How can we live well through tough times?

Trigger Warning: this article contains content relating to the subjects of trauma and suicide.

This month marks a full year of pandemic restrictions for most of the world. Here in the UK where we have in recent months had one of the strictest lockdowns globally, we are starting to learn of ‘lockdown fatigue’.

Well over a third of all fines for lockdown breaches have been handed out in the past seven weeks as people tire of the restrictions and some have begun to bend the rules.

Month after month of only leaving our homes for essential business or daily exercise, whilst endlessly following gloomy news, and perhaps also juggling work with homeschooling or living with covid related bereavement or illness, has left many of us feeling very worn down indeed.

In every aspect—physically, emotionally, and financially to name a few— our resilience has been collectively put through its paces in a way that gives us some insight into what it might be like to live amidst the challenges of a climate-changed world.

*What can we learn about building resiliency from the survival crash-course that the pandmic has given us?*

So what then might we learn about resilience from the pandemic? Why have some fared better than others? What has most helped us to keep putting one foot in front of the other? And how might this survival crash-course serve us in our climate mitigation and adaptation strategies?

Wintering

Winter, an already challenging season, has this year really had us on our knees.

As flowers now start to show, the sun regains its warmth, and the vaccination program begins to work its magic, spring feels both metaphorically and literally within sight.

And although the virus will continue to affect us for many more years, there seems to be a collective sense of some kind of preliminary finish line appearing on the horizon. At least, for those of us in England who were presented with a roadmap out of lockdown last week.

But, whether we find ourselves confidently striding towards that line, or limping through these final weeks and months, let us not be too hasty in relegating this time of winter to the realms of distant memory as soon as possible. For it is when our full resource is no longer required purely for survival that we may find ourselves in a position to unlock the deep-buried blessings of such an awful time in our lives, if we are willing to be with the discomfort for just a little whilst longer.

This is the art of ‘wintering’, a concept explained beautifully by author Katherine May who describes wintering as;

‘A fallow period of life where you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of the outsider… [But] wintering brings some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom lies in all those who have wintered.’ (pp. 9. 12).

*The most challenging times of our lives can can also bring some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience.*

Surviving Winter

‘Wintering’ describes May’s journey through a period of deep depression and her discovery of various traditions and practices that helped her survive. Whilst triggered by her husband’s sudden, though short and well-recovered, period of illness, this wintering experience seems to have been waiting for May for quite some time.

Having ‘wintered’ at various times throughout her life it is therefore not surprising that the first of May’s wintering survival strategies is ‘making ready.’

To ‘make ready’ for winter May explores the winter preparations traditionally undertaken by her friend from Norway, a country with infamously harsh winters. This includes preserving food, fixing house repairs, decorating for the season, and having an entire wardrobe change.

This was quite a revelatory read for me because a ‘making ready’ approach to winter is one that is honest about the inevitability of winter times in our lives. To ‘make ready’ during the summer and autumn seasons of our lives is to therefore approach wintering with a degree of acceptance so that, when winter does arrive, we do not waste vital resources panicking or fighting reality.

This is a pattern also hardwired into nature. I didn’t know, for example, that trees and plants make all their buds for the following year not in spring, but in the previous summer.

*Just as trees and plants make their buds in the following summer, so too can we learn to prepare for the winter seasons of our lives.*

This means that the buds are tiny but visible the whole way through winter, I just hadn’t noticed them before. May writes; ‘plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt.’ (p. 13)

May explores a wide range of other wintering practices such as Halloween, which has its origins in remembering those who have passed through wintering and into death, and which encourages us to consider what may lie beyond that experience. May also celebrates sleep as a time of hibernation and rest, and nighttime as a pause when we are free from the daily grind of online living, and for some of life’s other pleasures, such as intimacy. Other of her suggestions are more practical, such as using a sauna or buying a SAD lamp.

The purpose of learning to winter well, according to May, is twofold; we can lesson winter’s impact by learning to see it coming and honing our survival strategies, and we can pass on the wisdom that we learn to others.

Post- Traumatic Growth

I am encouraged by the view that resiliency is something we can cultivate because there is little worse than the feeling that we are stuck, trapped by our circumstances, and at the mercy of what unfolds.

