Resilience, Overcoming and Fortitude with Heidi Keller, Ph.D.

Parents like myself would like to know that their children will “be okay” and bounce back should bad things happen to them, and tough times will inevitably happen in life.  How can we build skills in ourselves and in our children to be able to “bounce back” and grow stronger from adversity?

Expert guest Heidi Keller, PhD discusses resilience, how we can have more of it and how we can teach our children to have more of it.   Dr. Keller, a clinical psychologist, has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and at the end of the episode she talks about how what she has learned about resilience has helped her.  

Other topics discussed include:  

• Three practical questions that help build resilience in adults and children
• Three ways the people who have experienced abuse or trauma are different than others
• How the self-esteem movement in the United States was unhelpful
• The wrong way to compliment a child and the best way to give a child encouragement
• What the U.S. military does to teach soldiers resilience

For listeners who are couples. . . remember from Episode #9 on this show entitled “The Honeymoon Phase of Love” when we talked about how in order to keep those honeymoon feelings going beyond the first six months of your relationship, you need to actively do new & interesting things together?   For listeners local to New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania, please consider attending the MS FunRaiser July 02nd 2019 at Farmstead Golf and Country Club in Lafayette, NJ.  This dinner and dancing event features Val and Jenna from ABC TV’s Dancing with the Stars.   Money raised from tickets and donations will help and support those Multiple Sclerosis, MS, in this region of the United States.  This event is run by the guest on this show, Dr. Heidi Keller.  E-mail MSFUNraiser2019@gmail.com for tickets.

P.S. The photo used as artwork for this show was taken by my 10 year old son George (_geogre.art_)who was given the assignment "create a photo that represents resilience."  This gave me a chance to teach him about what resilience means!    

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

To love, learn, to laugh, to love, to be, love, to be beauty, to understand, to bring right to the things that matter most.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

This is Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. Welcome to my show. For every life stage, we have questions. Let's enhance our lives together as we explore the things that matter most. For the couples listening today, remember from the podcast episode on the honeymoon phase of love when we talked about how, in order to keep those honeymoon feelings going beyond the first six months of your relationship, you need to actively do new and interesting things together. I'm about to suggest an opportunity for those who are local to Sparta, New Jersey. This episode is dedicated to the MS Fundraiser, July 2nd, 2019, at Farmstead Golf and Country Club in Lafayette, New Jersey. This dinner and dancing event features Val and Jenna from ABC TV's Dancing with the Stars. Money raised from tickets and donations will help support those with multiple sclerosis in this region of the United States. If you're interested, go to this email address, M S FunF U N Razor R-A-I-S-C-R 2019 at gmail.com for tickets. This podcast has listeners from all over the world. One thing that I know parents from all over the world can agree on is that we want our children to be okay. Most parents, if they could, would rather take on suffering themselves than let their children go through pain. I know that's how I feel about my four children. But that's not the way life goes. We can't control everything. And life will happen to our children. So the next best thing is this to know that they would be okay and bounce back once the bad things happen. Which inevitably bad things will happen in life. Bouncing back. That's a piece of resilience. Heidi Keller, PhD, is here to talk about resilience. How we can have more of it, how we could teach our children to have more of it. Heidi, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much, Alexandra. I'm glad I'm really glad to be here. How did you first get interested in resilience?

SPEAKER_03 3:01

Well, um, even before I started graduate school, um, we had a foster daughter. She was 18 years old. She came to our home, um, my husband and I, and we had two young children. And she had come from an abusive home and seemed to be actually doing pretty well. She really stuck up for herself. She was really great with kids. We liked her a lot. Uh, she came at one point came and asked if we needed a nanny, and we weren't quite ready for one, but we asked why. And she said, Because I need a place to live. She needed to get away from this family. So she came and lived with us, and then maybe a year or two later, her sister came and lived with us also. And so they were both exposed to sort of a loving family from us after being away from their abusive family. But the two of them turned out quite differently. And I just wondered what made it so that the first, she was actually a little bit older. So the older girl, how did she become more able to tolerate emotions? You know, what was the difference between the two of them given that they grew up in similar circumstances? And so I started looking into why that was.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Right.

