Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
"Your relationship with yourself determines every other relationship in your life."
When we create a healthy relationship with ourselves, everything in our lives begins to transform.
Join us each week as we discuss topics such as overcoming shame, letting go of limiting beliefs, dealing with imposter syndrome, finding healthy motivators for achievement, transforming trauma, and learning how to practice self-love and self-acceptance.
The Permission to Love Podcast is dedicated to helping people have healthier relationships with themselves and find the permission to fully love and accept themselves.
About Jerry,
“When I realized I was the source of my own suffering, I realized I could also be the source of my own healing.”
Jerry is a Master Certified Transformational Mindset Coach, author, speaker, and host of The Permission to Love Podcast.
He works with high-achievers to help them create a happier, healthier, and more sustainable life grounded in self-acceptance and self-compassion.
Jerry has helped thousands of people have a healthier relationship with themselves and uncover the limiting beliefs keeping them from the life they so deeply desire and deserve.
He uses a combination of transformational mindset coaching, positive psychology, trauma-informed approaches, IFS, and NLP to remove limiting beliefs and connect with their authentic selves.
Jerry has an undergraduate degree in Political Science, an MBA in global business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and is currently completing his Master's degree in Psychology at Harvard University.
Before becoming a Transformational Coach, Jerry spent most of his career in Philanthropy, raising over $1 billion USD for not-for-profits. He is a survivor of childhood trauma and now helps individuals learn how to create the lives they want from a place of healthy motivators and remaining mentally, emotionally, physically, relationally, and spiritually healthy.
New episodes of The Permission to Love Podcast come out every Monday.
To learn more about Jerry, find additional resources, or submit a topic or question, check out: www.jerryhenderson.org
You can also connect with Jerry on Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
Trauma and Resilience | Resilient by Design
In this episode, we begin an exciting new series titled Resilient by Design. Together, we explore what resilience truly means, how trauma impacts our capacity to be resilient, and practical ways to cultivate resilience in our lives.
Drawing on research, neuropsychology, and personal insights, we discuss how resilience isn’t about being unshakable but about adapting to life's challenges.
Learn how survival resilience differs from thriving resilience, why self-compassion is crucial in building resilience, and how trauma affects our brains and behaviors.
Whether you’ve experienced adversity or simply want to strengthen your ability to adapt and thrive, this episode provides a compassionate and informative guide to help you start building resilience today.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to the Series
03:09 The Cycle of Goals and Shame
04:20 Trauma and Resilience: The Connection
06:29 What is Resilience?
10:03 The Role of Relationships in Resilience
12:28 Addressing Comparison and Self-Judgment
15:01 Survival vs. Thriving Resilience
18:09 Trauma’s Impact on the Brain
22:09 The Path Forward: Building Resilience
25:39 Looking Ahead
Key Takeaways:
- Resilience is not innate; it is a skill we can develop through intentional practices.
- Trauma survivors often excel at survival resilience but may need tools to transition to thriving resilience.
- Self-compassion is vital for building resilience and overcoming self-judgment.
- Connection with others is a cornerstone of resilience.
- The brain’s neuroplasticity allows us to rewire and strengthen resilience through consistent effort and support.
Practical Tools:
- Mindfulness Practices: Learn to calm the fight-or-flight response.
- Supportive Relationships: Build a community to foster connection and growth.
- Self-Compassion: Shift from shame-based self-talk to curious and hopeful language.
For personalized support in building resilience, visit JerryHenderson.org to learn more about Jerry’s coaching program.
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
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These two types of resilience right, the resilience to survive and then the resilience to thrive are different, but they're also interconnected. They're both forms of resilience, but they have different outcomes and they're coming from a place of a different core energy that's around them. And so, yes, while we're so grateful for the resilience that helped us survive, what we want to learn to do is take that resilience that we've developed, build on it and begin to turn it towards the resilience to thrive. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I am your host, jerry Henderson, and, as always, I am so grateful that you've taken time out of your schedule to invest in yourself by listening to this episode, and I do want to say that I hope you enjoyed the recent series that we did on the best of the Permission to Love podcast. It was really such an incredible journey for me to revisit some of those episodes, and I'm really grateful for all of you who reached out, gave your feedback about how much you were enjoying that series, and so thank you, thank you for being here and thank you for being a part of the community of the Permission to Love podcast. Now I do have to say that it's really good to be back behind this microphone, because today we're kicking off a brand new series about resilience, and I'm titling it Resilient by Design, because the truth is, our resilience is something that we can design in our life. It's not something that passively happens. We have to be intentional about it. So I hope this series can help you in developing resilience. I also think that there's really no better time for us to be having this conversation than right now.
