Hello, hello, and welcome to Sheep Persisted, the Gen.
Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie.
Sutton A. Psychology student at the
University of Pennsylvania. Let's get into it.
Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright,
popular, and they don't like themselves?
And you wonder why? But adverse childhood
experiences explain a lot of that because shame gets
imprinted in the right brain early on and people can't get
talked out of it often. You got to go deeper to the felt
sense and that's a beauty I think of of what we're learning
that we can heal people, but not in traditional psychology, at
least not initially. Hello, hello you guys and
welcome back to She persisted. I am really excited you're here
today. We're have a really interesting
episode all about resilience. We've talked a little bit about
ACE scores and how we can boost our resilience with different
ways that we think about things and broaden and build theory and
all these different adjacent concepts.
But I don't think we've ever done an episode fully dedicated
to what resilience is, why some of us are more or less
resilient, and how we can. Boost our.
Resilience for when we go through challenging periods in
our. Lives so I'm really, really.
Excited for this conversation, it's one of my favorites that
I've had. In a while on the.
Podcast Today's guest is Glenn Scarraldi.
He has served on the stress management faculties at the
Pentagon, the International Critical Incident Stress
Foundation, and the University of Maryland, where he received
the Outstanding Teaching award. He is the author of a number of
articles and books on human mental and physical health and
is the founder of the Resilience Training International, which
teaches practical, effective coping skills to build the
strengths of resilience. We dive into a lot of different
areas. In this episode.
We talk about his background in the military and how.
That led him to start. Studying resilience, we talk
about the ways that you can think about your mental health
to boost your resilience and come at it from that angle.
We talk about the psychology of toxic stress and how that
impacts our resilience we talk about the different coping
skills that you want to use in low stress versus high stress
situations because they're really different we talk about
ACE scores, which are a really fascinating concept and
something that you should absolutely be aware of and we
also talk about how that impacts our lifelong stress levels and
how you can heal from adverse childhood experiences.
We talk about finding specialists to work with, how
trauma can impact our shame and self esteem, how to heal from
that self doubt and what you should know about being truly
resilient in your life. So we, we really go everywhere
in this conversation. It's a really, really
fascinating listen and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I
do. And as always, if you guys find
this episode interesting, make sure to comment, share with a
friend or family member, post about it on social media, leave
a review. It really, really helps the
podcast. And I don't.
Want to keep you too long? So with that, let's dive in.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on Cheaper
Assisted. I'm so excited to have you on
the podcast. We've talked about a scores and
resilience a couple times on the podcast, but we've never done a
full episode talking about what is resilience, what contributes
to how resilient we are, especially as young adults, and
how we can improve that. So I'm really excited to have
you on the podcast today and dive into that.
It's great to be with you and I'm so impressed with what
you're doing with your your life experience.
Thank you. I so appreciate that.
I would love to start with your background and research and how
you decided to go into psychology.
What piqued your interest as far as resilience and trauma?
And obviously we're going to talk about a lot of different
dimensions of that in different ways that shows up, but what is
your background? How did you become interested in
this area? I'll try to make this quick.
I always say that my life experience perfectly prepared me
for what I'm doing today. I grew up in a little close knit
community in New York and there was enough chaos in my home that
I can empathize with just about anybody or anything and never be
surprised. But I was surrounded by
wonderful extended family, terrific friends.
I wish everybody could have friends like I had a close
community. We go back to our unions.
People say we always felt so safe in our school and that's
not, you know, what kids are seeing today.
But so I went to the United States Military Academy and West
Point and I was during the Vietnam War and I I saw friends
coming back with post traumatic stress disorder.
I had no idea how to how to help.
After my active duty five years, I stayed in the reserves and
started teaching high school because I like young people and
coaching. And I saw this is a factory town
and kids are struggling with broken homes and drugs and
suicide and and rape. And I had no idea how to help.
So I decided to go back to get my doctorate at the University
of Maryland. They had a wonderful stress
management program and was in public health actually.
And so I was, I was free to focus on not just psychology,
but medicine and nutrition and exercise Physiology and
complementary medicine. I was basically looking for
anything that helped, and I was invited to teach stress
management at the Pentagon, where I discovered that you
could really do a lot of good in little small group classes for
functional people, preventively teaching them skills, principles
and skills. And so at the university I was
on loan to the Pentagon for a couple of days a week.
