AMEN Australia 2020 Conference: Centres of Influence

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Deanna Pitchford

Resilience or Reliance: A Way Forward in Times of Stress

Thank you for the invitation to speak to this group this afternoon.

I need to just clarify I don't have a PhD so it's not a doctor.

So my only claim to fame is that I'm married to a doctor, but I don't have a PhD myself.

My work in New South Wales is at Avondale College.

I'm lecturing in the counselling department, and that in itself has been quite a journey of faith to start with and still is to a large extent.

So let me share my screen with you and share with you what I want to present to you today.

So what I want to look at today is the concept of resilience.

And I want to look at this from a Christian perspective.

So I have today, I have 2 questions that I really want to cover.

This is what I would like to answer for myself and for you as well.

My question, first question is, is resilience a fixed ability?

Is it something that you either have or you don't have?

Is it something that you're born with and that doesn't change over your lifespan?

Or can it in fact be increased or enlarged or developed throughout the lifespan?

So that's the first question that I set out to answer for myself when I started doing a little bit of research in this area.

Now resilience as you know at the moment is a great buzzword because of COVID-19.

There are just so many articles coming through on social media and magazines and just online.

You can look up the issue of resilience and find many, many different definitions and many, many different suggestions about how to increase your resilience.

But I was thinking when I was reading these articles, I think we first need to answer this question.

Is it possible to increase our resilience or is it in fact a fixed ability?

My second question that I want to answer, and I'm hoping to have some time towards the end of this presentation to share a little story with you to illustrate my point here, but I'm wondering whether resilience is always the answer to life stresses, or is there something else as well that is important?

And that might be where that second word of reliance comes into play.

But let's look just quickly at some of the factors needed for good emotional health.

Darren Morton gave us a very interesting insight into the whole concept of flourishing.

And he emphasized the work of Martin Seligman who came up with a model that looked at the various factors that research has shown to promote a positive sense of well-being.

The first, and these are just the various parts of this model in my own words today.

So the first thing that he specifies is that if you're talking about good emotional health, It has of necessity got to include a sense of feeling okay, feeling good about yourself, feeling good about life.

Surely you cannot have good emotional health if you are overly stressed or feeling depressed or just lacking motivation, concentration or any of those good things.

So we do need that sense of positive emotion.

And 2 of the very best ways of increasing sense of positive emotion are the following.

Physical exercise is the very best way that we know of to promote emotional regulation.

It helps to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety, and is just a very important part of enhancing positive emotion.

The second aspect of enhancing positive emotion is the concept of having an attitude of gratitude.

And when you reach the end of the day, and this is a spiritual exercise that I try to implement in my own life.

At the end of the day, I try to think back over the day, and I try to remember or find the ways in which God has shown himself to me that day.

There are so many blessings that are just scattered in abundance along our way, and we very often do not tap into those or even notice those.

So I would like to suggest that 1 way of improving positive emotion is to have your senses and your feelers out for those ways in which God has blessed you.

To gather those blessings to your heart, to keep a record of answered prayer, to keep a record of wonderful ways in which God has come forward and stepped out for you in your life.

No better way of increasing your positive emotion.

Then the second point of this model that has been mentioned before is the point of being engaged, being fully engaged, showing engagement with life.

Now I have an interest in positive and successful aging and 1 of the things that we have found and that we recommend for people as they get older is to not lose touch with their sense of curiosity.

So if you have a sense of curiosity and a sense of openness about life, you will stay fully engaged with life.

And that way you stand to find those things that you are really passionate about.

Those things that will help time pass by without you even noticing it.

Because that's what full engagement in life actually means.

It means to be so positive about the things that you do that you don't even notice that the time is passing.

The third aspect of this model is looking at achievement.

And it's all good and well to talk about positive emotion and being fully engaged with life and having flow in your life.

But if you are struggling with a sense of self-esteem, these good things will certainly help, but nothing will be as effective as actually achieving some goals.

There is a sense in which achieving a goal will help to boost your self-esteem in many important ways.

So, and will also promote your sense of positive well-being, your good emotional health.

The fourth part of this model is tending to our relationships.

We have no idea really how important it is to keep up that network of friends and friendship and support.

We know that a lack of social support has been shown to negatively impact not only our emotional health, but also our physical health.

And I was interested to read a range of studies looking at the interaction between social connection and good physical health.

And these studies ranged from the positive effect of good social support on things like hypertension, herpes, cancer and heart disease.

I never really thought of anybody doing a study on herpes, but there you go, this also has been done.

So there seems to be really, really good evidence linking our sense of social support with good physical and emotional health.

And in fact, the link between social support and good physical and emotional health is as strong as the link between smoking and ill health.

Now, when we think about relationships, not only do we have a responsibility, perhaps as a church and as a church community and as health professionals, to reach out to others and to include them in our interactions and in our fellowship.

But we also as individuals have a responsibility to tend our own relationships.

So there's something to be said for making the effort to phone people or to send a text or to somehow connect with them on social media, there is a lot of benefit that can be gained just from tending our own relationships.

The final part of this model is the aspect of finding meaning in our life, being able to tell our story as something that is part of a bigger story.

In other words, finding that rhyme and reason for our life.

Now, good emotional health will lead to the following things.

A positive sense of well-being is going to enable us to fulfill our civic duties, to meet the demands of everyday life, and also to live with purpose and joy.

And Jesus said in John 10 verse 10 that I have come that they might have life and that they might have it to the full.

So you might think well all of this all of this talk is very secular about how to have positive emotion, how to be engaged in life.

But when you look at the deeper purpose behind all of this, it is to live life to the full and to be able to be an advert for God's good work in our lives, something that reaches out to others.

Now, people with good emotional health, there will be a further aspect here, and this is where we link with resilience.

Now, resilience, as I said, is a buzzword, especially in this COVID-19 time, but it has connections to so many different things.

We know that people with good mental health are more likely to have psychological flexibility, that ability to sort of roll with the punches, to recover effectively from illness or change or misfortune.

And not only that, it means also, resilience also means that when things are not going well, despite the fact that you may be in a difficult season in your life, you can still have a sense of joy in the Lord, because you know that things will change.

This is 1 of the good things, perhaps, about life is that nothing stays the same.

And to have resilience is not only to be able to rise to the top again, but to be able to keep going even when things are tough.

And so this definition of resilience is often linked with a sense of buoyancy.

And when you think of buoyancy, you're thinking of a child's ball in a pool, for example.

You try and push it under the water, but it just keeps popping and bobbing back up to the top of the water.

That is a good metaphor for the whole concept of resilience.

That sense of buoyancy, I can get back on top of this.

Now, this concept is very multifaceted And it has implications and extensions and ramifications for so many different things.

So it can be defined as positive and effective coping in response to risk or adversity.

It is also connected to the concept of adaptation, so it can be defined as successful adaptation when challenged by life's stressful events.

And it is also connected to this very interesting concept of post-traumatic growth.

And I was reading just this week that the research shows us that more people come through difficult times showing post-traumatic growth than we have people who end up with post-traumatic stress disorder.

So more people grow through adversity and there's something to be said, there's something biblical in this because it says in the Bible that that hard times lead to perseverance and that all of this is important for character building.

Resilience or Reliance: A Way Forward in Times of Stress

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