Jerry Henderson:As I said, we're getting ready to kick off a new year, and January is often a time when many of us look ahead, set our goals, make resolutions. But here's a startling truth Research shows that nearly 80% of New Year's resolutions are abandoned by February. Man, that really shocked me when I read that statistic. But I do have to say that I'm very familiar with that process of setting some goals, abandoning them and getting into a shame cycle about them. I used to go through this process of setting these really big goals and setting a lot of goals at one time to make a lot of big changes, and I didn't realize that actually what I was doing was setting myself up for failure. And while I was excited about those changes and reaching those goals. What I didn't realize was that I was pushing myself beyond what was realistic and setting myself up for sabotaging myself as a part of doing that and finding myself continually repeating that pattern. I really dug into what was that pattern all about and how could I develop some resilience, some discipline, really get goals that were meaningful, that were able to be accomplished and that weren't so far out there that they were realistic and my system almost dismissed them because they were so unrealistic, which then led to trying to accomplish them, then abandoning them and then going through that whole cycle that I just described earlier.
Jerry Henderson:So I hope what I share with you in this series can really be helpful for you, and I do want to make a note that this will be especially useful for those of us who have a trauma background. If you've experienced trauma in your life, as a child, or a toxic relationship or the loss of somebody or whatever that traumatic experience was, it can have a big impact on our resilience, and we're going to talk specifically about that the impact of trauma on our ability to be resilient, and how can we begin to develop resilience in our life, how can we begin to overcome that? Because here's the truth You're not trapped in that. I know it may feel like it. I know there might be a lot of confusion about why do I keep trying to move forward and I keep facing these setbacks and I don't have the type of resilience to face some of the hardships or the challenges that are being presented in my life. Well, I'm hoping to help, through this series, to help explain that, to help you form some compassion for yourself which, by the way, is a really important part of developing resilience and then help journey with you to a place where you're becoming more and more resilient in your journey.
Jerry Henderson:I do want to take a moment and note that I did recently do a standalone episode on resilience. It was a part of the happiness series that we did, but I had a lot of requests from people to go deeper into the topic of resilience. Right, it's a big topic today. You hear a lot about it, there's books on it, all kinds of information out there, but one of the things that I think can be missing, and I think that people are really wanting to hear about, is how trauma impacted their ability to be resilient, also understanding what are some of the roadblocks to being able to be resilient, because it's one thing to hear about resilience, that we need to be resilient, that it's a great thing. It helps us accomplish our goals. It's another thing to begin to understand. Why am I struggling so much with resilience? Why can't I be resilient like the other people that you might be comparing yourself to? Because that whole conversation that we have with ourselves can be very disheartening, very frustrating, and that conversation in itself can begin to sabotage the development of resilience in our life. So this series is a response to many of you wanting me to dig in deeper around the topic of resilience in our life. So this series is a response to many of you wanting me to dig in deeper around the topic of resilience.
Jerry Henderson:Now, before we continue, I do just want to take a brief moment to ask you for a favor. Did you know that nearly half of podcast listeners enjoy episodes without ever hitting the follow button? And so I want to invite you to take a moment to do that today, because subscribing to this podcast is going to ensure that you never miss an episode. You're going to get those reminders, and it also helps us grow and reach more people who could benefit from these conversations, and hitting that follow button is also a very simple way to show your support, and it truly means the world to me. So, if you're finding value in this podcast, take a second right now. Hit that follow button on whatever platform that you're using, because your action not only helps this podcast thrive, but it also allows me to keep creating the content that supports you and others on this journey. So thank you for being a part of this community and thank you for your support. I'm truly grateful for it.
Jerry Henderson:So let's go ahead and dive into the topic of resilience as a part of this first episode in this series of Resilience by Design. Now let me ask you a few questions. What comes to mind when you think of that word resilience? Well, many people think it means being tough, never showing weakness or always bouncing back quickly. But resilience isn't about being unshakable. It's about being adaptable.
Jerry Henderson:Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress, such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. Now let me be clear on something being resilient doesn't mean that a person won't experience difficulty or distress. In fact, it's quite the opposite of that. Usually, the road to resilience is often paved with a lot of challenges or considerable emotional distress, and part of that is what develops resilience, but it can also work in the opposite. It can actually diminish our resilience if we don't have the skills to learn how to deal with what life is throwing at us.
