How Can We Build Resilience in Recovery?

This week on Circle of Chairs Conversations, I’m diving deep into a topic that feels more urgent than ever: resilience.

If you’ve been feeling worn down by the pace of life, struggling to bounce back from hard seasons, or simply wanting to strengthen your own mental and emotional foundation, this conversation is for you.

As the American Psychological Association puts it, resilience is “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress.” Or as I like to think of it, building the kind of backbone, grit, and perseverance that helps us move forward with courage, even when life feels uncertain.

In this episode, we explore:

• The science of resilience—how trauma impacts the nervous system and what it really means to “self-regulate”
• Practical, evidence-based ways to strengthen your resilience starting today
• How movement, mindfulness, and community connection can help repair what trauma has disrupted
• Why leaning into your feelings—yes, even the hard ones—can be a powerful act of healing
• The link between caring for your physical health and building emotional fortitude

Caroline Beidler, MSW, is an author, speaker, and Managing Editor of Recovery.com, where she combines expert guidance with research to help people find the best path to healing and treatment. Her book, When You Love Someone in Recovery: A Hopeful Guide for Understanding Addiction, was released Spring 2026 with Nelson Books. Drawing from her own recovery journey through addiction, mental health challenges, and trauma, along with training as a clinical mental health provider and addiction recovery expert, Caroline is passionate about guiding you into seasons of greater healing. Learn more about her books here. 