SPEAKER_03 4:27

He didn't really uh call it that at the time, but Viktor Frankel, a lot of your listeners will have heard of him. He was a Holocaust survivor and also a survivor of a concentration camp. He was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, which described his experiences and what he believed to be really three main ways of finding meaning in life, no matter how brutal the conditions can be. Um, so his three things were creating some sort of work or doing a deed. The second thing was an encounter with another human being, finding love. And he talked about that in the circumstances of being in a concentration camp, which it seems would be very difficult to do. At least connecting with other people. And unfortunately, he would connect with a person and then they would die and he'd have to find another person. And then the third thing is the attitude that uh we all take toward unavoidable suffering. So that, of course, sounds very familiar, and ultimately became really the most important part of learning how to become more resilient, um, this attitude that we take. So the concept has really been described over the years as a bunch of different things invulnerability, hardiness, coping, and then eventually as resilience. And Victor Frankel didn't really call it resilience.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Is there one agreed-upon definition today on what resilience is?

SPEAKER_03 6:00

Well, yes and no. The general um definition of it is really getting through some sort of difficulty and being okay and possibly even stronger because of it. You know, it's the idea, like you said, of bouncing back from some sort of a difficult situation. Now, there's a little bit of a controversy right now, well, not right now, it's been for a while. It's between people who believe that the survivor has to have experienced severe circumstances or some sort of trauma. Um, and then there are a lot of people who've sort of watered it down. So the participate precipitating event that demonstrated how someone or a group has bounced back really came away from the definition. So essentially removing trauma from the equation, um, which is really where 50 years of research was based on um things like trauma and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

So you're saying there's a group of people that are saying you cannot include trauma when you're looking at resilience definition.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

No, not that. It's that um I'll give you an example. Things that you hear on the news all the time. You you hear the word resilience all the time about a bunch of different things. So here's one example describing a sports team who overcame defeat by winning, you know, and they say they're they were resilient because they um, you know, they lost a few games and then all of a sudden they won. And that makes sense. So that's not enough. Well, a lot of people don't think that's enough. A lot of people think that if you're gonna talk about the word resilient, you need to keep it within some sort of really s you know, overcoming some really significant issues. Right. So it's sort of the term has become a little bit trite in those instances. Yes. And I'm in the group that believes that someone should have had some sort of extremely difficult circumstances or trauma in order to consider themselves really resilient.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

I I have a dear patient of mine whose mother abandoned him and his four siblings when he was twelve. And he went through school feeling like he he was different. He felt like he had to keep this a secret that mom wasn't home, there wasn't a mom at home. But for the most part, he did okay, he did well in school. He didn't seem to be depressed, and he had friends, and it wasn't until he was 21 that it hit him, and he went into a deep and suicidal depression, which is how he landed in my office. Now, I have a connection to this story and some research I recently learned, and I want to just bounce it off of you. Great. Um so this spring I went to a conference, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, and I learned something fascinating from a Harvard researcher. Her name is Susan Anderson. And what she shared in her presentation is that there tends to be a 9.2 year delay between the onset of trauma or abuse and the onset of depression or anxiety. So you have 9.2 years without any symptoms, and then it comes. And this happens to two-thirds of two-thirds of people who have had trauma. And with this particular patient, it was nine years later that it came out for himself.

SPEAKER_03 9:51

Do you know whether that was because there was a long time where talking about it wasn't acceptable?

SPEAKER_01 10:01

I would say in this case, he didn't he didn't have a safe place in the in the world to talk to about this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:12

Yeah, and so that article, I'm wondering about that article, if they addressed that issue, why where the nine year what happened during those nine years, what was happening? Were they just not talking about it? Were they denying it?