Jerry Henderson:And now here is some really great news. Resilience is a skill that we can all develop, and it's shaped both by nature and nurture. Now, the nature part might sound like a bummer, and research does show that some aspects of resilience are genetic, like our temperament, but, on the other hand, here's the really good news Most of it comes from our environment and intentional practices, and our environment and our practices are in our control right to a large extent, and so those are the things that we want to focus in on how do we develop a more healthy environment, and environment includes a lot of things that we're going to talk about throughout this series and those intentional practices we're also going to get into, and so I just want to encourage you that it is something that you can learn, you can develop, and you're not stuck at whatever level of resilience that you currently have right now. Now, many of you know that I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to research, and I recently completed a course on neuropsychology and I'm just fascinated about how the brain works. And neuroscience gives us some really cool insight into how resilience works. And we're learning more all the time about how the brain is constantly rewiring itself in response to the experiences that we have, and the term for this, as many of you know, is neuroplasticity, which means that even if you're faced with significant challenges, your brain has the capacity to adapt and grow stronger, and we can help it in that process with the right practices. And we also know that stressful experiences will activate the amygdala, our limbic system, which is the part of our brain responsible for our fight or flight response. But with the right tools, we can train our brains to respond more calmly, more thoughtfully and with a greater level of resilience to the stressful experiences that we're having in life. So a lot of what resilience is about is being able to handle the stress that shows up in our life, to be able to cope in healthy ways with the experiences that we're having, to be able to recover from or adapt to any adversity that we're facing.
Jerry Henderson:Now, before we move on, I just want to debunk a huge misconception about resilience. Resilience is not about going it alone. It's not about being tough and not having to ask for help. No, resilience is actually deeply tied to connection, and when we're not connected, our resilience levels go down. So, whether it's a trusted friend, a coach or a community, having people to lean on can make all the difference in the world in developing resilience. So don't think that when we talk about resilience, it means that you're isolated. You got to figure it out. You just got to be tough enough to get through it.
Jerry Henderson:No, all the research says that if you want to develop resilience, being in relationship, in life-giving relationships, is a big part of it, right? So having people help us get through challenges doesn't mean that we're not resilient, because, remember, resilience isn't about just gutting it through, it's about being adaptable, it's about figuring things out, and a big part of resilience is using the resources that we have in our life to be able to handle adverse situations that show up in our life. And so a resilient person will absolutely leverage the relationships that they have in their life and see those relationships as a lifeline, as support to help them continue to get through whatever it is that they're facing. All right.
Jerry Henderson:So now let's start getting into the impact that trauma has on our ability to be resilient, and let me start by asking you this question have you ever judged yourself for not being as resilient as you'd like to be or as you think that you should be and remember, I'm not a big fan of the word should there's a lot of bullshits that we put in our life. Right, I should be like this, I shouldn't be like that and should often has a lot of shame associated with it, and so if you're having a sense that I'm not as resilient as I should be and I should be more resilient, I want to encourage you and I want to invite you to get curious around that language that you're using and see if you can begin to move away from that shame-based language into more hopeful possibility language like I could be more resilient. What would it look like if I did develop resilience? Okay, I just wanted to make a quick point on that, that we don't want to come at this from a shame-based approach.
Jerry Henderson:Now, another thing that you might experience, or have experienced, is that you've wondered why it feels so much harder for you to be resilient than for other people that you see in your life, you might feel like, well, why can't I do it the way that they do it? That person always seems to be bouncing back or they seem to be really resilient and like what's wrong with me that I can't do that. And, once again, getting into the comparison game never serves us, because we don't know their story and we don't know what's going on with them, and we also wind up robbing ourselves from the compassion that we need to give ourselves in order to become more resilient. And that's one of the big things that comparison will do right it will get us out of being able to see our own unique story, extend compassion to ourselves so that we can begin to truly heal and make the changes that we want to make. As a part of this episode, I want to help reduce some of those feelings of shame and maybe some of the confusion that you've been experiencing right around why you're not as resilient as you think that you should be, or why you're not as resilient as you see other people quote unquote being and most importantly, as always, is I want to help you have a greater level of compassion for yourself in your resilience journey, because self-judgment is a significant barrier to resilience, but research shows that self-compassion is one of the keys to building it.
