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Five Steps for Developing Resilience

Resilience is the word we use to describe health in integrative medicine. Resilience literally means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty; be it time, money, physical or emotional.

I have developed 5 Steps for Building Resilience that might come in handy this holiday season. When your resilience is low, your immunity will follow. There is no way to reverse or prevent disease when you perceive yourself to be stressed out.

1. Examine your expectations: I love to give people a journaling exercise for examining your expectations. Write down every expectation you can think of that you have from life, God (the Universe, Divine, Spirit, etc.), your parents, your kids, your partner(s), your job, yourself, the government, food, your body, your mind, your spirit, etc. EVERYTHING…

Now go through them and check the ones you don’t want to release. These are deal breakers. Now look at the ones you can let go of. This is most of your list. They are not under your control. The more deal breakers you have, the more unhappy you will be when they are not met.

2. Learn to regulate your emotions: The first step is just to notice when you are experiencing a feeling. Feelings are a felt sense of your life experiences. Emotions are the physiological response you have to the feeling. If you feel sad, deny yourself permission to feel that sadness by judging the feeling as “bad” and then find yourself overwhelmed by sadness, your body’s systems will follow.

Allowing yourself permission to feel, without judgment of the feeling, is important. If you notice a feeling, give yourself compassion for that feeling, and sit with it in neutrality…it will pass. If you judge it as bad, you will lock it in and the body will take 8 hours to recover from every 5 minutes you are upset. Compassion is the key.

3. Connect to your inner self: When you feel sad or mad or anxious or confused…check in with how old you feel in that moment. Find the little kid part of you that is feeling the feeling and give her or him the love, support and encouragement he or she wanted the very first time she or he felt this same feeling.

Science tells us that time is not linear. All of our ages and stages are available to us all at the same time. You can reach in and self-soothe that upset child part of you and not expect someone else to do it for you.

4. Perform daily self-care: Setting good boundaries is an excellent form of self-care that will help you glide through the holidays with ease. Just say no. Don’t worry if you cannot do the perfect dish, give the perfect present, or be in two places at one time. You are loveable no matter what.

5. Heal resistance to life: Resistance to life happens when you are in utero. It’s a concept that helps you understand yourself or someone else in your life who is: always late, thinks everything is too hard, lacks energy perpetually, resembles Eyore from Winnie the Poo. Here are 5 ways to overcome resistance to life:

1. 1. Uncover your story plot. What is yours? Is it a drama, a tragedy, a romance, a comedy?
   2. Create a new story. If you are in the habit of “shoulding” all over yourself, you might want to create more “coulds” and trust that you can be in the flow of life and not in control of it.
   3. Mine for evidence. It’s true that bad things happen in life. It’s also true that lovely things happen. Which one do you focus on more?
   4. Reframe your view. Perhaps you can now focus on what is working rather than on what you long for or don’t have in your life.
   5. Make a mantra. Something like, “I live in joy effortlessly and with resilience, accepting my challenges as gifts for my growth”.

This list of resilience builders and the graphic I have created are part of a larger program called, You Unbroken. If you find you need more help than a simple blog can offer, I invite you to join this online program. It’s filled with tools for developing resilience that are based on a therapy technique called Dialectical Behavior Technique (DBT). This program has helped hundreds of people reverse their autoimmunity, develop more happiness and joy in their lives, and even assisted in creating better holiday boundaries.

I get this question a lot. The short and most honest answer is, “it depends.” The following screenshots are the abstracts of two scientific papers addressing this question, both from 2017. Note the far different conclusions they come to.

No wonder people get so frustrated trying to come to the truth about mold. So let me just start with saying, we are all different. There is no study that will ever be done that will have a conclusion applicable to each and every person. If we refer back to my Freedom Framework (more detailed discussion in Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle), this will make more sense. Remember that every autoimmune disease, and every other chronic issue, will have the same four root causes, but to varying degrees and in different manifestations. 