This ‘frozen’ state is what characterises our response to trauma. When we are unable to fight or flee from a threat to our safety our bodies and minds begin to close down. This is one of the reasons why children are especially vulnerable to trauma; the options for escape are often much more limited than in adulthood.

It is also why, if we have previously experienced trauma in our lives, an invisible virus circulating in the air we breathe and preventing us from leaving our homes, is likely to trigger a trauma response, even if we are not consciously aware of why this might be the case.

Quite often when trauma is triggered we are not aware of exactly what past memories are being relived. We might find ourselves feeling abnormally tired, restless, or anxious, we may have disturbed eating, drinking or sleeping patterns, increased substance dependency, conflict with others, or feelings of despair.

One of the most common signs of having found ourselves back in survival mode is a real difficulty being present to the moment. Instead, we might find ourselves ruminating on the past, worrying about the future, or simply unable to focus.

It’s not surprising that May’s guide to ‘flourishing when life became frozen’ focuses a great deal on solutions that soothe the body, because it is in the body that we experienced the lion’s share of these trauma symptoms. As our bodies are responsible for producing and experiencing our emotional responses, it makes sense that it would be through our bodies that we might find some relief from those that are unwelcome.

*We are not stuck with a base level of resiliency but instead can develop tools that support our minds and bodies to develop greater resiliency.*

In my previous post On… Our Bodies, I shared some of the research that exists around how our bodies store and continue to relive unprocessed trauma, often repeatedly generating similar physical reactions even when that specific threat has passed many years ago.

This, then, is the power of seeing resiliency as something that can be cultivated. Every time we do something to help ourselves, whether that’s going for a walk, reaching out to a friend, or having a day away from screens, we move away from the perception of ourselves as a powerless and helpless victim of our circumstances.

Instead, we are telling our bodies that we do not need to go into freeze/ despair/ powerlessness mode at this moment in time, because we still have options.

So the things we do to help ourselves survive the winters of our lives are important, but perhaps more so is the simple act of doing something for ourselves in the first place.

This is how, whether or not we have previously experienced substantial trauma, we can learn to grow during the most challenging of times, and prepare ourselves for whatever lies ahead. We can become more and more expert in taking care of ourselves, especially when it feels hard to do so, growing in creativity, stamina, and wisdom for life.

Surviving the Storm

There was, however, something missing from May’s book for me, and this is where I’m going to move from winter metaphors to storm ones.

There is an inherent assumption in ‘Wintering’ about the resources available during seasons of hardship. May is able, for example, to take time off work, to pay for a gym membership she does not end up using, and to holiday in Iceland.

I am all for doing whatever constructive means we have available to help us take responsibility for our own well-being, and I also have taken extended times off work when I have needed to, for example. But, although May does reference some periods of financial hardship and the impacts of a late diagnosis of autism, there is still much privilege to be found in her perspective, as with mine, as a white, heterosexually married, and well-educated woman living in the UK.

If resiliency is psychological in that it is an approach to life’s challenges that can be cultivated, and physiological in that the battleground for this cultivation primarily takes place in the body, then resiliency is also political. Because, when life is closing in on us, privilege is something that gives us options, alternative routes we can take or ways of getting what we need.

This is captured very well in a quote that went viral shortly after the pandemic began; ‘we are not all in the same boat, but we are all in the same storm.’

How Big Is Your Boat?

BAME communities have been disproportionately affected by a pandemic that has both exposed and further exacerbated the racism that is engrained into the structures of society.

Jobless rates among BAME groups, for example, are now double the rate than that for white people, and we know also that black people are thought to have a fourfold risk of dying from covid than white people, due to life circumstances rather than poorer health.

The pandemic has unflinchingly pressed upon the fault lines that already exist across our societies, because this is exactly how the testing of our resiliency works; when our buffers are removed we can see uncomfortable truths that we might normally hide from view.

And here is another reason why winter seasons deserve more attention from us than simply getting them over with. They demand that we attend to our weak points.

So, as we have made our way through this tumultuous time we have been made aware of the varying sizes and capacities of our various boats, both personally and collectively. In addition to race, we have found that age, underlying health conditions, mental health, financial security, education, our social networks, access to green spaces and so much more have gained incredible additional significance, almost overnight.