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Well, this was a study um you know, it was referring to more than one person. Sure. I think what some of the other presentations addressed is how do you prevent trauma from leading to depression and anxiety. And sir there were some interesting things I learned about that. Okay. Well, one thing is that kids who've had trauma are different in a couple of ways. I can give you three ways that they're different. Okay. One way is that they have more trouble discriminating between what's a threat and what's safe. So they're more likely to read negativity into a situation that's really okay, nothing to worry about, but they lose energy assuming negativity. So in the case that I'm sharing, once he became depressed, he started to assume that he was unlikable in most social situations, like at work, even when there wasn't any evidence of this. All right. So a second thing is people who've been exposed to trauma, they have more trouble regulating their emotions.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

And they seem more reactive. So after they get upset about what a friend or a parent did or said, they'll get more upset than most. And then they'll take it'll take them longer to calm down. And then a third thing is that what I already mentioned, that people who've experienced trauma are more likely to experience anxiety or depression later.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

Sure. That makes sense. And as we get closer to the end where we start talking about um ways to help our children build resilience, those three factors will come into play. Ah, okay. Yes. Something that's kind of interesting, uh, when you had asked me about um how I got into the subject of resilience, I actually started out looking at self-esteem. Because you know, when I was writing my I I had to choose a topic for my dissertation in graduate school. And so I started looking at the um a bunch of stuff about self-esteem. Because there was that big movement for a while, it was probably about 20 years worth. And and self-esteem sort of got beaten to death much in the way resilience is starting to. But one of the things that they found is that that movement basically backfired a little bit, creating a need to teach our children something else.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

So for example, that's right. I I think you're talking about how, at least in my generation, a lot of the parents complimented children in the wrong way. Right. Exactly it. I was just gonna give that example, even.

SPEAKER_03 13:24

Okay. Um, so so for example, a girl doesn't do well in a sporting event. You know, she whatever she's playing soccer or whatever. And so the well-meaning parent says, Oh, you did fine, don't worry about it, you know. The important thing is that you really tried. And then the girl knows she didn't do well. So that comment just falls flat. You know, she's she doesn't believe it really. And so then doesn't really internalize it. Um, or if she does internalize it and says, Oh, you know, it's okay to not do well, because I as long as I feel good about myself. So something that now we find works better would be to say something like, because that doesn't really give her what she needs to do better the next time. You know, she just feels better about, she feels good about herself, but she's not going to necessarily do any better at the sport. Um, so why don't we look at ways that so the parent could say, well, why don't we look at some ways that you can improve so you can practice more in that area? What did you feel you didn't do well? And then let's practice that, the parent can say, you know, so that and this is part of learning a sport. Um, but you know we love you no matter what. So you could still have the accepting parent that's saying, okay, well, you didn't like the way you played. So let's talk about why that is and how you can do better the next time, instead of just, you know, bolstering her self-esteem.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yes. That this is reminding me of Carol Dweck's work on fixed versus growth mentality. And that we, in addition, should not compliment children on being a great athlete or saying you're so smart. Because that promotes a fixed mentality rather than the idea of working hard to achieve your goals.

SPEAKER_03 15:13

Right. And that ties into the whole self-esteem thing, too. Um, and it makes it even worse if we're complimenting their appearance or something, and it's not actually necessarily true to the outside world.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Right. So it's better in general to promote um trying harder, trying different ways, or working harder in terms of, I guess, academic resilience. Right. Versus saying you're so smart. Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:44

I have an example of that. My own son um decided that he wanted to play the piano um when he was in kindergarten and got one of those little Fisher Price things that looked like a baby grand piano. And it had some um, so it was just this little keyboard and it had a bunch of pre-recorded things on him. And um, one of the things that had on there was a very shortened version of Fear Elise, which um, which was a classical piece. And he played it a few times to himself and then just played it himself. I mean, he listened to it a few times and then just played it. And he said, Mom, I really want to learn how to play the piano. So he did start taking some piano lessons, but he he mostly needed to just listen to something and then just play it. He had a very good ear. And people kept telling him how great he was at it. And um, and he kind of was, you know, it was amazing that here's this kindergarten. And he was picking out these classical pieces and being able to do that. And so everybody kept saying, Oh, play that again, play that again. And so he just ended up playing the same things over and over again and didn't, and didn't want to disappoint people by actually learning how to play the piano, learning how to read music and how to really become good at it. And so it sort of ruined it for him in a way, because he had this idea, okay, I'm a really great piano player. Well, this is good enough. I, you know, I can just keep playing these things until I'm in high school. And by that time, people are like, okay, well, we've heard that 1500 times. Can't you learn something else?