The four root causes are what I call the four corners of the autoimmune (or chronic health issue) puzzle. They are, 1) genetics, 2) gut health (everyone with autoimmune disease has leaky gut), 3) exposure to toxins (mold is one of these), and 4) past trauma and current day stress and how you handle it. Everyone has past childhood trauma, but some have trauma with a “T” and others have trauma with a “t”. Uppercase T trauma is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and sexual abuse and all forms of neglect and abandonment. Lowercase t trauma is any experience of feeling rejected, and every child experiences this at some point in life. 

So back to mold as a toxic exposure and one of the corner pieces of the puzzle. Why does one study say mold isn’t an issue, and all of the attention being paid to mold is part of “mass hysteria” related to a bogus claim there is such a thing as “sick building syndrome”? And why does the second study say that it is indeed a problem and can exacerbate chronic illness and trigger autoimmune disorders? 

The answer lies in the Freedom Framework and the other 3 corners of the puzzle. How well does your body detox its toxins? How leaky is your gut? Do your genetics predispose you to mold sensitivity and autoimmune disease and poor liver clearance? And are you already walking a razor’s edge because of the kind of schedule you are keeping, or because of held onto hurt and resentment from past betrayals, or are you in a meltdown because of a crisis going on your life? If any of the other 3 corner pieces are impaired, then what I call “critical mass” will kick in and your boat will tip and sink. 

I have a personal experience with mold not affecting me or anyone in my family adversely. Last fall we hired a contractor to install a bathroom into the lower level of our home. When the workers went to tie the plumbing in with our existing plumbing, they found quite a mess behind the walls where our pipes run. We had black mold that was rotting the beams that supported that part of our house. They estimated that it had been there for at least 5-10 years. We asked them to look at a bathroom on the top floor of our house that had been remodeled a few years ago and once again they found black mold. We then nervously asked them to take a look at the master bath that had been remodeled 10 years ago and sure enough…more black mold. In fact, the mold was so bad the contractor said we were on the verge of finding ourselves falling through the floor of the shower into our back yard (our shower juts out from the back of the house as an alcove). The picture he painted was horrifying, but the actual photos are too. The mold had rotted to the outside material of our home, the flooring, and again support beams. We have had to replace 4 bathrooms due to what amounts to a giant infestation of black mold…which we have been living with for years and completely unaware of.

I also have several patients I have worked with that have had their autoimmunity triggered by mold in their environment. Mold has been part of their healing journey and necessary to clean up in order to reverse their disease. Obviously, once we were aware of our black mold problem, we underwent mold remediation and I got an air purifier that removes mold spores from the air. I have provided the link for it at the bottom of this article. 

The secret to dealing with the impact of mold on your health is to address all four corner pieces of your puzzle and not get lost in the weeds with mold. 

1. Test for mold and undergo remediation if it’s found.
   
2. Get a high-quality air purifier that removes mold spores from the air.
3. Get your genetics tested and see where you can effect changes to how your body responds to environmental toxins epigenetically, because this helps a lot and can also reveal a huge number of other health influences that you may not have been aware of.
4. Get an in-depth nutritional evaluation to test for how well you are doing at clearing toxins, producing digestive enzymes, making your own stomach acid, digesting and absorbing the nutrients from your food and whether or not you are storing heavy metals.
5. Get your adrenals and hormones tested via a functional medicine salivary test. If your body isn’t dealing with stress well, you won’t tolerate much of anything in your environment.
6. Get a food sensitivity test. Again, this helps to know how bad your leaky gut is and what we need to do to get your immune system to calm down.
7. Practice and master the Stress Busting Tool Kit as part of the You Unbroken Program. The more emotional resilience skills you can build, the more resilient your immune system will be.

Schedule a Discover Call with my team to learn more about the tests you can take to understand mold’s impact on your health.

Love and hugs,

Dr. Keesha