Subscribe to her Circle of Chairs Substack community at carolinebeidler.substack.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Circle of Chairs Conversations with Caroline Beidler. Real talk on addiction, mental health, healing, and hope for people in or seeking recovery and our loved ones. So pull up a chair. You are not alone.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hi, Caroline Beidler here. I am so grateful to be with you today. I am a recovery advocate. I'm an author. And I'm a woman in addiction and mental health recovery. And for me today, that means that my life looks completely different than it did almost 15 years ago. I really struggled in my own journey through addiction and mental health. And what I didn't know at the time were undiagnosed symptoms of the trauma that I had experienced and the trauma that I'd continue to experience into my 20s related to my substance use and a host of other things. It's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about talking about issues connected to recovery. And when I say recovery, I don't just mean sobriety. There's a big distinction there. When I say recovery, I mean mental wellness. I mean physical health. I mean sometimes for many of us, including myself, a deep personal spiritual journey and a deep personal faith. So today I'm really, really excited to be able to talk to you about something that connects so deeply to this concept of recovery, this broader concept. And that's resilience. So especially if you maybe like me, or maybe you work in the field of behavioral health, maybe you're a therapist, a counselor, maybe you've started a peer recovery organization or sober living home. Wherever you're coming from, whether you have personal and lived experience, or maybe work with folks who do, love someone who does, it's important to learn more about how resilience can help us, not just along a recovery journey, but in our lives. So today I want to talk about four ways that we can help support trauma resilience. Four ways that we can help support trauma resilience. Well, I like to say that we can practice resilience. It's not something that just happens to us, right? Good things in life rarely just happen, although of course they do. The American Psychological Association defines resilience this way. Resilience is a 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. It means a bouncing back from difficult experiences. I love that. A bouncing back. Can you relate to maybe any of those challenges that we just that I just shared here and the need to be able to go through them and bounce back? Another term for resilience, I love this. This is from an article in Science Direct, mental fortitude or strength. It's this ability for us to endure adversity. Fortitude is courage. Fortitude is courage. Other synonyms might include, you know, you have backbone or grit. I love that word, grit, perseverance. All of these paint a picture for us of what it means to be resilient, what it means to bear with our struggles, continue through the pain, and keep doing the next right thing, as we like to say in recovery. Now, if you're like me, you're a reader, okay? I know not everyone's a reader today. Books, you all, books are still amazing. Don't stop reading books or listening to books, whatever you do. Um, there's an author and researcher, you may have heard of her, Brene Brown, and she has been studying the concept of resilience for decades. And she's been asking questions like what defines resilience? What makes some people better at overcoming adversity? Are there universal protective factors that help us promote resilience and healthy coping after tragedy? And you know what? The results have been really interesting and probably not surprising for those of us in addiction and trauma recovery. There are evidence-based ways that we can help build resilience. And as I mentioned, we're going to talk about four of those today. All of these are outlined by research. Some of them are reinforced by our spiritual journeys through scripture. And all of them are included in a lot of different sources that you can research and find. And if you read my books, which I hope you do, you'll find at the back of every book that I write, I have a list of sources where I share information from. I always encourage folks, test what you read, test what you hear for yourself. So I like to ask the question for us, for the recovery community, maybe again, maybe you're a student, maybe you're someone who works in the field or hopes to. I like to ask the question, why aren't we talking about this more? If so many of us, if the percentage is so high for those of us who've experienced trauma, I'd argue 100% of people on planet Earth today have experienced something hard or will. Sorry to, you know, if you're young, there will be trouble. Why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't we talking about ways that we can build up resilience? So, what are some practical tools? All right, are you ready? Well, first, just really quick, trauma does a lot to our nervous system, right? So when we talk about resilience, a lot of what we're doing, a lot of what I've experienced in my own journey of recovery and building resilience is we have to go back to the root. We have to go back to our body because what trauma can do to us, it's really, really destructive to our body, certainly to our mental health and to our spiritual health. So trauma, and I have some articles on my um newsletter, Circle of Chairs. If you're not a subscriber, please go to Circle of Chairs on Substack and just type in trauma under my Circle of Chairs Substack. I have several articles about this where I talk about what trauma does to the nervous system. It makes it go haywire, right? Trauma propels our body into a state that causes it to be unable to self-regulate. We are in overdrive. Things like cortisol in our system, it just flushes our system. And so we're always operating on kind of this fight or flight mode. These symptoms can be present like anxiety, anger, restlessness, panic, hyperactivity, even years later. And I certainly have experienced this. In trauma, our bodies and minds try to protect ourselves. And our brain and our brain and parts of our body actually shut down. This is so interesting, shut down non-essential processes. We get stuck in survival mode. The brainstem orchestrates