What Face-Planting Can Teach You About Resilience

In my early days after graduating from recreational classes to pre-team, I started going to a more serious gym (though you wouldn't know by the name, our team was called Tumble Bees). I clearly remember standing on the high beam (it felt impossibly high at 4 ft tall - about as tall as I was at the time, even with an 18-in squishy mat underneath) on my wobbly little legs. My coach, Elena, was walking around, nudging gymnasts on their legs. When she nudged mine, I fell off. "Get back up, come on!" she said. She nudged me again. I tried to stay on, but fell again. I was aghast. Why would she do that, it's so mean!

I told my mom the story, who asked Elena what happened. Elena explained "they all need to learn to fall before learning anything else. Once they are confident they will be ok even when they fall off the beam, they will be ready for more challenging skills".

What a life lesson. You need to be confident you can get back up in order to be ready to take the leap. That's resilience - having the skills to fall, get back up, try again and make course-corrections. I refer to it as the skill of resilience, to differentiate it from an inborn trait - it can be learned. With CPTSD (complex PTSD), some days I feel like I'm back on that beam again with my coach knocking me down over and over. Or like I'm standing in the ocean, the waves coming one after another. I absolutely need to practice resilience to keep getting up. There will forces testing my balance - but I can also learn to stand stronger so that I only waver or stumble rather than falling entirely, get up faster when I do get knocked down, and learn to read the water to navigate to a place with less waves. Sometimes I get frustrated and feel like my area of the shore has a lot rougher surf than where many other people are standing - not from an external circumstance point of view, but the internal experience. I have to consciously shut off the feeling of "it's not fair!" and just focus on my experience - acknowledge what's hard, point out the good, cut myself a break when I need one, and just work towards making my life better - minus the comparison.

I spent the better part of my childhood and teen years literally faltering with anywhere from a small wobble to epic faceplants, and my entire life doing so figuratively. Learning how to fall as a gymnast meant learning to trust your spatial awareness, strength, and agility - the greater the trust, the bigger things you dared to try. You only built that trust by taking reasonable risks and practicing. Learning to fall as a human being in this scary-ass world also requires that you build a sense of trust in yourself.

Through practicing resilience, you gain confidence that you will land on your feet.