I started this blog in May 2012, the day I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I originally started it as a way to communicate my medical status to my family and friends so that I did not have to communicate with a lot of people separately. I also wanted to make sure people didn’t find out some other way, get distressed, and then contact me to tell the same stories, over and over. It was part self-protection, which expanded to self-expression, meaning making, community, and the vulnerability that has helped me build what I like to think of as an authentic life. At the same time, I started seeing a psychologist who specialized in people facing serious health issues. I had been depressed twice prior and wanted to prevent that. I also wanted to prevent getting PTSD or other complicated trauma responses. One of the thing my psychologist, Rebecca, told me at the time was that people were more likely to get PTSD when they compartmentalized their trauma from the rest of their lives. I decided that I would use my blog to make cancer a part of my life but not my whole life.

What I didn’t know at the time was that all of the things that I did, some not mentioned here, were building resilience, or as Sherry Hamby, PhD, in her new book, Stronger Than You Think, calls, “building a resistance portfolio”. Sherry and I went to graduate school together. She was a couple of years ahead of me so we did not have a lot of close contact but I admired her incredible intellect, high level of research skill, and practical wisdom. In the intervening years, I have gotten to know her better through social media. Sherry is incredibly well published in peer-reviewed journals. She is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of the South and the founding editor of The Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Sherry saw the need to shift trauma research to research on resilience. She saw the gap, started doing the work, and co-founded the annual convention, “Resilience-Con” to promote the exchange of ideas and advances in the area. She devotes extra time to educate the people about interpersonal violence and resilience in major media (check out her Ted Talk), which has led up to the publishing of her book by Penguin Press.

I just finished the book. I learned a great deal. Sherry is a big picture thinker and she integrated lived experience with research, examined individuals, families, communities, institutions, and more. She drew from multiple disciplines from psychology, Buddhist meditation traditions, sociology, environmentalism, political science, urban planning, and more. There are implications for each of us as individuals and families as well as for local and national policy.

Despite the fact that I just made it sound like a nerd-fest, it is not, though if you are like me and like a good nerd-fest, you will not be disappointed. In addition to incorporating what we have learned from decades of research, Sherry grounds her book in challenging herself to see vulnerability as a strength, and share her own story of trauma and resilience.

In addition to learning aspects of Sherry’s life not previously known, I learned new things about trauma and resilience. The first thing I learned is that resilience is the most common response to trauma. If I had thought about it for several, minutes, I could have deduced this, but I had a bias toward thinking about all of the negative aspects of trauma and getting stuck there. This is a major reason that Sherry started working in the area of resilience. Most people have experienced trauma and many different types. A part of the book is about trauma and its impact. One research finding is that the number of types of trauma one has experienced is a significant factor in negative impact. When I read the non-exhaustive list of examples of types of trauma, I counted nine and then added two that weren’t on the list, experiencing medical trauma and also trauma related to parenting. I was surprised at the number. Although I acknowledge everything I counted as significant life experiences, I had not really thought of myself as having experiencing more than one type of trauma. But there you go. It gave me pause to think and when I looked at what builds resilience, I saw that through intention and luck, I have a thick portfolio.

Getting back to cancer, it is a trauma and one that for too many, results in death of oneself or a loved one. Trauma is part of nearly everyone’s life. We have ways to keep it from becoming in our eyes, our entire life, or in the case of another coping style, denial, we have ways of incorporating and honoring it without pretending it didn’t matter. Trauma always matters but so does resilience.

I highly recommend this book to all of you. There’s a lot of popular press out there that is written by unskilled and under-informed authors on very important topics. Some of them become quite popular and undeservedly so. Let’s make Stronger Than You Think, popular. Trauma and resilience are incredibly important. This is a rare chance to help educate ourselves and spread education to THE PEOPLE.

Be well friends,

Elizabeth