Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Resilience: The Art of Getting Back Up
Resilience gets a fresh take in this heartfelt conversation between Leslie Bolser and Dr. Beth Trammell, who strip away the buzzword status and reframe this essential life skill as something we practice every single day. Moving beyond the trendy "grit" narrative, they explore what resilience actually looks like from toddlerhood through the teenage years—and why some moments of bouncing back are naturally easier than others.
The discussion shines particularly bright when examining how differently resilience manifests across age groups. For our youngest children, it might be the remarkable ability to move from throwing blocks to giving hugs in mere seconds. Elementary students benefit from learning to identify their emotions and their intensity—recognizing when they're at "anger level 10" when the situation only calls for a "level 4." And for teenagers? That missing white hoodie might represent something far deeper than parents initially recognize.
What makes this episode especially valuable is the compassionate acknowledgment that resilience isn't equally accessible to everyone. Children facing ongoing challenges like depression, anxiety, bullying, or systemic barriers genuinely find emotional elasticity more difficult. Parents will find tremendous comfort in the reminder that they themselves demonstrate resilience constantly in ways they rarely celebrate or even notice. The permission to start small, celebrate tiny victories, and recognize resilience as an ongoing practice rather than an achievement makes this a must-listen for anyone raising or working with children today.
Ready to rethink how you recognize and nurture resilience in yourself and the children in your life? Listen now and discover how bouncing back happens in the most ordinary moments of your day.
www.bethtrammell.com
All right, Happy New Year everyone and welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited to talk about what we have on tap for this month, because this one is a really important word for me. So I'm excited to hear about this and dig into it. But we're going to introduce ourselves first before we get started. My name is Leslie Bolser. I'm the creative director for Core Essential Values. We're a curriculum company that works with schools and families and community organizations to help people use a common language to work together for the betterment of themselves and the kids and families that they work with, and I'm here with my friend, Dr Beth Tramiel. Beth, can you introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Happy New Year. I am so happy to be here again. I am Beth Trammell. I'm a psychologist and I love to make words matter for good. That's sort of my main jam. It's what my website is, and I also teach at Indiana University East, where I am the director of the Master's in Mental Health Counseling program. So I'm training future therapists when I'm not doing my best to make words matter for good in other ways.
Speaker 1:In your own home, in your own family, with your own kids, right, because you have four that you're currently using All the time. You should just list that as your background and your expertise.
Speaker 2:I know this is exactly why I'm doing this work. This is what.
Speaker 1:I do every day, yeah, okay. So this word I really love, I love starting the year with this, and it's gotten a bad rap recently. I think we can talk about that a little bit in this moment. But the words resilience and we're talking about it in terms of just getting back up when something gets you down and I know that it was really popular grit and resilience were pretty popular a few years ago and then there was a space in time where people were kind of critical of the ideas of resilience and grit, with the understanding that some folks just don't have the resources to be as resilient or as gritty maybe, as we hope that they can be.
Speaker 1:But I think today we're maybe talking about it in a different way. I wanna talk about this just in terms of every day in your house, as an adult or as a kid, just getting back up when something gets you down, facing a failure or a misstep, and what to do about it. What happens in your own home when a child or when you have a moment that you weren't so happy with or that was a little bit of a misstep or a little bit of a failure. How do you get back up? How do you recover in those moments and have some resilience. So let's talk about it with young kids. What does resilience look like in our young friends?
Speaker 2:I love that we're sort of just bringing this word like really down to the basics, right. And I think there are a lot of ways we think about this word resilience that it has to be something that's like oh, I had this major thing happen and now I've got to figure out how to get myself up from that. And while that is true, I think resilience is a word that can describe just those tiny moments of like, well dang, that's not how I thought this day was going to go. Yeah, well dang, my three year old had a blowout at the grocery store. And how do I bounce back and not let this ruin my whole day?
Speaker 2:You know, I think about that as a parent and how you know how many moments when my kids were really little that I was like, how you know how many moments when my kids were really little that I was like the whole day is ruined and I can't. You know, I, I can't show resilience as a parent. So I think that that is one thing, to just shift our mindset a little bit, that showing resilience and sort of like bouncing back can be as much for us as our kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's. That's really good and I agree I like talking about it in sort of its simplest form that isn't so much dependent on your, your experiences or your resources. It can be just dependent on the moment that we're thinking of that one moment in time. So with young children, I know it's a little bit harder for them maybe to be elastic and bounce back, but what does that look like to build that in your kids?