Jerry Henderson:As we continue on our journey of talking about how trauma impacts our ability to be resilient, I want to revisit really quick the concept of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and these include things like abuse, neglect or growing up in a household with instability. I also want to take a moment and remind you that trauma isn't just what happens to us, right, it's about what happens within us, inside of us. We make certain decisions. We make meaning of the event. We then certain decisions. We make meaning of the event. We then make decisions. Those decisions then become core beliefs. Those core beliefs then drive new behaviors that create new experiences. Okay, and here's the thing that the research is really clear on when we have these adverse childhood experiences and the emotional and psychological and physical impact that those experiences have on us, one of the effects is often a reduced capacity for resilience. Now, when I say a reduced capacity for resilience, I want to just clarify something really quick.
Jerry Henderson:Trauma survivors are some of the most resilient people I know, and with that, it is a specific kind of resilience. It is the resilience to survive, and this type of resilience has served you well, it's helped you. It's helped you endure hardship and keep going despite incredible challenges right, incredible challenges, right. However, it is not always the same type of resilience that's needed to build the life you want or to make the meaningful changes that you want. These two types of resilience right, the resilience to survive and then the resilience to thrive are different, but they're also interconnected. They're both forms of resilience, but they have different outcomes and they're coming from a place of a different core energy that's around them.
Jerry Henderson:And so, yes, while we're so grateful for the resilience that helped us survive, what we want to learn to do is take that resilience that we've developed, build on it and begin to turn it towards the resilience to thrive, to face daily life, to face the challenges that maybe feel so hard to overcome. And let me just encourage you with something you have a lot of resilience, you've shown it, it's in there. The only thing that we've got to do is just begin to guide it in a little bit different direction, with some different energy. And you'll begin to guide it in a little bit different direction, with some different energy, and you'll begin to take that resilience and turn it into something that will allow you to overcome those challenges that you're facing right now in your life and begin to produce the momentum to help you bring about the changes that you want to see in your life. So now let's just dig a little bit deeper into this topic about trauma and what it does do to us.
Jerry Henderson:When we grow up in a chaotic environment, when we've grown up in that environment, our brains learn to adapt to unpredictability and stress. Okay, and this is that survival resilience, and it is remarkable. But it can also leave you feeling stuck when it comes to thriving. The constant activation of your fight or flight system can make it harder to take calculated risks or trust in long-term stability, and so we're always in that red alert mode, which is hard to sustain, which has an impact on long-term stability, and research also shows that trauma can significantly alter the brain's structure and function. The amygdala, as we've talked about, is often overactive in trauma survivors and keeps the brain in a heightened state of alertness. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for our decision-making and impulse control, can become less effective, making it harder to regulate emotions or respond thoughtfully. If that wasn't enough, the hippocampus, which plays a role in memory, may also shrink, leading to difficulties in distinguishing past threats from present safety. Our system just doesn't feel safe because of the past threats that we've experienced or that we've lived through.
Jerry Henderson:And so, holistically, trauma is impacting the body, our mind, our relationships and physically, as I've shared before, it increases stress hormones like cortisol, leading to chronic health issues. Emotionally, it can create patterns of fear or hypervigilance. Cognitively, it may limit our ability to focus or plan for the future. Socially, trauma often makes it harder to trust or form meaningful relationships and connections, and trauma also disrupts key skills for resilience, such as emotional regulation, problem solving and adaptability. For example, the heightened stress response caused by trauma can lead to overacting to the smallest challenges or feeling overwhelmed by change in our life, and all of this can create a cycle where individuals doubt their ability to face adversity and it further weakens their resilience. And so I hope you can see that all of this together, right, that impact that trauma has had has stripped away a lot of the things that is needed for a person to have resilience, to develop resilience and to maintain resilience, and so I hope this is helping you understand that your struggle with resilience isn't your fault.
Jerry Henderson:You know, we recently did a series on the healthy high achiever and I was thinking about talking about resilience as a part of that series, but I wanted to save it for this series specifically about resilience, and here's the really interesting thing that's happening right. So for many high achievers, their motivation or the birth for lack of better words of a high achiever can take place as a result of childhood trauma or those ACEs that we talked about in that series. That can then lead to socially prescribed perfectionism or this desire to want to live up to the expectations of other people, and so they're driving themselves and they're pushing themselves to achieve, and they're doing a great job at that and they're achieving and they're getting into positions and places that takes a lot of work to get to and stay in. But here's the real challenge that many high achievers face who've experienced childhood trauma. The very thing that burst their need for achievement also has this other side to it that's had a big impact on their ability to be resilient. So it's kind of this double-edged sword has had a big impact on their ability to be resilient. So it's kind of this double-edged sword.