But at the university I started developing, when I came to call
resilience courses. And every day it was here the
principle, here the skill, it's practice it, go home and do it
for two or three days, we'll come back and process how it
worked. And there were skills to prevent
depression and anxiety and anger and build self esteem, which
correlates with all of the previous three.
And we found that everything changed, which is really good
news that you can actually strengthen people by teaching
skills, not just information. I don't find that really helps
much when people are under pressure.
And so that was really good to know.
And so I started a love hate relationship with books because
people come up after class or workshops and say I'm depressed
and I think that's related to stress.
And where do I find a user friendly book?
And I say, I don't know, let me look.
And most of the time I couldn't find one.
We started writing books on depression, anxiety, anger, self
esteem, lately resilience and adverse childhood experiences.
So it's kind of important pieces of the puzzle, I think.
And then I retired from the university so that I can devote
more time to writing and training high risk people.
And so I work today with the foundation that works primarily
with military cops and firefighters.
My wife and I recently depleted 4 years of running in the
dictionary recovery program, which addictions are often
driven by unresolved pain. And so like you, I think I, I
really love sharing what I wish I knew when I was 18 and hopes
that people suffer unnecessarily because, you know, we, we know
what, what helps, But sometimes it's hard to find that,
especially when you're in the throes of, of crisis.
What do you think? Is that difference between
information and skills? Because a lot of the time it's
like almost synonymous. It's just kind of how it's
presented. Do you think that framing it as
a skill suggest that people can actually implement it, or that
what they're experiencing is malleable?
Do you have any thoughts there about why skills are so much
more effective than just educating on what's happening?
Well, it's like like a sport I always like in mental health to
golfing or playing piano. You know, you can get a lecture
on beautiful music or beautiful basketball, but that doesn't
make you good at it. You know, it's important to know
big picture concept principles. And so I start with principles.
You got to understand why you're doing a skill, but then it
teaches a coping skill that's got to be practiced.
And I think people think I just read a good book that that'll
fix all my problems. Sometimes it does, but usually
it doesn't. Yeah, yeah.
I want to get into how we define stress and resilience.
And you talked about how that can present in a lot of
different ways, whether it's depression or anxiety,
addiction, PTSD. How do you kind of explain
stress and resilience as a psychological concept?
Because we've heard these words before.
But a lot of the times when we're either working on
interventions or conducting research, the way that these
things are defined is actually really different from how we use
them in day-to-day language. Right.
It's my whole thing has been take stuff out of the the clinic
in the academic works and make it so that people can understand
it. There are lots of definitions of
stress and resilience, but but the way I generally look at it,
stress is anything that calls us to be challenged to adapt.
And some people say, well, stressor is the cause and the
response is called stress. But people generally use those
terms interchangeably. But there is is good stress and
that is what you know, it challenges you, but it's
pleasant. Think of somebody in a flow
state who's at the computer doing something they really like
to do. Then there is tolerable stress
where stress arousal gets elevated, but it doesn't stay
elevated. You can come back to normal
before any damage is done. What we're often talking about
is, is what's called toxic stress, which is stress that is
so severe and or chronic that it overwhelms our ability to cope
to the point that there is damage literally to our brains
with with excess stress hormones.
And that affects emotions, our ability to cope, our
relationships. And so really it's a question of
how prepared I am to cope with what life is throwing at me.
And so I think a good resilience course has to be comprehensive
enough that it'll equip you with skills for anything that that
life will throw at you. So for example, when I work with
cops, it isn't just skills to be a good cop, it's skills to deal
with what you see emotionally. The way I define resilience is
just the inner strengths, strengths of mind, strength of
character that help us respond well to the bad stuff, to
adversity. And these skills, these
strengths are innate, capable of being developed, but
specifically what they help us do is prevent stress related
problems like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on.
If we suffer those conditions, they tend to be less severe and
with resilience, we tend to rebound quicker.
And then the other part of resilience, which is often left
off and beyond the ability to rebound and resist, is to
optimize mental health and performance.
And so that goes beyond traditional psychology into, you
know, being at your best. Really we want to overcome
suffering, but we also want to enjoy life and and be good at at
what we're trying to do, I think.
It's really interesting. We've gotten better at talking
about a lot of mental health concepts.
And I think then I could be wrong because I wasn't in high
school then, but like 50 years ago.
