Developing Resilience For Facing Our Depression Giants

Resilience training can help those with depression by strengthening their ability to deal with adversity. Today we have a holistic understanding of mental health and depression.  There’s a combination of medication, psychological therapy, social support, nutrition, exercise and spiritual care to help treat depression. One such treatment is resilience training through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) sessions with a mental health practitioner. Building up resilience takes time, effort and commitment.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience can be described as our ability to cope with adversity, challenges and changes that life brings our way and how quickly we can bounce back and adapt.

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as:

“Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means “bouncing back” from difficult experiences.”

Being resilient doesn’t mean that we don’t feel pain, or that we will avoid the risk of developing depression.  Resilience training can fortify our personal inner strength, equipping us with skills for coping with life’s difficult situations with confidence and courage.

Traits Highly Resilient People May Have

1. They have the ability to bounce back after a bad experience or failure.
2. They see bad time as a temporary state.
3. They have hope and often believe in something larger than themselves.
4. Dealing with hardships quickly and effectively comes from their ability to use their logic, to remain realistic and optimistic.
5. They don’t let rejection get them down or chip away at their self-esteem or confidence. They know their own identity and practice self-acceptance.
6. They build strong support systems being family, friends, mental health care, teachers, doctors and others whom they trust.
7. They also have the ability to reach out when they need help.
8. They practice gratitude and notice, appreciate and are thankful for the little, positive things in.
9. They are eager to seek out opportunities for growing and learning, to try new things and giving it their best shot despite the chance of failure or what others may think.
10. Christians draw strength and inner peace from knowing who they are in Christ, their faith in God, meditating on the words in the bible and prayer.
11. They develop healthy coping mechanisms to keep their inner peace.
12. They can shrug trivial things off while choosing to care about the things that really do matter. They pick their battles very carefully.
13. They stand up for themselves. They value the right to be loved, respected and treated with dignity as a basic human right.
14. They know their boundaries and limits. They confidently say things like,” stop, no, enough and no way” to harmful things.
15. They have integrity & practice being truthful.
16. They fully experience the negative and positive emotions without substance abuse or any other bad habit to help them deal with it.
17. They’re not scared to feel fear. They just don’t give into it.
18. They keep good company and respect themselves.
19. They’re flexible and accept change as somewhat inevitable.
20. They have a sense of humour and are able to laugh at themselves.

Why Learn To Be Resilient?

Not all of us know how to stand up for ourselves or how to deal with life’s ups and downs. Most of us develop our own self defence mechanisms to deal with ‘fight or flight’ responses.  Not all of these methods are healthy like, ‘avoidance’ or ‘addiction.’  Without proper resilience training these self-taught responses will continue to contribute to our emotional immaturity and the worsening of depression and deterioration of our own mental health.

I encourage anyone who self-medicates, avoids dealing with their problems only to see them get worse or gets angry and/or violent to seek ongoing counselling help.  Ask about resilience training.

Sandra Ciminelli
Cred. Dip, Couns. (Christian)

Further Reading – Emotional Immaturity Tied To Depression & Anxiety – aifc

Sources:

Psych Central – What is Resilience?
American Psychological Association – The Road to Resilience

Seeking Help

Talk to your doctor about your concerns.
Visit CCAA to search for a Christian counsellor near you.
Visit ACA to search for a counsellor near you.

Studying at aifc

Have you thought about counselling?   It’s a great opportunity to learn how you can extend God’s love and grace to the hurting out in the community. For those who would like to enrol in aifc’s accredited Christian counselling courses we have two intakes per year for courses commencing around the following months:

• Beginning of each year in February
• Mid-year in July

Enrolment Season – opens approximately 2 months prior our courses commencing. Enquire now and fill out the form with your details to receive course information by email.  Enrol online here during our enrolment season.

Those living overseas can study aifc’s courses via our Distance Based Program.
The International Student Program, enables those with a student visa to Study On Campus in Sydney.

Note: A Master of Counselling course was introduced in 2018.

Contact aifc Monday to Friday from 9am – 5pm with your enquiries on 6242 5111 or toll free on 1300 721 397