Jerry Henderson:On the one hand, you've got this motivation that trauma gave many high achievers for them to achieve, for them to prove themselves and to take away that message or that feeling that there's something wrong with them, but the very thing that they need in order to stay as a high achiever or stay as a high performer, that resilience that's so needed to continue, that has been weakened in them and can lead to burnout, and so they're not able to sustain that, and so that whole cycle leads to even more shame for the high achiever. Right? They're thinking well, why can't I sustain that level of achievement, like I see other people doing, and what's wrong with me? I mean, I have this need to achieve, but I'm finding myself getting burned out, or I'm finding myself not able to sustain that same level of achievement. Well, let me just help you with something here.
Jerry Henderson:It's often because of the experiences that you had in early childhood that stripped away some of those core things that's needed for resilience, and so it's not gonna be just about trying to gut through or push through or trying to just really force yourself to do more. No, it's gonna be about learning how to develop resilience. The trauma survivor needs to learn how to develop resilience through some really practical ways of being able to do that. So if you find yourself in that cycle, this is a really important point for you to understand. It's not that you're just not good enough or there's something wrong with you. You had experiences in childhood that might have had an impact on your ability to be resilient Okay, just a natural ability to be resilient.
Jerry Henderson:But here's the great news, the really good news is that once you become aware of that, you stop shaming yourself for it, stop beating yourself up about it. Then you can get into that work of beginning to build resilience, beginning to develop it, because, once again, resilience isn't fixed. Even though you might've had experiences that hindered the development of it, you can still develop it, and it starts with the knowledge that that's what you're actually dealing with. Okay, that it's not that there's something wrong with you. It's not that you're not a high achiever or that you can't excel in those areas. You're just going to have to do some work on building your capacity for resilience. Great news is, once again, you can, because it's like a muscle the more you learn about it, the more you use it, the more it grows, the stronger you get at it, and the research supports this, showing that with tools like mindfulness, supportive relationships, intentional practices, we can rewire our brains and rebuild our capacity for resilience and to thrive.
Jerry Henderson:So I just want to encourage you. If you're a person who struggles with resilience and you really want to develop it and you've been beating yourself up about why you haven't been able to be resilient and why you haven't been able to bounce back and follow through and do the things that you quote unquote know you should do, I want to encourage you. You're not alone. I've been there, and just because I've been there doesn't mean that I know your story. It's just a data point, it's information for you to know that somebody who had some pretty significant childhood trauma, who then developed shame, who then tried to prove himself, and who didn't have the necessary resilience and didn't know that that's what I needed to work on was developing resilience learn how to love myself, learn how to have compassion for myself, become curious, go on a journey, develop these relationships that could help support me.
Jerry Henderson:I always felt like I had to do it on my own. I always felt like there was something uniquely wrong with me. I just didn't know even what resilience was. I didn't know the impact that childhood trauma had had on me and diminishing my ability to be resilient. And once I learned that, I began to dig in, I began to develop resilience. I began to find ways to support myself and invite others in on that journey to help support me. So I just want to encourage you. You're not alone in it. You're not the only person who can't figure out how to have resilience okay, and I'm really excited to go on this journey with you about how you can develop resilience in your life and build the life that you want to live, get out of just being in survival mode, getting into thriving mode, and create the life that you're worthy of.
Jerry Henderson:Now for today's episode as a part of this series, that's pretty much what I wanted to cover is what is resilience and what impact does trauma have on our ability to be resilient? It'll kind of help set a framework. It'll also help set you up for some self-compassion towards yourself, because I think setting that foundation is important to kind of help open you up right, because if you're a person who struggled with resilience, you might say to yourself well, I've tried everything and I don't know how to do it and what's wrong with me that I can't be more resilient. So I'm hoping today's episode gave you some insight to maybe why you do struggle with it and to allow yourself to have some compassion and to move towards developing resilience with a whole different energy. Now, if you need help on your journey of developing resilience, I want to encourage you to check out my coaching program. You can find that at jerryhendersonorg or simply see the show notes in this episode.
Jerry Henderson:Now, if you've enjoyed today's episode, I want to encourage you share it with somebody who you think could benefit from it, because if it's helping you, I'm sure it'll help them as well, and you never know the impact that it can make in their life. I just want to give you a glimpse into some of the next episodes around this resilience series. We're going to continue to dive into things about cultivating supportive relationships, overcoming self-doubt and tapping into the strengths that you have that you may not even realize. How does discipline and resilience work together? Those and other topics are coming up in our future episodes around this topic. I can't wait to share with you in this transformative journey in developing resilience. And now, finally, I want to remind you, as I always do, that you are worthy of your own love.