I don't imagine that students were all day every day in high
school being like, I'm so stressed, there's so much to do
I'm burning out. I'm the workload is too much and
now that's a really common experience in high school and a
justified response because you have AP classes and you're
studying for the SAT and AC TS and college exams and the
workloads are increased and we almost lose.
That other side of the. Equation, like you mentioned,
which is that stress can be good.
It allows us to mentally and physically perform better.
It allows us to respond to those challenges.
And so the more we avoid these things, the more intense they
become. And so this narrative that we
hear a lot about burnout and stress and overwhelm all being
negative, there's both sides of that, which I think are an
important part of the conversations that we're not
just working to avoid all stress and minimize all potential
stressors in our life. You mentioned different.
Skills for different levels of stress?
Do you have some examples for people of like what a low stress
coping skill would be versus a really high stress intervention?
Yeah, so when I work with the high stress groups, I start out
with the easy stuff so people can get to experience.
Hey, this works. For example, I do a 5 minute
foot to head stress reducer and you know, people say, well, I'm
really busy. Can you give me something quick
and make sure? So, so I'll say, OK, just just
sit comfortably and meditate a posture which is kind of be
planned, the floor and and back well supported and just start to
notice what's going on in your body.
Because what we know from brain scans is if you can track what
the body is doing, the brain starts to get into the
resilience zone, which is where stress arousal is neither too
high nor too low, but just right so that everything is is online.
So track what's going on your body.
What is your gluteal muscles feel like on this chair?
What does it feel like to be supported?
And then kind of just do a series of put your hands on your
stomach and just let compassion feel on the in breath your
abdomen. Do a similar thing with your
heart. Do a similar thing with the
warmth of your hands around your eyes.
And then a little massage, little thumb massage, little
tapping, which is drawn from a trauma treatment.
They integrate parts from from our Eastern friends where it
we're just be in contact with your true happy nature.
You know, get under your thoughts, your racing mind and
just for a moment rest in your core self, which you don't have
to create. It's already there.
It's already happy and wise and kind and, and humorous.
And you just got to be aware of that.
It's, it's innate. That's part of those resilience
qualities we have. So that, that would be like kind
of easy stuff for anybody. Just abdominal breathing is easy
stuff. But when I make try to make it a
skill, I'll give people block sheets and I go home and do this
say five times a day when you wake up and you go to sleep.
And then initially at low stress times.
And as you get good at the skill, try it a traffic light or
try it with when somebody irritates you or cuts you off.
The logging, I think it's just increases focus.
And when you look back over three or four days or a week you
go. I can see my ratings improved.
I was getting better at it with practice.
So for example, abdominal breathing, that's so simple and
almost everybody has success with it.
But if you're asked to track it and then know that you're going
to come back, say to a group of class and report on how that go,
then the people tend to fill it in and kind of reinforces their
success. And if they didn't have success
to talk about what would help to to make it better for trauma,
you know, we build on those skills and all sorts of things
that that work sometimes in therapy.
But a lot of things can be self managed.
And this is part of kind of a theme of my life's work is I
want to take skills out of the clinic and give them to people
to use on their own. You know, good therapist is
worth his or her worth in gold. But but I want to make sure
people are self reliant and not just relying on a mental health
professional too. And so many skills that can be
used. For example, a lot of people
have heard of EMDR for trauma, eye movement desensitization,
reprocessing. But when people are having a bad
day and maybe you can't get to the therapist, anybody can sit
and go, OK, what am I feeling? What's going on in my body?
What emotionally am I feeling? What images and thoughts.
And then just follow your own fingers back and forth 24 times.
That's a self help strategy that, you know, it's not a
comprehensive trauma treatment, but it might get you through the
next hour, the next day. I just try to give people a
whole tool bag of skills and they can pick what they need.
Yeah, yeah. And it's.
Like you mentioned, like if information is sitting in the
therapy office and talking about the experience and the skills
are going out to the real world and practicing them when you
need it. Both sides of that are really
important to actually feel that difference in in the techniques.
There are some things that can increase our stress and
resilience throughout our whole lives, especially in childhood.
I think people are becoming more familiar with ACE scores.
I think most people listening probably got screened for Aces
when they went to the pediatrician's office and maybe
throughout their whole life. But can you explain to us what
ACE scores are, what adverse child experiences are, and then
how it affects our stress and resilience throughout the rest
of our life? Yeah.
