that promote positive feelings.

While the study had a small sample with only one type of chronic illness, Moskowitz believes the intervention may be found to help people with other types of persistent disorders as well.

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