Resilience as the Ability to Bounce Forward

Breaking away from childhood lessons and rebooting your ability to adapt.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

Key points

• Primitive gestalt patterns are lessons learned in childhood that interfere with adaptability and resilience.
• Superstitious behavior results from the incorrect lessons of childhood.
• Bouncing forward occurs when you are present to challenge old beliefs and learn new lessons

A while ago I had a client who came to me for help with her anxiety and depression. I’ll call her Lynn, not her real name. When we discussed her anxious childhood, she would tell me she would worry a few days before exams as a student. And she would be anxious right up to the test. The night before she would hardly get to sleep. After she took each exam, she felt that she failed, or didn’t do well. It was at that point in our discussion that I asked, “Well, how would you do in your exams?” And here was the kicker. She said, “I always got “A”s!

Another client, whom I’ll call Bob, not his real name, was referred because he had insomnia. His constant worrying would interfere with falling asleep. He would start his day being anxious. He worried about and looked for what problems he’d encounter. What would go wrong, or what mistake might he or someone he knew, make? At the end of the day, when it ended without anything bad happening, he would breathe a sigh of relief.

The conundrum of resilience as the ability to bounce back

These are two examples of a perspective on the common definition of resilience: the ability to bounce back.

As I considered Lynn’s response, that she always got “A”s but didn’t expect to, I scratched my head, and as if a light bulb went off, it all made sense to me. You see, we are blessed with an amazing learning process we refer to as conditioning. You remember, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the Russian experimental neurologist and physiologist? He was the guy who rang a bell every time he fed his pet Fido. And then he pulled a quick one on Fido. He rang the bell but didn’t leave any food. And of course, Fido came when he heard the bell. And a conditioned response was born. The bell developed reinforcing properties and expectations because of it being paired at the same time with the presentation of food. We now call this classical conditioning.

Many years later I was fortunate enough to be a young Assistant Professor in the psychology department of McGill University in Montreal. Fortunate, because at the time it was a hotbed of neuroscientific study. One of the professors, Peter Milner, was involved in discovering the pleasure centers in the brain. Ron Melzack, was there, who came up with the gate theory of pain, and Wilder Penfield was mapping the brain. These were just some of the illustrious leaders I was honored to connect with.

And the one who made the biggest impact upon me, and one of my early mentors, was Donald Hebb, who, in 1947 wrote “The Organization of Behavior”, the seminal work on how learning takes place in the brain. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. It is his statement, “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” that popped into my head in that light bulb moment.

How our ability to adapt goes off course

Let’s take a moment to think about the conditioning process that was taking place in these two clients. Lynn’s brain was experiencing agitation, worry, and anxiety about how she would do on her test. And the outcome was that she did well, very well indeed. Neurons that fire together, wire together. The neural pathways associated with her worrying and those associated with relief were firing at the same time. And wiring her brain – putting these together – and coming out unconsciously with, “When I worry, am anxious, and don’t sleep, I get an “A” on my test.

Now let’s consider Bob. He starts out worrying about what can go wrong but hoping things will be ok. And at the end of the day, the coast is clear. Again, we see the consequences of resilience as the ability to bounce back. Bob bounced back to the same incorrect lesson: “When I’m anxious and worry, my day doesn’t go off the tracks.” And this conditioning crept into his bed, where he continued with this inaccurate connection and worry.

Primitive gestalt patterns

Bob and Lynn were stuck in what is sometimes referred to as superstitious behavior. This is behavior that – by chance – gets associated with some type of reward or relief. It gets imbued with the power to attract, the power to be triggered. This is because of the lessons of childhood, or what I refer to as the primitive gestalt patterns we live our lives by. We may be hypervigilant due to fear of some negative behavior from a parent. We somehow make it to adulthood and credit the hypervigilance for that achievement. This is how many maladaptive adult behaviors develop. The result is that we adapt to our childhood environment, creating our primitive gestalt patterns, and then our ability to adapt becomes frozen in that environment.

The 21st century requires a new definition of resilience as “the ability to bounce forward”

My discussions with Lynn centered around a more accurate pairing. I started us out with “I always got an A.” And then we made the salient connections to support bouncing forward. I encouraged the more appropriate lessons: “That’s because I prepare well for my tests and know the material. I’m competent and I’m smart. When I study, I learn the material well. The reality is that I always do well on tests. Therefore, I can trust myself and expect to do well on future tests or any other challenge I encounter.”

And here is the new and up to this point, difficult step: I can take in the concrete evidence of my goodness, of my capabilities. And if that’s the case, I no longer have to worry or be afraid. When I apply myself, I do well. This is bouncing forward. Learning the correct lessons results in breaking away from your primitive gestalt pattern.

I engaged in a similar process with Bob, who also began appreciating how his days typically turn out. Of course, there are the occasions when things don’t go as expected, but that’s the uncertainty of life. And Bob then realized that even when that happened, he handled these events well. This put him on the path, bouncing forward, into new lessons of life and about himself.

You can restore adaptability and your ability to learn the appropriate lessons with this bouncing forward mindset

I challenge all of you to awaken to the moment, rather than be in the automatic mode which leads to bouncing back. When you awaken to the moment, you can choose the correct lessons to be learned and break away from your primitive gestalt pattern into the realm of true resilience. Fritz Perls, the cofounder of gestalt therapy, once said, in childhood we swallow what we are fed. As an adult, we can bring up all that we were fed and chew on it. And if it doesn’t taste right, spit it out. And I’ll add, and only “swallow” what tastes right and what helps us learn, grow, and be the best version of ourselves.