So this was one of my recent delights was in 1998 two medical
doctors, Felidian and Anda had access to 17,000 records of
people in an HMO middle class, educated fairly well off and
they found that the more adverse childhood experiences you have,
the more likely you are to suffer from you name it, any
psychological problem, just about any medical problem, any
functional problem on a graduated basis.
So the higher your A score, the more prone you are to get ill or
dysfunctional. And so the 10 most common in
that group, Bear in mind that there's lots of others that are
more appropriate for say minority groups or inner city
groups, military people. But it was it was any kind of
abuse, mental, physical, emotional, physical or emotional
neglect, living in a home where there's a loss of a parent, from
divorce to separation, seeing domestic violence, seeing
somebody mentally ill or suicidal, on drugs or
incarcerated. So typically the more of those
Aces you get, the more likely you are to have some kind of
relatively serious problem, especially once you get to
around four or more. And when you get to six or more,
people lose on average 20 years of life.
Now, that is just mind blowing. And that is about what the
average cop loses. They die about 22 years younger
than their peers, their civilian peers.
So this has been called the most important unaddressed public
health problem facing our Nation Today, because even in
California, where a lot of this is being pushed, maybe 10% of
people are really up to speed on aces.
How to heal it and how to not make your kids go through this
again. So there's a lot of skills that
are that are needed. I love the way that this is kind
of graphically depicted. If you think of a fire with
flames and and that's the Aces, the bad stuff including
attachment disruptions and then say 10 feet above is the smoke
and that's all the depression, PTSD and autoimmune problems,
obesity and precocious sex and premature pregnancy, so on,
Felitti said. We do a disservice to treat the
smoke without getting at the flames.
In other words, that the trauma and wounds from the childhood
diversity. What's between the two?
It is dysregulated stress, stress that is either stuck on
too high or too low. And that is what causes all
these emotional and even brain development changes.
And if you like it, I always find it fascinating to talk
about how the brain develops after ACES.
It's very different than a kid who's securely attached and and
living in a secure home. But people suffer for decades,
sometimes not realizing there are treatments that are healing.
And so suffering is is often unnecessary.
But it's usually not talk therapy for a lot of different
reasons. You know, we we train our young
people today still in in will talk to me about what you're
thinking about what you're feeling.
But the problem is people are traumatized in the 1st 18 years
of life and particularly in the first three years of life.
Trauma doesn't register in the verbal logical left brain.
It registers in the non verbal right brain unconsciously.
A lot of this stuff is below the level of awareness.
So when you're thinking calmly, you can say, well I'm upset
because of XY and Z. The right brain says, I don't
know if I could put words to that.
I just feel a felt sense. It's kind of my body, it's kind
of emotional. And so you can't talk to what's
registering lodging in the right brain, but you can come at it
from a body based in other words, reduce arousal in the
body, that reduces arousal in the survival brain, the
emotional brain. And then ultimately that'll calm
the left brain, cognitive brain so that you can eventually talk
about it. But you start with treatments
that that calm arousal come the body and also deal with images
because that's what the right brain does.
Just one more point about brain development.
The first three years are critical.
The left brain isn't even developed in the first three
years, but the right brain is. And so a lot of people say,
well, you're an adult now, just get over it.
Well, what you're asking someone to get over is something they
don't even recall is the felt sense of dread or shame.
And sometimes it comes from bad environments like abuse, but
sometimes it's just a fairly good family where the kid is
just exposed to super high expectations that they think
maybe I can't meet those expectations.
And so low self esteem and shame often gets imprinted.
Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright, popular
and they don't like themselves and you wonder why?
But adverse childhood experiences explain a lot of
that because shame gets imprinted in the right brain
early on and people can't get talked out of it because it's
not on the left brake that you can reason.
I mean, cognitive therapy can help to a degree, but often you
got to go deeper to the felt sense and that's very different
approach. You know, it's a body based
imagery kind of approach and that's a beauty.
I think of of what we're learning from adverse childhood
experiences that we can heal people, but not in traditional
psychology, at least not initially.
What are your favorite? Techniques for addressing that
felt sense that more internal experience and response to
stress. Is it a certain type of therapy?
We mentioned breath work. Do you have any of these that
work really well with your patients or that you've seen a
lot of success with or that people find to be really
effective and kind of decrease that feeling of being out of
control or not knowing how to navigate what they're
experiencing? Yeah, So as a public health guy,
my my role is to educate people, ideally preventively, and then
also to help steer them to the right kind of treatment.