The question is, what are we going to do with this information and how can it inform our response to climate change?

*The difficult moments of our lives encourage us to examine and tend to our points of weakness.*

Presencing and Purposing

I was recently introduced to The Resource Innovation Group (TRIG), a not-for-profit affiliated with Willamette University in Oregan, which is ‘creating widespread understanding of the urgency, methods, and benefits of building universal capacity for Transformational Resilience for climate traumas.’

TRIG has a two-step framework for building Transformational Resilience, based on neuroscience and trauma research, which is offered as a ‘Train the Trainer’ program to leaders across a variety of public sectors in the hope of growing widespread societal resilience to climate trauma.

The first of their resiliency steps is ‘presencing’, meaning to ground in the present, remember the resources currently available, and to learn how to observe our reactions so that we are not controlled by them.

The second is ‘purposing’, meaning to watch for new insights, tap into our values, and harvest the possibilities for a brighter future that acting on climate change can bring us.

I love this model because it encapsulates so many of the multifaceted qualities of resilience in an easy to remember formula that conveniently spells out GROWTH;

G- Ground

R- Remember

O- Observe

W- Watch

T- Tap into

H- Harvest

*‘Presencing’ and ‘Purposing’ in response to crisis can help us grow personally and globally.*

The Resilient Activist

Our mental health, which is affected by an almost infinite number of factors, both personally and politically, is one of our most powerful tools available to us in building resilience. It is the lens through which we view everything that happens to us, it is the means by which we arrange the various cards that life deals us.

The importance of our mental health, especially with regards to climate change, cannot be underestimated. TRIG has found, for example, that 20-50% of those who experience extreme weather events (currently 47 million of Americans) also experience mental health problems.

A recent study from Stanford University concluded that by 2050 the USA and Mexico will see an additional 21,000 suicides directly as a result of climate change. But these are not some far off gloom-filled predictions. Just a couple of weeks ago I spoke with the founder of The Resilient Activist, Sami Aaron, whose son committed suicide in his mid-twenties after eight years of climate activism and as a result of his eco-despair. That was eighteen years ago.

Since then Sami has dedicated herself to creating a ‘joy-filled, nature-connected community’ which works to resource activists to grow in resilience.

Sami’s response to her son’s death is ‘purposing’ in action. Somehow Sami has crafted some signs of hope and meaning out of the most devastating of circumstances.

Her gift of offering resilience to the world’s change-makers has come at an enormous personal cost, and her message to us is clear; take care of yourself.

*Global challenges such as climate change and the pandemic require that we double down on our efforts to love and care for ourselves.*

Parenting Ourselves

Before I burned out as the Founder Director of a climate change charity here in the UK last year, I used to think that resilience was about having as few needs as possible.

My fears for the future, driven in part by climate change, pushed me to train myself to survive on as little sleep, fun, and general self-care as possible. To speak metaphorically again, I tried to prepare for the coming famine by starving myself, but all I did was make myself weaker.

I have come to understand that resilience is instead about being able to identify and meet our needs, even under pressing circumstances, with creativity, compassion, and calm. It is learning to parent ourselves, especially when others in powerful positions cannot or will not.

I love this quote from self-help author and trauma specialist, Alice Little; ‘as traumatised children we always dreamed that someone would come and save us. We never dreamed that it would, in fact, be ourselves as adults.’

*We can learn to better care for and parent ourselves, especially when those in powerful positions, such as global leaders, have fallen short.*

I will close this month’s blog with a few questions for personal reflection. If you’re interested in finding out more about resilience, you can also subscribe to my blog where I’ll be sharing 5 minute resilience exercises each week for the whole of March and April, exclusively with Climate.emergence suscribers.

What has helped you survive the pandemic so far? Is there anything new that you have discovered? If money and time were no barrier, what would you do to make the pandemic easier for yourself? Is there anything within those ideas that could take forward?
What does ‘presencing’ and ‘purposing’ look like for the challenges you currently face in your life? What helps you ground in the present moment when you are feeling scared or worn down? Are there any places where you can bring meaning to these difficulties?
In this moment, right now, what can you do to help make things a little easier for yourself? You might want to make yourself a list to put up on your wall, or even leave a suggestion or two for others in the comments below.

**About Me** I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Resilience