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Oh, and that's been validated, that experience by some of Carol Dweck's some of her studies. Um, that students with a fixed mentality will they're more likely to lie about their grades because it's so important for them to maintain that they are smart.

unknown 17:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

There it's harder for them to fail or to show that they're failing because they're afraid of that, because the options are black and white. Either you're smart or you're not. Rather than you keep on trying, you will fail. And that's, you know, that's a good way to encourage is to say, you know, this is gonna be very, this is gonna be tough learning this new soccer move or this new math concept. It might feel hard, but when once you learn it, you're gonna feel great.

SPEAKER_03 18:06

Right. That's a great way of looking at it.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Yes. So you've done some work on resilience in the military.

SPEAKER_03 18:17

Yes. I I worked for the uh VA for a little while, and um I just sort of came across something on one of the VA sites about resilience um training. And so I got pretty interested in that. It turns out it's the same group of people at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the idea of how to become more resilient. They did a lot of research on it. They were experimental psychologists and started out with animal research and stuff like that. And and something called learned helplessness that created a lot of depression in people, you know, just like, what's the point? What's the point in trying? I'm not gonna do a good job anyway, you know, that kind of mentality. So basically in the military, they they started a whole um, because so many people were coming back with really severe PTSD, you know, a lot of psychological problems, a lot of suicide. And so the army, and eventually it would, I guess, spread out to the other areas of the military, um, started working with the people at the University of Pennsylvania to develop something called master resilience training. And um, they had sort of seven core ideas. The first, like one through five, had to do with preparation, basically to expose them to other ideas before they got exposed to the traumas of combat. So they um prepared them in ways like uh the first couple of, it's like a 10-day training. So the first couple of days are about um resilience and not only about bouncing back, but actually being able to grow and thrive. And then building mental toughness, identifying character strengths is a big part of it, and making it okay to be um in the army and not have to be tough all the time. Oh. You know, sort of what you were saying about the fixed mentality versus growth, that everybody's going to grow. And it's okay for all of you people who are expected to be, you know, really strong and tough without actually having learned it. So they emphasize the need to actually learn it as opposed to just ex uh expecting.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Or the openness to keep learning or to say, I need to learn.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

Right. And I don't have to present myself as uh a soldier who doesn't experience pain, you know, doesn't experience any kind of uh um doubt about him or herself, that kind of thing. And then strengthening relationships is a part is a big part of it too, because and then they bring in uh families and stuff like that. So um, so the first f five steps really so they sort of come to a conclusion about all of that, and then this uh sixth is sustainment, and the seventh is enhancement of all of these skills. So the first five really were are influenced by positive psychology. That's um the training that the original training that they got were from the group, you know, that supports positive psychology.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

I'm thinking about two different things as you're mentioning, the military training for resilience. And one of them, do you remember that study that found that if you expose toddlers to mild stressors, they are less likely to get depressed and anxious than the toddler who's completely protected from stressors. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 21:48

Yeah, yeah, and that and that talks to what you're saying at the beginning, how as parents, we really want to um protect our kids from stuff, but that's not necessarily the best way of parenting. Yeah, because then they don't learn.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

they don't learn how to overcome or that they that they can overcome, right? Right. And then the other thing I was thinking of from the military concept is that with children, one of the ways they have found that you can help children to become more resilient is if they have one safe caregiver who teaches them ways of thinking, basically teaches them to not be overly reactive to things. So that the parent will interpret the world in a more positive way to help the child to interpret the world in a more positive way.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