The treatments I've been most impressed with, people are
pretty aware of EMDR and we know that eye movements calm the
emotional centers of the brain, and that's wonderful.
The thing that I'm most impressed with, the treatment
I'm most impressed with is what's called accelerated
resolution therapy. Have you heard of this one?
No, I came across it when I was looking at what helps traumatize
soldiers, and it was found that this worked even quicker than
EMDR, sometimes went through three sessions.
So it uses eye movements, but it brilliantly adds many, many
different approaches, creative, innovative approaches.
And so the way this works is you start with a body.
OK, so you have this bad memory. Let's notice where on your body
you feel the emotions and let's calm it with eye movements.
And then let's pull up the image itself and calm that with eye
movements. And then let's erase and replace
that image and re reinforce that with eye movements.
And then ultimately, let's imagine a future where you cross
a bridge to a, a place where you're you're feeling happy and
well adjusted and you're leaving all your baggage on the other
side of that that bridge and let's 3 and 479 movements.
It is brilliant. Lady Rosenstweig was trained in
the MDR and she started adding all these innovative things to
make it better, I think. And she was told you can't do
that. You either have to stop doing it
or don't call the MDR. So she's called it and I am just
so impressed and, and the research is still fairly new,
but impressive for the few years relatively that it's been
around. But but therapists getting
trained in this and they're really enthusiastic about it.
And I've had a number of people say, you know, where can I go?
And I said, look on the website acceleratedresolutiontherapy.com,
find a a therapist in your area. And I never anybody come back
and say that didn't work. I hated it.
Well, I will put that in the show notes.
For sure. So, people.
Can look in their city or state and find a clinician if they're
looking for that approach. Yeah, it's, it's very, very
impressive. I've just seen things happen in
one or two or three sessions that were, you know, could take
weeks or months or years. Like it's called intensive
trauma recovery. I was invited to a trauma
conference at the University of West Virginia, and I talked
about dissociation and how people can understand what that
is as a part of trauma. And I started talking to the
organizers, a psychiatrist and his spouse who was a PhD art
therapist, and they came up with this treatment that I thought,
this is brilliant. I want to learn more about this
and start training with them. And what it does is it divides a
trauma which typically is all blurred and all crazy and the
brain doesn't process it well and intrudes and so forth.
But it it gives the trauma memory structure by saying, here
are the seven phases of the instinctual trauma response.
Draw each one and then talk to me to the therapist about what's
going on there. And then watch as I, the
therapist, post your drawings on a whiteboard or wall and in a
very kind, compassionate way, tell your story.
So now you're eventually putting words to that.
But art, sometimes I can't talk about what's going on inside,
but I can express it with my hand, and that does.
And so in a Safeway, you hear that your trauma memory has a
beginning, a middle, and an end. It's over, it's in the past and
like ART, sometimes that can be done very, very quickly and set
all memory in a way that that lasts without re traumatizing
people. So those are the two that I
really, really like. And while we're talking about
finding good treatments, Sidran, SIDRAN, if you send a e-mail to
them, they're in Baltimore area and give them your ZIP code,
they'll say, OK, here are people who identify as a trauma
specialist. OK.
Those skills are different than just traditional talk therapy.
Yeah. Yeah.
Quality assurance. But at least you can get
somebody who's, you know, attuned to trauma.
So yeah, I love. That and I think it's definitely
helpful to know exactly what to search for because especially if
you're dipping your toe in the water, you haven't been in
therapy before. It's not super intuitive that
oh, all therapists might not have these backgrounds or they
might not specialize in this area.
It's not like you go to a General practitioner and they're
like, oh, actually you got to receive this specialist.
Sometimes it can be a little bit more on the patient to kind of
lead that process and advocate. So it's definitely a learning
curve. Yeah.
And I think to the end, initiated, we think all
therapists are the same. Well, they're not.
And you got to be a really good consumer.
And some people get discouraged because sometimes you find one
that's not particularly skilled in in trauma therapy, you know.
So ask them, interview them and say here's my problem, I'm
interested in treating it. What have you got?
And, you know, find out, am I comfortable with that person?
Do they have the experience to treat when I'm troubled by?
Yeah. You mentioned that shame and
self esteem can also be part of this equation.