this survival mode when the sympathetic nervous system increases stress hormones and prepares the body, you guessed it, to run, to flee, to fight, to freeze, to fawn. So, what are we able to do? What are we able to do? I promise you we're going to talk about some of the good stuff, right? So, one of the things we can do to participate in practicing resilience and building resilience, we can get moving. You may be familiar with this kind of uh newer term, somatic therapy, somatic therapy. A lot of folks are talking about this now, which is really interesting. Because trauma impacts our body and adds stress and hormones and chemicals and all this stuff like cortisol. And over time, it can increase this hyper-arousal state. Movement and exercise can be extremely helpful to help release endorphins, to get our body back to equilibrium. And over time, movement and exercise, you all research shows can actually repair, this is so amazing, repair the harm done to our nervous systems. Wow. So what can we do? Well, I don't want to sound like you're like elementary school gym teacher, but it's true. Research shows exercise for 30 minutes or more on most days. 10 minutes force of exercise, you all get up off your couch, your chair, and go for a walk. I have to do this. I work um remotely. I'm a writer, editor, I do all sorts of things. And so I'm on the computer a lot. Sometimes I have to set timers to remind myself get up out of the chair, right? A lot of people use, and I'm looking into this, walking desks. Exercise is great for your mind. It can provide like this mindfulness element of breathing, just returning to your body. I love this old African proverb that says, when you pray, move your feet. It's one of my favorite times to just connect with myself when I move. Another tip to help you build resilience, and that sounds simple, right? Exercise. Wow, who knew? But reconnecting with their bodies. And you wouldn't believe how many women I meet in early recovery who are not physically active, who are in early recovery, who need to build up resilience, who've experienced really, really, really, really hard things, who don't know that regular physical movement can extremely help you progress you along a recovery journey and help you build resilience. So learning how to self-regulate our nervous system is also really important. Like I talked about, our bodies and our minds, right? Get stuck in this overdrive, hyperdrive. So, what is self-regulation? Well, we can learn how to self-regulate our bodies. We can learn how to self-regulate our bodies. And self-regulate to me, it sounds kind of like science-y, maybe clinical, maybe you are a clinical person. Totally cool. I love that. I was trained also as a clinical mental health provider, um, could go on to do therapy and I've I've chosen to do some other things, but I love that I have that background. So, clinical folks, love you all. But another way to think about it that I like to think about it is loving self-control. Loving self-control. When we can take a step back, when we can take deep breaths, when we can try mindful breathing, for example, when we can ground ourselves in what's around us, that's another great tool for self-regulation. We're able to heal and build resilience. So in my book, You Are Not Your Trauma, uh, builds um a brute unhealthy patterns, heal the family tree. I I'm I'm in the process of reading of writing my next book. So I apparently cannot remember my second book's title. Okay. Um, human moment there. But in the back of my book, You Are Not Your Trauma, I include some of these resilience practices. So I encourage you to take a look at that. One of my favorite breathing exercises actually is a breathing pattern of 477. You all, this seriously, I feel like changed my life when I was having severe anxiety and a lot of trauma symptoms kind of coming back to my body during um 2020, uh, when the world seemed like it was falling in on itself. And I really found this breathing exercise to help bring my cortisol levels down because I was feeling so out of control, right? We didn't know what was going on or what was happening. But this was able to help me bring myself back and be able to regulate some of those trauma symptoms coming up. So let's do that now, shall we? Breathing pattern 477. You want to try it with me? All right. And if you're like, oh, this sounds like so, I don't know, woo, or something like that. It's really not, you all. These things are based in research, based in science. There's evidence that shows we have the tools. And maybe if it's your faith journey, you believe God has given us the tools, maybe you're not along those lines. And that's totally fine too. A clinical background, there is research that shows this mindful breathing can help us. So a breathing pattern of four, seven, seven. All right, I'm gonna do it with you. We're gonna breathe in for four. We're gonna hold that breathing pattern for seven counts, and then we're gonna breathe out for seven. All right, are we ready? So we're gonna breathe in.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Two, three, four, hold it. Two, three, four, five, six, eight, seven, and out. Two, three, four, five, six, seven. Breathe in. Two, three, four. Hold it. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, and out. Two, three, four, five, six, seven.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Be sure when you're breathing out, just release slowly. Now try that for like 10 rounds and see what happens to your body. Just try. Uh, the other thing, grounding is another really helpful practice that a lot of folks in trauma recovery um are super aware of. So um just quick little practice exercise here. If you put your feet on the ground, all right. So say you're having maybe some flashbacks, you're feeling some anxiety, um, you're really having a hard time relaxing. Maybe you're triggered and you don't know. It could be a sound, a smell. You don't know why you're triggered, but you're just feeling um this kind of hyper-arusal state. Try sitting in a chair. Got my nice farm chair, uh, farmhouse chairs I found secondhand, love thrifting. Take some deep breaths. When you ground, you want to notice what's around you. So you might notice how your feet feel in your shoes. Maybe you have sandals on and you can wiggle your toes. Maybe you can feel what your seat feels like in