Right. And more positive isn't just sort of the glass half full, glass, half empty idea. There's a lot, you know, there's a lot more detail to that. Yes. And again, I'd I'd like to get into that when we start talking about how to become more resilient or how to raise our children to be more resilient. But that brings up something important because you're talking about a parent being a caregiver. A caregiver or a parent. But actually when they first started like looking into um how to help people become stronger, it was developmental psychology, you know, looking at children and how they grew through the ways. And they were really focusing for it turned out too many years on risk factors and protective factors. And should we start to really build on the protective factors, enhance protective factors, but it really wasn't an equation. You know, it's not an equation of you have so many risk factors. Can you give them more protective factors to balance that out? And it didn't work that way. So for example, some um risk factors were like a dysfunctional home environment, um, a low socioeconomic status, chronic discrimination, you know, and then also potentially having an abundance of negative life events, deaths and stuff like that. And um I mean a negative life event is being from a dysfunctional family. Abuse. Right, all of that stuff. And it wasn't always necessarily in the family. The family might have been okay parents not not like knowing what to do to help their kids through things as much, but just sort of being neutral and not being able to help them through things. Now on the other hand, um one of the biggest protective factors was having at least one strong adult role model and that could be anybody. It could be their coach, it could be a teacher in the case of our foster daughter, before she came to us, and we ended up being you know role models, but before she even got to us, she had a home ec teacher who recognized that she was being abused and really sort of took her under her wing. And this was before mandatory reporting, but she really just showed her that she could like create anything in the sewing class and, you know, just things like that. So having a having one role model. There's some other things that were protective factors like a sense of spirituality, you know, be having something that's bigger than yourself and also having more positive life events, but not creating them necessarily.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

I, in that conference in the spring, I learned about a study by Dennison and colleagues, a 2016 study that found that children that are sensitive to rewards can be buffered against trauma leading to depression. So kids that are able to seek out rewarding situations like sports and music and friends, that is a protective factor to help buffer them from depression, from trauma.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

Yeah that's a really good point. It is a protective factor, but it's a little bit more than that because they are internalizing a way of coping. You know, a way of coping with some negative emotions as long as it's a safe place to do that. You know, whate whatever it is, whether it's sports or music or whatever, as long as it's a a safe way of expressing emotion without being um ridiculed I well I I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

They may or may not express emotion while they're doing the sport. It's just a positive experience. Yeah I said that a little bit it gives reward. Right, right. I said that a a little bit wrong. Well I'm not saying you're wrong. It's as a discussion yeah um there's a program out there that is supposed to teach resilience. I don't think they use the word resilience it's by John Weiss of University of Washington.

SPEAKER_03 26:42

Yeah I'd like to hear about it.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

So it's three things basically that they teach children as a prevention right cognitive skills so that they can learn how to evaluate and reappraise things that seem negative. So just because Susie made a face at you doesn't mean she's mad at you or that the whole group hates you there are other options right and no need to jump to conclusions. That would be one example a second thing they teach is relaxation training so that children learn not to be too emotionally reactive. And in one of my podcast episodes I review how people can do square breathing. That one's called facing the unknown and then they also teach what's called behavioral activation. So it's that idea of the child seeking rewarding activities. So joining a club, you know getting them to seek out clubs and sports and taking a class and joining a group or building friendships so so that they could have the rewarding activities.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

What if the young person is too shy for example or a lot of kids who come from dysfunctional homes have a very difficult time in school for a lot of reasons. How could an adult help the person do that if they're sort of naturally shy or scared that it's not going to be a safe thing?