Speaker 2:You know, it's really interesting because for a lot of our kids that are really young, I talked to a lot of parents and teachers that are like he just threw a block at my face or he just, you know, had a major meltdown about me turning off Bluey, and then he came up and like gave me a hug and wanted to love me, like literally like three and a half seconds later, you know. So our kids, you know, in some ways are teaching us that hey, you know, we can have a moment and kind of bounce back from it. So I find that at this age, this kind of like quick turnaround time is often truest for our youngest kids, because they really just have kind of this big emotion and then they kind of move on to the next thing that they want in their life. And so when our kids are doing that, we have to remember that, yes, when they threw the block, when they had their meltdown, it was hard for us to be like, wow, that was a lot and that's kind of hard.
Speaker 2:And when your child is ready to sort of move on, it isn't necessarily our time or our place to be like well, I'm still mad and I'm going to be mad for the next three hours because you had a meltdown about Bluey. No, I'm not saying that that doesn't ever happen, right? I'm not saying that you need to just like get over it and you know, if they hit you in the face, you need to just pretend like everything's fine. But I think sometimes there's a balance in that. Sometimes, after they have their meltdown, it is the teaching moment, it is the moment to say like, hey, when you did that, it did really hurt me. You stomped on my foot and that hurt my foot, you know. But I think, in other ways, allowing their resilience to lead our resilience, may be something that is worth doing or trying today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, it's a little bit of a different take on pick your battles right, Just knowing what's small and what's big and letting the small things be small things and then letting the big things be a little bit different. As they grow a little bit older and they're in more of like the elementary, early middle school age, what does resilience look like for them?
Speaker 2:You know I love that. We talk about like being able to get up when you know you get down. You know because I think at this age it's recognizing kind of the range of emotions that happen for all of us. You know, recently I've been having some conversations with different groups of people about anger and trying to help our young people identify, like you're at anger level 10. And this situation may have called for like an anger level four.
Speaker 2:Everybody can be angry about this situation, but let's start talking about what level are you at, and this isn't something you do in the moment. Let me be clear when they're like screaming and yelling and carrying on at whatever thing is happening, this isn't your moment to be like look bro, you're at a level 10 and I need you at a level four. That may not be your moment, but I think it's helping this age group see that we have all these emotions that can live in us and that's great. They all kind of live on this continuum of intensity and the reason that we can help them focus on this is that when they can identify their emotions, when they can identify what level their emotion is and identify what probably this situation requires, it allows them to bounce back more quickly. So, when I can develop the awareness, oh boy, what I'm feeling is actually not anger. What I'm feeling is sadness because my friend just did something to hurt my feelings.
Speaker 2:What I feel right now is a level eight, but I know that I need to be like a level four or five and I can get up and walk around the room or I can go and talk to another friend, I can go and play with another friend. That's the picture of what resilience is, in, kind of the long term right. So again, that might feel really big and lofty right now for your child who's in the third grade, and they're still learning this skill. But, as you think, as a parent, how can I help move my kid from just blowing up because something happens to? Hey, let's stop and let's think about what this emotion is, let's think about what level it is and then let's think about what should we be right now? How should this kind of feel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's important. I like that you said not to do it in the moment, because you do it after for a while until they can start to feel it in the moment. That's really really good advice. And also that resilience is something that you build over time, that it's not a quick skill at all. It's something that you have to practice and learn and sort of get the hang of what it's like to bounce back or to hide some of those weird emotions like shame. Right, Shame is something that can be hard to overcome, to be resilient and, like you were saying, sadness. There are a lot of emotions that can be tied to the feelings that you get on the knocked down part and that can be tied to the feelings that you get on the knocked down part and then hard to get to the good emotions you feel after you've accomplished getting back up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, even when we move into, like our older teenage kids, the process is still the same, right, we're like starting to teach them that in upper elementary, through middle school and even through high school, we're still teaching that same process, right, of recognizing what's happening with my emotions, how do I feel when I get knocked down? What level or what intensity is the most appropriate thing for this? And then how do I just continue to work toward seeing things or being the person that I know that I want to be in this situation, and I mean I still know adults that are still working on that skill. So the other thing about resilience, especially as we talk about teenagers and even again into adulthood, is that, you know, sometimes it's easy to bounce back from something. I, you know, missed four questions on my algebra quiz and my grade is an A anyway and I didn't really study, and so I can kind of bounce back from that pretty easily. I think there are a couple of things to realize for our teenagers in particular is that sometimes there are things that happen that get us down, that are harder to bounce back from. So I think sometimes there are bigger situations that, even though we as parents don't see it as a big deal. It might be a really big deal to our kids, you know, and so I I shared this example at a recent workshop that I did that I like to have my mornings be fairly peaceful and so I try not to like pick any battles first thing in the morning with any of my kids, right, I have two teenagers and two elementary age kids, and my one teenager needed a white hoodie and the white hoodie was in the wash and it was like I really need this white hoodie, you know, and and the parent in me, in my mind, was like what is the deal?
