Reviews Elsewhere – Stronger: Develop the Resilience You Need to Succeed.

Saw this review over at Pysch Central and while the book itself doesn’t speak to child abuse or mental health, the idea of developing resilience is something that resonated with me as an abuse survivor.

Because, in the end, isn’t healing from abuse, and the struggle that goes along with that just a form of resilience? Wasn’t surviving childhood in the first place a form of resilience?

And, mostly, doesn’t every survivor who is struggling to heal need to know this:

To illustrate how failure builds resilience, the authors discuss the analogy of strength training. We tend to assign the power of getting stronger to the weights that a person lifts. But the dumbbells or barbells actually damage your muscles. “The stress of lifting creates tears in microscopic muscle fibers,” the authors explain. “The body then uses internal nutrients, especially protein and anabolic hormones, to repair this damage … It’s not the weight, per se, that causes the muscles to grow, but the internal physiological attributes and nutritional resources interacting with the catalyst of weight lifting.”

In that sense, you actually leave the gym a weaker person, but you wake up stronger.

Let’s think of our struggles not as a sign of weakness, but a sign that we are growing and becoming stronger through them, and then keep going!