your chair. Or maybe you don't feel comfortable closing your eyes and you want to notice what's around you. Maybe I'm noticing you can't see, but some beautiful art that my husband's aunt gave us. She was getting rid of. We're like, I love that. That's beautiful. She brought it over. Or maybe you're noticing the wind um going through the trees outside. These exercises can help us down regulate, kind of de-escalate our nervous systems and over time build resilience. Now, again, these are all tools, you all, that we can have in our toolbox. Okay. The next tip, we're gonna move away a little bit from the more somatic, like body-centered stuff, connecting in community. So following a trauma, and I've experienced this, we may want to withdraw from others. And I did this for years. And a huge part of the way that I did this withdrawal was through my substance use. But isolation, as we know, can be extremely harmful. Again, I've experienced this firsthand, and I know so many other folks who have. Allowing others into our experience, into our lives can be scary, especially if we've been harmed by other people. But it's such an important piece of building resilience. Social support, y'all, is one of the key things that helps us, key protective factors that help us along our recovery journeys. It's okay to ask for help. So bring folks together. Connect with someone in your community. Maybe go to a recovery meeting. If you're working with someone else, find ways that they can connect socially. And at first, you know what? It might be a virtual group. It might be something that feels a little bit more safe. And then over time, they're able to connect more authentically in community. Maybe it's a church, maybe it's a community center, recovery community center. Maybe going that next step into recovery housing. That's a huge, huge, really helpful way for many folks to connect in community and be able to learn how to have relationships with others. Um, and that community, that social support is so, so helpful, as we know for building resilience. And number four, you all, number four, taking care of our physical health. So bringing it back a little bit again to body, but along with that exercise, and again, at the risk of sounding like your gym teacher, taking care of our physical health, eating right, sleeping right. Uh for many of us, avoiding drugs and alcohol, that balanced diet, all these things that can help reduce stress. Now, one of my favorite things, I have this sleep routine. Okay. For years I struggled with sleep, nightmares. It was just, it was really hard for me. Um, but I found a routine that works for me. You know, no screens, at least an hour before bed. I always read before bed. I have, you know, certain things. I have like an eye mask. I do different things before bed. It's like this little ritual, this routine for me. I say some prayers, but having routines around sleep hygiene can be super helpful. Yeah. And again, you know, for some of us, avoiding drugs and alcohol can be a huge part of our physical health. So there are some things that we can do to help practice resilience. And again, I want to just keep emphasizing it is so important if you're working with folks or maybe you're a student and you want to help folks in the future who are in or seeking addiction and mental health recovery, being aware of how we can build resilience into our lives is key for a long-term sustained recovery and enhanced quality of life. If we want to have a good life, if we want to be able to show up for our people, if we want to participate in our community, maybe make it better, we need to show up for ourselves. And there's ways that we can do that, practical ways that we can do that. I just want to close with this. You know, acceptance can be a really hard part of the trauma recovery and resilience journey. A big part of my own healing every day, especially early on in recovery, has been allowing myself to feel things. Allowing myself to feel things. Now, the tools we just talked about have helped me be able to do that. Feel angry, sad, insecure, and name those feelings. Name those feelings. Now, when I was in active addiction, you know, no feeling allowed, right? Feeling wasn't something I did. I wanted to run from feeling. But the more that we show up, the more that we had practice acceptance through community, through working with others, through some of these uh resilience practices, the more that we can show up for ourselves and really just start being present in our own lives. And that may include feeling our feelings. And there's some other times when our feelings may be really big, maybe a lot of anxiety, maybe a lot of depression. Maybe it's hard to get out of bed. Maybe you've had thoughts or know someone who's had thoughts of harming themselves or someone else. There are indicators that you may need or someone you know may need more professional help or support. And I want to encourage you to be able to do that. I want to encourage you to be able to do that. One of my most favorite resources that I'm uh sharing with folks now is recovery.com. You all, recovery.com has a uh is a place online where you can search through like 20,000 mental health and addiction treatment providers, really across the world, a lot of them based in the US and Canada. You can search by things like whether or not you have insurance, where you want to go, specific treatment types. So maybe you're looking for something that's women specific, maybe you're looking for something that maybe is related to like alcohol use or cannabis use or ADHD, anxiety, like whatever your thing is, you can search by those topics. And it's really simple to do that. So recovery.com tries to take the guesswork and does take the guesswork out of finding support for you or a loved one that you need. So I always encourage folks, seek that extra professional support if you need it. If you need it. Resilience. I hope you'll take away from today's conversation that resilience is so important. We need resilience in our lives. We need resilience in our lives. So I would like to challenge you all. Try one of these practices and let me know how it goes. Let me know what you think. And if you're not already subscribed to Circle of Chairs on Stubstack, will you do that? I would love to stay connected with you there. So thank you so much, you all, and take care of it.