Real Life Builds Resilience

When I was in my early twenties, I offered to watch my friend’s kids for the weekend so she and her husband could attend a couples retreat. Unbeknownst to all of us, tiny white grubs were quietly hatching in the kids’ hair. By the next morning, scratching led to investigation, which led to the realization that we had a problem on our hands.

Undaunted, I did a deep dive into the life cycle of the louse and learned the fine art of using a lice comb. We made a game of it. We sang songs while we picked nits. We donned colorful head scarves and continued our merry time together until their parents returned. It was their job to assure the kids were lice-free before sending them back to school.

This happened before I started losing my autonomy to an unethical spiritual teacher.

If a similar scenario took place when I was deeply lost in his ideological paradigm, I know without question that it would have played out very differently. Unmoored by cultic indoctrination, I would have been desperate to know right from wrong. I would have sought the ‘right response’ and gone all rigid in relating to those kids. I would have unwittingly dished out heavy doses of judgement mixed with the need to ‘teach a lesson’ to those kids and parents alike. It would have been no fun at all.

But where does the capacity to respond to adversity in creative, relational ways come from?

At my core, I am a farm girl. I was a child when we welcomed our first cow and sheep to our ramshackle homestead. A few years later, we were milking 40 Holsteins, slaughtering our sheep on site, and dealing with the diverse daily dramas that naturally occur with so many critters around. By the time I was with those kids for the weekend, I had already shoveled more shit than most people twice my age, dressed bovine wounds with Blue Cote, and been grossed out by maggots - more than once. I’m not squeamish. I learned how to work hard. I like manual labor.

My farming roots stitched resilience into the core of me.

But my canned life - aka cult life - eroded that resilience. Cultic indoctrination replaced flexible responsiveness with rigid black and white thinking. It instilled an internal judge and erroneous declarations of right and wrong that kept me bound to a narrow ledge that I feared falling off.

Fortunately, I broke from that prison after eighteen years and got on with living my life cult free.

What’s the foundation of your resilience?

Did you grow up in a cultic group or religion? If so, you likely have to dig deeply into your biography and your biology to find it.

When did you meet life itself - separate from the controlling doctrine? How has your exquisitely designed nervous system saved your life? Changes are good that you’ve had a number of life experiences that awakened the core of who you are - your sassy or sensitive personality and morality that’s flavored uniquely YOU.

Something got you to where you are today. You ARE a survivor. And you will become a thriver to, if not today, someday soon. Wired into each of us is a nervous system whose job is to help us survive. And lucky for us, the brilliant neuroplasticity of this network of nerves, actually wants us to live our best lives.

Real life builds resilience.