S3: EP5- How to Cultivate Emotional Resilience with Liz Stanley

Join Mary and her very special guest, Elizabeth A. Stanley, PhD. Liz is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She speaks, teaches, and writes widely on a variety of topics related to resilience, political psychology, civil-military relations, and international security. She is the award-winning author of Paths to Peace and Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive during Stress and Recover from Trauma. She is the creator of Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®, taught to thousands in civilian and military high-stress environments. MMFT® research has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, NPR, and in Time magazine and many other media outlets. A U.S. Army veteran with service in Asia and Europe, she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. She’s also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy.

When we experience stress repeatedly over time it can affect our window of tolerance. Most of our windows are narrowed and we might find ourselves coping and not recovering from the stress in our lives. This can become a vicious cycle of self sabotage and giving into addictions and going skills without dealing with whatever is going on in our bodies. 

When we are inside our window of tolerance we can process things in a healthy way. When we start to move outside of that window of tolerance, that’s when our fight, flight, or freeze response kicks in. The survival brain is responsible for driving our emotions and helps us connect to others. As we move outside the window we lose our ability to to function and connect in a healthy way and we are being motivated by stress and emotions. These things may soothe us in the short term but don’t actually give us recovery. 

Most of us are deeply disconnected from our emotions. Most of us are afraid to face our emotions because we think we will get stuck, so we have trained ourselves to go numb. Emotions won’t go on forever. They are waves and we need to trust that we can have the capacity to face our emotions without getting stuck. We can bring emotion into awareness and let it wash through. We can build up the capacity to tolerate sensations in the body without shutting down and feeding the emotion with old story lines and beliefs. We can create ways to allow our survival brain feel safe and that’s when we can start the process of recovery.