What it takes to thrive in (almost) any social context

Charting the path to relational resilience — it’s all about flexibility

When I saw this photo, I was captivated by how this one person subtly stands out from the crowd of phone users. Are they thriving in this social context, though? Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels

I dedicate this one to Rachel and Damian — two people who beautifully model resilience on many levels, as a couple and as individuals.

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The other day, I finally verbalized my relationship aspiration.

What I’m trying to do through all those community projects, communication workshops, and Authentic Relating is… build relational resilience.

What I mean by that is that I want to be able to interact with different people — my parents, co-workers, strangers on the street, “difficult people,” folks from backgrounds wildly different from mine — in a way that enriches both mine and their experience.

I want to be able to comfortably speak to anyone. On the one hand, it sounds like an impossible feat. On the other, the skills that go into that are crucial to humanity moving forward.

Or even surviving.

On a general level, resilience is flexibility. It’s the ability to adapt and persist in changing circumstances, without allowing them to crush you.

As a flagship example, I think of Victor Frankl. He didn’t merely survive three years in four concentration camps. He was able to use it to add meaning, strength, and merit to his life and work. As just one example, his Man’s Search for Meaning based heavily on his camp experiences was listed as “one of the ten most influential books in the U.S.” by the Library of Congress.

Frankl was a great example of embodying resilience on many levels — including the relational. But before we dive deeper into what relational resilience is, let’s look at components that sustain it.

You can think of it as skillfulness in relating to one’s own experience. Let’s see what that consists of.

First, say hi to your nervous system…

When I started my inner journey 9 years ago, I thought that psychological growth was about experiencing less negativity. Yes, I bought into that “positive vibes only” jazz — just like most beginner self-improvement junkies.

I’ve definitely grown since then. And, I still experience “negative” emotions. The main difference is… I’m much quicker to move on from them. When I feel anxiety, sadness, self-doubt, or rage, it usually lasts minutes or hours at worst… instead of days or weeks like it used to!

For me, personal growth has been about learning how to move between different emotional states faster. Those states are pretty well laid out by the Polyvagal Theory.

The Polyvagal Theory posits that our autonomic nervous system functions as three subsystems that get activated at different times. Stephen Porges, the author of the theory, refers to them as the social communication system, the mobilization system, and the immobilization system. They can be seen as nervous system’s responses to — respectively — safe, dangerous, and life-threatening situations.

Immobilization is the most primitive response to a life-threatening context. We share it with most vertebrates. It’s commonly known as the “freeze” response. It gets activated when the circumstances are so dire the only chance of survival seems to be… playing dead.

Then, there is the mobilization response, which is evolutionary more recent. It gets activated when our neuroception (more on that below) tells us we can maximize our chance of survival by either fighting or running away. This is the popular “fight or flight” response.

For mammals, evolution devised a special response of the nervous system to a situation that feels safe. That’s what Porges refers to as “social communication system.” Only mammals have the myelinated vagus, an element of the nervous system which “serves to foster calm behavioral states.” This enables us to capitalize on safe situations by connecting with fellow humans in a way that strengthens our social bonds.

Currently, this may be our most adaptive survival strategy — useful far more often than the mobilized and immobilized responses.

Why am I telling you all this, on the way to explain resilience? Because emotional resilience — the foundational component of relational resilience — is the ability to activate the social communication system on purpose.

Emotional resilience is determined by your past… except, it isn’t

In the previous section, I briefly mentioned something called “neuroception.” What’s that?

I wrote more extensively about it in the last week’s post. To summarize, it’s the mechanism we use to determine the levels of safety around us. You can think of it as an unconscious “surveillance mechanism” that, based on environmental cues, decides which response to activate in the nervous system.

Neuroception is directly related to emotional resilience — the ability to transition from one nervous system response to another. How?

To start with, not all people’s neuroception is equally accurate. Depending on our past experiences and genetic programming (and possibly other factors I’m not aware of), different people can assess the same circumstances as very different in terms of safety. This means they may display very different behaviours as a result.

According to Polyvagal Institute,

“A more resilient individual will have a neuroception biased towards detecting cues of safety, while a less resilient individual will have a neuroception biased towards detecting threat.”

An example? In our 20s, my female friend and I used to go dancing to nightclubs pretty regularly. But in the beginning, it wasn’t straightforward to have fun together. That’s because our nervous systems responded to dancing in the crowd very differently.

Especially to guys hitting on us.

As a teenager, my friend had many experiences of cat calling and minor harassments. As a result, she would have her eyes wide open in a club and generally not dance with men she didn’t know. Occasionally, when she had a longer chat that made her feel safe, she might give it a go — and only when I was around.

At the same time, I’ve never really been picked up on at school parties when I was a teenager. My nervous system was never alerted by guys being into me because… it was rarely an issue. I can thank my tomboy/hippie look for that — even though that lack of attention didn’t exactly make me happy as a 15 year old.

According to the Polyvagal Institute definition, we could conclude that, in this situation, I was the more emotionally resilient one. My neuroception was “biased towards detecting cues of safety” rather than threat.

But this would be a disempowering definition of emotional resilience for my friend. Luckily, she didn’t assume this would always be her reality. She was able to train her nervous system to be more resilient by teaching it to bounce back to safety (we didn’t operate with that language back then, obviously).

She learned how to reactivate her “social communication state” quickly and efficiently, after having been thrown off by perceived threats. She was able to re-assess the situation and acknowledge when it was safer than her nervous system deemed it to be. With that practicing calming her nervous system even in the middle of the party — for example, by stepping outside for a few minutes, chatting to me, or taking some deep breaths.

This actually made her feel safer and more in control that when she was driven by her mobilized “fight or flight” response. Now, that’s what I call emotional resilience.

But being in charge of your emotional states is only the first step to being relationally flexible. The second is cognitive resilience — the skill that allows you to re-shape your inner narratives.