Greetings! Welcome to all of my new Substack subscribers! I’m Lisa Cooper Ellison, a trauma-informed writing coach, author of this Substack, and your resident story alchemist. If you’ve been here for a while, thanks for sticking around. I’m so glad you’re here. If you’re a free subscriber or follower, be sure to check out this fall’s plan for my paid Substack subscribers.
When I was ten, I went to school with a torn retina.
Minutes before the bus arrived, my brother swung a sock full of pennies through the air like one of the medieval weapons we’d seen on TV. We were always counting pennies for groceries or gas, so the pennies themselves weren’t a mystery, but why they ended up in the sock is something I’ll never know.
I do, however, remember exactly how it felt when that whipping ball of metal accidentally collided with my face as I lifted my head after tying my shoe. The impact created a galaxy behind my eye that reminded me of hyperspace. My stomach curdled. I got woozy as I stood up, but the bus was there, Mom was sleeping, and if I didn’t catch it, my brothers and I would get in big trouble.
All morning, worried teachers eyed the purple-black swelling around my eye. I kept telling them I was fine. What happened was no big deal. I didn’t even ask for ice. And yet that injury was so bad it left a scar on my retina optometrists could still see decades later. At the time, I simply didn’t let myself feel it, because I was tough and tough equaled resilient.
Looking back, I can see that I was operating from the dark side of resilience—something Sally Cunningham and I discussed last week during the 2026 WorldShift Speculative Fiction Conference.
Like me, she’d hopped on the toughness train and bragged about her resilience, and how quickly she could move on from life’s greatest challenges, until decades later she realized how dangerous this belief was.
Have you ever pushed through fatigue to complete something, buried your feelings so you could carry on, or told yourself a trauma or injury wasn’t a big deal?
Even though patriarchal culture is crumbling around us, most of us still operate from the bootstrapping get-it-togetherness and the Teflon facade it rewards. But when we bypass our pain and dismiss our difficulties, we hinder our growth.
True resilience isn’t about toughness or forcing yourself to be okay. It’s about expanding the container of who you are so you can be with what is. That requires vulnerability and an openness to receiving help. It invites us to have curiosity about what we can learn from what occurred, not because everything happens for a reason, but because you can choose to grow from it.
While we’re all born with a certain level of built-in resilience, we can expand ours by learning and practicing its skills. In an increasingly dysregulated world, we need resilience-building practices more than ever.
Identifying the places where you’re operating from the dark side of resilience is essential to your well-being and creativity.
That’s because we create from our emotions.
To ensure our creative channels remain open, we must allow our emotions to flow through us. Operating from the dark side of resilience shuts those channels down. That’s because the dark side tells us that our emotions make us weak, or they’ll break us or keep us from what we desire.
Building a deeper understanding of what you’re feeling, how those feelings work inside you, and how we can use them rather than be ruled by them is how we move toward the emotional light and into a truly resilient life.
This is the perfect week to do this work. Thursday’s full moon lunar eclipse in Pisces could bring up some intense emotions as it closes a chapter that began on September 17, 2024. Those feelings could be related to an experience that feels like a repeat or leveling up of your 2024 experience or a hidden truth that gets revealed. Pay close attention to your dreams. They might be extra vivid or bring forth new realizations and insights.
If you want to play with this energy, think back to what was going on around September 17, 2024. Did you experience a relationship wrinkle, an unexpected snarl or something that rocked the way you see things?
On September 17, 2024, I recovered the early life trauma that ruled me for almost fifty years and tried to burn me out. It’s the mystery at the heart of the memoir I’m writing. I’ve worked to integrate it for the past two years. At the outset, that included crying jags, panic attacks, and moments of emotional overwhelm that weakened my knees so much that I crumpled to the floor. For a while, it was a very big deal.
It’s showing up right now as a pressure to finally get a handle on the rhythms that are best for my life so I can practice radical self-care. And I’m doing it in the face of displacement and massive upheaval that I might once have said wasn’t a big deal so I could race toward my goals.
As we approach this final eclipse in Pisces, I’m respecting the magnitude of what’s happening by making room for extra self-care and any emotions that rise to the surface, so I can choose presence rather than toughness.
If working with this eclipse energy lights you up, here are some questions to explore:
Think back to September 2024. What was happening?
What relationships did this issue involve? Don’t forget to include your relationship with yourself.
How have you changed since then?
What wrinkles still exist?
What three things will you do this week to care for yourself? They can be as simple as taking five breaths before meals, going for a ten-minute walk, or engaging in a five-minute stretch session.
How will you give yourself grace rather than trying to be tough?
Want to apply this to your writing project?
Channel any intense emotions you feel into scenes with a similar vibe. For example, if you feel sad this week, use what you feel to create precise details, interior dialogue, coping strategies, or physical responses for a scene where your protagonist is extremely sad.
However you walk through this week, please know that you are worth taking time for, because when you nurture your relationship with yourself, you stand in your power.
Love and blessings to you,
Lisa
PS: Many thanks to Sally Cunningham who shared her dangers of resilience with me. Our email exchange inspired this post.
Your Turn: How have you fallen prey to the dark side of resilience? What are you doing to change this? Share your answer in the comments. You never know who you might inspire or help.
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This week’s rewind episode speaks to an issue that so many writers go through: reigniting your passion for your project after an agent rejection. If you’re querying or you plan to, this episode is for you.
Listen Now or Read the Transcript
Discover what a writing voice is, the question you should ask BEFORE trying to cultivate yours, and the skills you need to develop to make your work so distinctive that all people need to do is read a few sentences to know it’s you.
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