Speaker 2:It is not that big a deal, it's just a white hoodie. Pick another hoodie in the closet. You know, I was just processing, right, because in the morning sometimes I take a little longer to process, and so I didn't really say anything. I was just sort of like waiting to hear the story, and I'm really glad that I did, and frankly, I'm glad it happened in the morning because I was still kind of slow to process what was happening.
Speaker 2:But later my kid told me I don't want to be the only one not wearing the white hoodie, and so it wasn't really about the hoodie. It was about the social pressure and the social things that were going to happen if they weren't wearing the white hoodie. And again, this is like a minor thing, but what I'm trying to highlight is that the things that feel really big to our teenagers might actually be a big thing to them in this moment, even though, in the scheme of life, no one's looking back on this day and the white hoodie and it's not a big deal. But right now we have to allow them to have this be real and so having them kind of have the space and then figure out what do we need to do here to bounce back from feeling really frustrated or really annoyed that the white hoodie isn't available?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really great point that, through our adult lens, things that we think maybe should be pretty quick to bounce back from or that aren't that big of a deal, we don't have laser focus in on that underlying notion that you were describing right, that maybe it's anger, or maybe it's the fitting in, or maybe it's whatever it is that's actually causing that, and so it feels like you should just be able to really quickly recover from not having the hoodie, when in fact there's something underneath that that's making it more difficult. I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the other thing is recognizing right. The first is recognizing that their perception of how big or small things are is important for us to just validate. But then I also think that we need to consider that Most of us, if it's one instance or it's something small, like I mentioned earlier, the ability to show resilience may not be that hard. But if it's day after day, day after day, day after day I have to keep getting up and facing these things that have me down it becomes harder to show resilience. It becomes harder to show resilience and I think that that is what some people want us to remember about resilience is that there are populations, there are kids who are already struggling more and it is harder for them just to just get up and don't let things get you down.
Speaker 2:Kids who may have kind of a history of depression or anxiety, yeah, kids who experience consistent oppression or bullying, right, those are things that are going to be harder for a child to sort of naturally just bounce back from. And so I think, recognizing, how do we see those things again as real experiences for our young people and then how do we figure out ways to really walk alongside them and support them? And how do we bounce back? How do we get back up even again to what we're saying in these tiny moments, in these tiny like one day at a time, sort of times?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's really good to remember because then I think we can focus on the actual things that they can bounce back from that are really small, right. And so, as a teacher or as a parent, knowing that there may be things that are hard for them to overcome, maybe not expecting the resilience in those moments or not demanding the resilience in those moments, and finding it in smaller things, and then speaking into students, into our children, that they are resilient, finding the ways that they do bounce back from something and say gosh, you're so resilient, that's so great that you were able to move on like that, knowing that there are 10 or 12 other things that they're not bouncing back from in the moment, but just acknowledging when they do on the smaller things, I think can just sort of plant that seed.
Speaker 2:I think that's excellent and it's a great way to wrap up today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, and I just want to remind parents too, as we're talking about resilience and they may be in the same situation you were describing. Right, there may be so many things in the life of a parent that are overwhelming and difficult and bouncing back just may not feel like something they want to talk about, but parents are resilient. You have to bounce back all the time in ways that you may not even see in yourself, and so I think, just looking at yourself and the moments that you have during the day and celebrating the times where you were able to just keep going no matter what stressors or whatever has happened, just recognizing that you are resilient- I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 2:You are resilient. You've got this. You've got this.
Speaker 1:I love it Once in the grocery store, the white hoodie parents, you got this, you got this, that's great, all right. Well, we're going to wrap up for this month. We are cruising into the second half of the school year, which is just wild to think about. It's wild, it's just crazy. So I'm excited to talk to you more the rest of the school year. In the meantime, if you want to know more, you can look for us at Core Essential Values by finding us on social media at CE Values, or on our website, which is coreessentialsorg.
Speaker 2:My website is makewordsmatterforgoodcom, so people can find me there, and I have another podcast called Things you Learn in Therapy, so if you hop over to that, you'll catch some episodes there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great. I can't imagine in that podcast you haven't talked about anger and bouncing back and those deeper issues that you mentioned there at the end. If you want to know more about those things, I would check out that podcast for sure. All right, will you join us again next month to talk about something new? Absolutely Can't wait. Excellent, see you then. Bye, everybody, bye, thank you.
