Resilience in Times of Change
- an inspiring reflection on a mother finding peace during crisis, by Wende Jowsey
This year it has been my privilege, my joy and at times my biggest challenge to work as a mentor for parents whose teens are in crisis. I have seen the bonds in families seem to dissolve, stretch, and sometimes shatter before they can come back together as a whole.
Getting through this messy and incredibly necessary process requires this thing called ‘resilience’ that we keep hearing about. Oxford Languages dictionary defines it this way:
"the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity”
While it’s true that we survive by adapting to change, there’s also a subtle, almost secret element that can seem counter intuitive until it’s understood. It turns out that we are vastly more resilient when we surrender our attachment to outcomes, no matter what the challenge. Far from being a passive act of giving up or walking away, conscious surrender frees us to experience a more graceful unfolding of a situation than mounting a forced effort to change something. Especially when that something is another person.
A mother I once worked with had tried every motivator in the lexicon of parenting skills but her daughter’s attitude towards her remained firmly verbally abusive and hostile. The mother wrestled with her own confusion, rage, and constant pain of rejection for years. Then one day as we spoke she seemed different; lighter.
“What’s changed?” I asked her. She replied that in the middle of washing dishes she suddenly knew that while she had in theory accepted that their relationship might never be what she longed for, she was still waiting for her daughter to change so that there could finally be peace in her heart as a mother.
It dawned on her, viscerally; this waiting was never going to end.
Startled to find herself on the precipice of what she could see might lead to a hopeless state of depression, she suddenly tapped into a third option: she let go and found the peace inside herself. She cut a kind of umbilical cord that had tied her to the same thoughts, emotions and reactions in an endless loop of struggle. “My daughter is who she is,” she told me. “Me feeling victimised by the way she treats me was driving me crazy. I could see that my choice to love her meant that I needed to see her behaviour as a reflection of where she’s at right now, not as something that defines my worth as a person or whether I see myself as a success or failure as her mum.”
This was a turning point. The external situation remained more or less the same, but her experience of the relationship and of herself, shifted. She was able to call back her power to smile, laugh, and be herself around her daughter from a place of love.
She redirected energy that had previously been tied up in emotional knots towards practicing daily mindfulness meditation, breath work and taking more time for her own needs. She let the past go and gave up nursing old wounds and disappointments. Not surprisingly her daughter began to see her mother differently and one day confided that she knew she needed help but had been too scared of her mother’s rejection to ask for it.
So this, it turns out, is how we bounce forward, not back. It’s an inside job. We entrust the struggle and the fears to something greater than ourselves. We bring compassion, presence, and stillness to the forefront of our consciousness as a way of being with, rather than against, what is.
We surrender and come out the other side of the looking glass.
We come home.