I'm curious how that shows up. Is it something that people are
thinking through? Like maybe they're like I'm not
responding to stress in the way that my peers are?
Or I feel like I should be having a different experience
here and then shame and self esteem comes into play?
Or is it more like a something that subconsciously gets
correlated between the two? How does that relationship play
out? OK, so in our diagram here,
here's this, there is a smoke and here's this regulated
stress. Off to the side.
I put shame and self dislike which is basically low self
esteem. It doesn't always happen this
way, but let's say a child is unwanted and that child gets
messages from a caregiver, mom, dad, or a significant adult
figure. Maybe it's words, but it's not
so much the words, it's the feeling tone that a young child
in the right brain will register.
So maybe it's a disgusted or angry look that the parent gives
kid. Can't reason that out, but it
gets ingrained in the brain. And so maybe 20 years later, as
a accomplished adult that now adults thinks, I don't feel like
I deserve this. I don't feel worthy.
And it's not necessarily something they're consciously
saying aloud, although it might be.
It's more like a felt sense, a sense of dread, a sense of I'm
not good enough. And so cognitive therapy might
help, but that's a left brain approach.
And so, you know, you try to go at the shame.
And so in a bottom up and imagery way.
And so in, in the workbook that I fairly recently completed, the
Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery workbook, the idea that
I try to convey is trauma by definition is overwhelming.
It overwhelms our ability to cope.
And so it's good. There's no shame in asking for a
coach. You know, a world class athlete
generally has a coach with no shape.
You know, we take specialized military equipment and and take
it offline and give it maintenance and service and
sometimes we need that too. And so if you can find a good
trauma therapist, it's a great idea, but the problem is a lot
of people will never get the treatment that would help them
for a variety of reasons, cost or stigma or I don't know where
to go or I tried it once and I don't think anything's going to
work because they don't realize all the different options.
And so in the work like a layout, like a eight step skill
based plan to heal from trauma. And for some people, they can do
that on their own, self managed. Others will maybe use it as an
adjunct to working with a therapist.
And sometimes therapists will get into the workbook and say,
oh, let's work on this skill today together and, and see how
it goes. But there are skills to regulate
dysregulated stress, to regulate strong distressing emotions
which maintain that stress arousal.
There are brain keys, there are 9 or 10 keys that help the brain
prepare to rewire so that these old memories are not continually
driving your adult show. We can strengthen and stabilize
the nervous system through imagery, imagery that simulates
what an ideal attachment relationship would have looked
like. And again, that's not logic so
much so. It's just imagine yourself as a
as a young child being loved and and cared for and enjoyed by
that ideal caregiver, whether it's mom or dad or both.
What would that feel like? What would it, what would it
feel like to hear that soothing tone or to see the smile or
loving gaze in the eyes? Anythings possible in imagery.
Imagery can be very, very powerful.
At that point then you're you're ready to go after the trauma
memory and rework the image. There's some float back
strategies where you'll you'll take a upset in the present and
go why did I so overreact and trace that back to the earliest
memory where you had similar feelings of shame or being
insulted or criticized and settled that core memory as
well. After you've done that, there's
often remnants of shame lurking in the recesses of her mind.
And so there's some imagery skills to rework, shame
programming that's imprinted in the brain.
And at that point, you're then ready to do what I call
transition skills because life is about more than just
overcoming suffering. You know what kind of skills
will lead to a happier, more satisfying life.
And that gets into pleasant activities, it gets into
forgiving, it gets into developing character traits that
I feel good about when I look in the mirror.
That's something that psychology books don't often talk about,
but there's research that shows that people feel less traumatic
stress symptoms when they feel good about who they are inside
their character, even not just in America, but in Europe and
and in Buddhist countries, like people who adhere to the five
tenets of Buddhism, which I can remember them all.
No intoxicants, no sexual abuse or misconduct, no lying,
cheating or stealing. Less depression, less stress.
So character I think is really important and often is
overlooked. Sometimes people are damaged
morally by the way they're treated, but then sometimes we
get older, we make decisions that we don't feel good about.
And so part of resilience is learning how to rebound and be
kind and look ahead because no one is irredeemable.
No one is unchangeable. So there's a lot of hope, but
it's one of those things we don't really talk about too
often. I'm curious.
And this is. Totally just a theoretical.