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Right. That would be I would think that the school has a great role to play in showing options to children and personally inviting them. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 28:33

Well yeah the school schools and parents as parents we often sometimes we go overboard where we'll just expose them to like too many things and then they end up you know they end up getting worn out. But if we expose them to enough things and then then they find something that they really like. You know, so they try a couple different things you know karate joining the lacrosse team and they aren't coordinated enough for that um but then they take up a musical instrument and then all of a sudden they find that is really rewarding.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Yeah. Yeah parents can do that. And the schools I've worked a lot with an immigrant population um just outside of New York City in a federally qualified health center where I was um doing some work there once a week. And with that population because they're new to the country a lot of them don't know about the options.

SPEAKER_02 29:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

So a lot of those children I found weren't involved in any activities and they had dealt with trauma of coming into this country um a lot a lot of difficult circumstances and they didn't have a lot of those rewarding type of activities because they just weren't in the system.

SPEAKER_03 29:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Yeah so the combination of those three sounds like um at least some people believe that that that's a good is that in tune with what you would recommend on teaching children resilience.

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Well I you know certainly relaxation training as long as we start early enough where like if you if you started picking that up in high school for example, the kids might be too embarrassed, you know? They might feel that was too touchy feely for example, but doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't make it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But I think the earlier you start the better it would be to teach them something like square breathing. Yeah. Well any of these things the earlier you start the better it is because you start if if you start with um things that are minor to overcome rather than something really huge as they get, you know, go on in life, it's going to work better because you're building skills upon skills. So I don't think there's a downside to those things. Much of what seems to work really has a lot to do with the first thing that you mentioned, which is the cognitive. Yeah, cognitive skills and basically trying to explain difficult times. Let's just take difficult times because it's not only about helping them understand difficult times, it's also about helping them understand good things that are happening cognitive ways. So would this be a good time for me to talk about that sort of general phasing this in for the kids because whatever you would yeah. Okay because that's talk to me. This this ends up being sort of this ends up being kind of my big the big bang at the end. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

And if you want it to be now if the end is now go for it.

SPEAKER_03 31:33

So um so like I said you know starting early on where the challenges are much smaller, you know, even something really silly like running into something I mean running along you trip over something and and you're a little kid and you start crying, you know, and just being able to say well, okay, you know, pick yourself up let's, you know, let's make you feel better and then try not to run in flip-flops anymore. You know, you know, things like that. But um so but with the cognitive skills obviously they have to be developed enough to be able to respond to these things. So it's something like they have some sort of difficulty. It could be a minor or a major one and explaining to them in terms of sort of evaluating their sort of three steps. Is this something that I have or had any control over? You know, um is it realistic to think that it's somehow my fault so this is for a bad event. You know in in training people to um and training all of us and kids in explaining bad and good events in our lives if you want them to become more resilient, if it's a bad event, you want them to understand that it's not necessarily something that they had any control over.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

That's a great first question and that's the serenity prayer.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Exactly. Yes. I'm glad you brought that up because that really is part of it. And then the uh second part of it is so basically um we're talking about external versus an internal explanation of something. So then the second part of it is in a negative situation, if this happens again, could it be different? You know? So I'll give an example of that in just a second. And then the third part is do I believe that this is going to happen just under these circumstances or is this a one-time occurrence? And so then we're talking about sort of an external view of the event unstable and specific.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

So let let me give you an example.

SPEAKER_03 33:35

Which is which is the way non-depressed people think exactly so your child tells you that other kids make fun of the way she talked after getting braces.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 33:47

So then you're talking to her about it. Well is there any way that you have any control over them in their comments? You know um what part of this can you control and can't you? And the bottom line is you can't control the fact that people are being negative towards you. You know you can't change them. You can't change the fact that they said that. And then it just happened this first day is it possible that's not going to keep happening? You know? So you want to sort of stick to the idea that okay well this happened today and it felt really bad but but it's not when someone's feeling terrible about that.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah. Exactly. So that's a great question.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