I'm not sure that there's an actual study or an actual
measure of this, but do you think that most of us have some
ineffective relationship between like those childhood experiences
and how we relate to stress? Maybe you don't have any score
or maybe you don't have the four to six that have that huge
impact on your outcomes. But do you think generally
everyone to some degree could be more effective with that
relationship to stress and then how we respond internally?
Yeah, so I had the privilege of of getting to know a lot of
students over the decades. I was at the university.
We had little small discussion classes and we were talking
about this a little before. You would be surprised how many
people who on the outside look all put together.
Great. But I think just being mortal,
you know, we have, we question ourselves.
We don't feel good enough. You know, it's just a question
of degree. One of my friends said
everybody's got emotional problems.
Just a question to what degree? You know, the skills are the
skills and they help anybody in any, any state of emotional
development. You know, it's just a question
sometimes. How much help do we need with
developing those skills? Some people can learn it on
their own and they're basically doing pretty well.
But, you know, you can tweak a little things here and there,
other people. That's when it's good to have a
therapist because understandably, you know, you've
been through a lot of hard stuff and somebody kind of walk you
through the healing process would be really useful.
Yeah, 100%. There is a study that many
countries around the world, 99% of people have regrets.
Wow. And I think the 1% are probably
sociopaths. They didn't understand the
question. I mean, who, who doesn't ever
make mistakes, you know? So part of this, I think, is
being compassionate, having self esteem that says that was a
mistake. I don't feel good about it, but
it doesn't make me worthless or irredeemable.
Yeah. Makes me human.
Yeah, very related. If you could like wave a magic
wand and young adults could have one skill or one way they
thought about things with regard to emotional resilience or how
they navigate stress. Maybe it's a preventative
measure, maybe it's something they learn in school.
What would that? Be what I love to do when I'm
training groups like Federal Employees and Nation's Capital
is ask them what do you think resilience is and what would you
expect to take from our two days together or four days together?
Some some of the best definition of resilience came not from
academics or theorists, but from people in the trenches.
And one nurse at a large Children's Hospital said, I
think resilience is the capacity to absorb stress and maintain
yourself. And to me, that speaks to the
feeling of worth, the feeling inside of being quietly glad to
be who you are. That is independent of
externals. So much of her culture says you
have no worth unless you're bold and beautiful and rich and
accomplished and have a nice car and and, and a great job.
Those are nice sometimes, but it, it's not the good feeling
you get when you look in the mirror.
And so I think, I think there are a series of self esteem
skills that I've, you know, I, I started teaching in my courses
and then wrote it up in a workbook, the self esteem
workbook. And the way that came about is I
studied under the leading self esteem researcher, Morris
Rosenberg in 1980. I said, Doctor Rosenberg, you've
spent your whole life documenting how low self esteem
causes problems in people. What do you do if someone
doesn't have it? You know what he said?
He said, I don't know. And so, well, that's no good.
So I'm going to make a course up and, and I plumbed the
literature and I boiled it down to skills that could be
practiced. And we found you can actually
improve self esteem with skills, practice skills that related to
a sense of unconditional worth as a, as a human, not market
worth, not social worth, but inner human worth, unconditional
love and the process of growing. And I think we learn a lot from
our friends in the East. All of that done with compassion
because it's difficult to do everything right.
But we can try. And as long as you know, I love
John Wooden, the the old Hall of Fame basketball coach.
Success isn't the scoreboard. Success is the satisfaction and
Peace of Mind of knowing that you've done your best.
Sometimes the other teams better.
Some problems we can't solve, but we can feel good if we know
we're good at the old college try.
And so a lot of self esteem is just kindness.
Not that we soften out our expectations.
It's it's healthy to have good expectations, but to pursue them
with kindness, with love and never with punishment.
I think that's sometimes as parents, we make a mistake.
You know, if I just Robbie, my kids do good, do good, do good
everything work out good. I think it's more important to
teach kids to enjoy doing your best and accept the outcome well
if people want. To get your workbooks that you
mentioned or follow along with your work.
Where are they able to do that? If you just go to Amazon and and
search the books under my name, Glenn Shiraldi, or you can go to
my website, resiliencefirst.com, but the books are generally easy
to find. That's where I usually get all
my books from Amazon. Yes, amazing.
Well, I will put all of those in the show notes.
And thank you so much for. This conversation, I know it's
going to help. So, so, so many people.
You're very welcome and thank you.