And then thirdly well okay this was about talking differently with braces not in everything that you do. You know they aren't criticizing everything globally that you're doing in life. They're just they're just making fun of the way you talk with your braces. So but not only in difficult times um you also want to help them understand once something good happens. So uh for example I end up using her all the time instead of his but of of course it could be we're both women so we could say her um Kevin here in the studio. So her presentation so like she makes a presentation on the dangers of smoking. Okay. And it was really well received. You know her classmates complimented her on it her teacher says that's really good. So she tells you about that and the self-esteem uh movement would say way to go you know good for you punch on the you know in the arm keep up the good work well there's more to it than that. Okay, yeah well you worked really hard on that you know I'm really glad that they liked it. So that's sort of like internalizing a good event okay and saying that um then there's the second part of it which is you know if you give this exact same presentation to another group, they're probably also going to like it. You know, so it's it's a stable explanation of um doing something good. And then globally it did a great job with this topic if you give a different kind of a presentation or a performance or something else you'll probably do well if you put the same amount of effort into it.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

So can you repeat again the general principles of what you would want to say to a child after a good event you want them to internally understand that it's because they worked hard on it.

SPEAKER_03 36:23

Okay. You know, because they put effort into it. And that if they're gonna do the same type of thing, the same type of presentation or whatever, there's a stable way of having them it might transfer. Be able to well that's actually the third part transferring it to other situations. There's a very fine line between the second and the third part. The second part is if you're gonna give the exact same thing, you know, to another group or whatever, so uh is this situation going to stay stable? Yeah. Will it stay stable in a good event? And then the third thing is like you said, is it going to transfer into other things, a performance of, you know it doesn't even have to be in front of other people. It could just be anything else that they do because if they're gonna work hard on something, you know, they'll get a good outcome. Whereas we were looking back at a negative thing, you know, where uh if you're if it's gonna transfer to something it's a bad event and it was going to transfer to something it's not just about talking differently with braces is it going to be everything you do? And so you're trying to help them understand it's not going to be in every situation. It's just happened to be with the braces. Right. You know they're not gonna necessarily you know the next day you go in and they're gonna start criticizing your clothing choice. So helping them understand that the way that they think about good and bad events in their lives can really help them grow on those skills so that once something um worse happens, then they're able to really cognitively understand that in that way. Nice and this can apply to adults too yes it can there are um places all across the nation that are trying to teach adults these kinds of things and certainly it works particularly with people who want it to work you know and have the cognitive capacity to be able to do it. If they have the a a way of being able to incorporate this type of learning then they can do it. And that's the whole idea with the military training you know they're they're training almost these exact concepts in the resilience portion of the training so that when they get out into battle for example if they're in the infantry or something like that and they end up killing someone you know well what kind of information did you have at the time? How much of this was in your control? What could you have done differently you know then they have this other way of looking at it that doesn't necessarily blame themselves where they're not necessarily blaming themselves you have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. What has that taught you about resilience well a lot of that ties into the fact that my father had multiple sclerosis um he ended up dying when he was 53 because when he was diagnosed in the 1970s they didn't even have a way of diagnosing it really, let alone treatment so they didn't even have any treatment. So kind of seeing how he dealt with that because he became much sicker much quicker than I have because now we have a multiple sclerosis society that's done all this research. There are a lot of treatments there's a definitive way of diagnosing it. And so the fact that he was able to deal with that in a way that um he was able to pass that on to me in and and me wanting to help other people who have multiple sclerosis also in understanding that this is something I have no control over. You know, I I uh I got this diagnosis. There's nothing I can do about that part of it. Is this something that um affects every area of my life well no not necessarily you know I have specific symptoms and sometimes those get worse and then I have to deal with it at the time. And then also um is it going to be a consistent thing? Is it going to tran translate to other areas of my life or you know it's is it just about having this disease process or is that going to affect something like am I going to all of a sudden start developing something else just because I developed multiple sclerosis, which of course isn't the case. You know, I'm not gonna necessarily have some other disease just because I have that right that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

It it does you you ask yourself those same exact questions and I can see how that would be helpful.

SPEAKER_03 40:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 40:55

Which isn't to say that every single day is a good day but you know you to you learn to focus. It's like you were saying find find something rewarding. So yes right at this moment my rewarding thing is doing that fundraiser and it's extremely rewarding and I'm dedicating it to my father because he really you know there was a lot of his life where he even before he was diagnosed where he uh he and my mother developed those coping skills within us my brothers and me so helped a lot.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

Can you help listeners to understand what the symptoms are of multiple sclerosis some people don't don't know.

SPEAKER_03 41:36

I can help them understand what my symptoms are um a lot of times people don't understand if someone has a any disease that isn't as obvious. It's not externally obvious necessarily if you're if you're using a cane or you're in a wheelchair um it's more obvious. Multiple sclerosis targets the central nervous system so it's your brain and all your nerves all everything that goes down the spinal column. So it depends on where the breakdown happens you know without going into a lot of medical detail it depends on where in this in the central nervous system you're getting these lesions or whatever. Mine happened to be all be in my brain um which is ironic because I'm a I I trained as a psychologist and that was the area that I most needed that not to happen. You know, I could be in a wheelchair and still be a psychologist but I can't have a lot of these problems with things like speaking sometimes I slur my words things like that. Processing speed has been a big problem for me. And I have a lot of swallowing difficulties and fatigue is a really big thing for me. So those are my circumstances a lot of people have different sorts of things that are some are obvious and some aren't as obvious. And it's a lot harder for people to um well let's just give an example I have to park in a handicapped parking spot sometimes. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't it depends on how tired I am because one of the things that happens is that I trip. I fall more than the average person. I trip a lot. So if I go to the grocery store and I'm gonna have to walk around the grocery store a lot I have to get a cart so that I can hold on to the cart. And I have to park in the handicap parking because if I have to walk a big distance I might trip and fall in the parking lot. So somebody might see me parking there and putting my my handicap sticker up and then I walk in and it looks like I'm fine. And they might think, you know, what the heck is she doing? She's taking advantage of her grandmother's uh handicap parking sticker. So some people that have this types of symptoms that I do um run into some sorts of biases like that. People feel a lot more sorry for someone in a wheelchair and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

This podcast episode is dedicated to your fundraiser can you tell listeners about it again? Sure.

SPEAKER_03 43:57

When I started taking dancing lessons one of the instructors had students in wheelchairs so it got me thinking about hosting an event that could demonstrate to people with MS who have physical symptoms that they could dance. That thought led me to the idea of a fundraiser to benefit the MS Society. It's a dinner dance we're having it at the Farmstead Golf and country club which is a beautiful setting in Lafayette New Jersey the basic idea is a dinner dance but we also happen to be very lucky to have stars from ABC's Dancing with the Stars show Val, a lot of people have heard of Val if they know anything about the show. He's one of the founding dancers and he just recently married another one of the professional dancers, Jenna. So the two of them are coming and they're going to be doing a couple of performances and you can buy VIP tickets and um go into another room later on and meet with them and take your get your pictures taken with them if you want. But in any case people will have a dinner dance we're going to have baskets to raffle. It's on July 2nd from six to 10. We have less than a week the deadline for purchasing tickets is June 29th. So people need to sort of get on the ball and reserve their tickets pretty soon and there's that website but it's easy tell listeners what that is. Well the what the website's too hard too hard to remember. So it would be better to email me at MSfunrazer without the D.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

So MSFunrazer2019 at gmail.com and then I will answer their questions and give them a link to the website I think I want to end with sharing what the serenity prayer is to live for listeners.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

That's a very good idea.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

And hopefully I I get this right but I think it is God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I can't change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Exactly thank you for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

Thank you so much for inviting if you enjoyed this episode of Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra show your support by leaving an awesome rating on iTunes if you'd like to share your comments or ideas about this podcast follow us on Facebook under Psychology America. Lastly Dr. Alexandra has written an inspiring children's book entitled There's Always Hope a story about overcoming which is beautifully illustrated by Brianna Giastulo There's Always Hope a story about overcoming teaches children about finding joy and gratitude even when things don't go exactly as planned and can be found at PsychologyAmerica com or Amazon.com