Too much screen time? Let yourself have 2 more minutes of it right now: because if you’ve been tooling around reading anything related to mood disorders or anxiety disorders, IV ketamine, and other advanced treatments, you’ve probably noticed that there’s buzz about resilience.
Because of the world that has opened up since IV ketamine began treating depressed patients with its ability to create new branches and connections, the expectations of these patients have soared.
No longer are patients satisfied to have a little relief from their depression. They’ve learned they can feel good. Feel “normal.” Enjoy participating in life the way others do.
So now the question you hear on the internet isn’t this: “Will any medicine help me feel at least a little bit better…?” No.. now it’s this: “Will this medicine help me feel resilient again?” Or “What can I do during this treatment to help it work… improve my chances of remission… develop more resilience?”
Now before we go on, I want to clarify that no doctor can promise or guarantee remission of symptoms from disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, addiction,social anxiety, or to promise or guarantee that suicidal thinking will go away. There just isn’t any medicine in psychiatry that helps 100% of people get well.
But, even so, there are many people who’ve suffered for years, even decades, with these disorders who are now living lives they never dreamed possible. They’re painting, excelling at work, meeting the loves of their lives, enjoying their families, and contributing to their important relationships. They’re investing in hobbies, socializing with friends and family, and feeling good about themselves and their accomplishments.
This doesn’t happen overnight, but resilience has freed them to invest in their lives, and provides the energy for things they could never do before.
Resilience Protects You From Falling in the Ditch
And when hard times come along, they have the resilience to grieve a bit, then brush themselves off and keep moving forward. This may be the most remarkable change of all.
Resilience is the ability to adapt when a crisis comes along… to adapt to whatever the situation may be. To bounce back, recover, and move forward after an onslaught of difficulty.
Since psychiatric mood and anxiety disorders often develop as a response to some degree, to something environmental or an upsetting/traumatic event, if you can adapt to that event or force in your environment, you can remove that response from your psyche.
Adaptation is the way organisms throughout your world survive. When there’s a strong wind, if trees don’t bend under the wind they’ll be splintered and destroyed. But their ability to bend is their means of survival and the way they develop resilience.
The same is true of you.
If you have a continuous source of stress in your world, one that assaults your senses, emotions, or body, you can eventually be beaten down and weakened or destroyed by those assaults.
But if you can find a way to bend like a tree does, to adjust yourself to accommodate those assaults, hurts, and winds of fury without being damaged, it will help you avoid being traumatized. And that’s how you’ll develop resilience.
This brings up the story of a friend of mine.
Jillian grew up in a small town in the midwest, and was a faithful member of a tiny congregation there. The pastor had served in her church for 40 years, and unwittingly preached a serious sermon every Sunday that reflected the smallness of his own tiny world in that tiny town.
Jillian, like the rest of the church members, worked hard to live up to the expectations her pastor laid out in his sermons. Her town was small, her world was small, and those expectations left her view of life small, too.
Culture Shock – From Small Town to Big City
As she approached her thirtieth birthday, her husband broke the news to her. He’d been transferred to Chicago.
So they packed up their belongings, and moved into a pretty little apartment in that big, new city. Her birthday was anything but a celebration. The traffic overwhelmed her … the variety of people she saw at the grocery store, the post office, and everywhere else were just so different than any she’d ever seen before.
Hairstyles, clothing styles, and the way people just talked made her feel more like she was on another planet than just in a different city. She felt afraid to meet people or make friends. She was afraid she looked like a fool and she couldn’t imagine how you could trust anyone.
The more time she spent alone, the more isolated she felt. And the sadder she became. She was lonely. She missed the comfort of her home town.
Her husband asked her often if she was making any friends. But she just told him that the people she ran into on the street weren’t “her kind of people” — and she felt safer alone.
One day he arrived home from work and announced they’d been invited to dinner by one of his co-workers. She was excited to meet this co-worker and his wife. Surely they’d be a good match socially, too.
The following Friday, Jillian and her husband drove to the address her husband pulled from his pocket. The front yard was alive with a variety of blooms that reminded her of English gardens she’d seen in books at the library. It was just beautiful.
Jillian Adapts and Learns Resilience
They knocked on the door — and it was opened by the strangest-lookingpeople she’d ever seen. She immediately wanted to go home, but her husband held her hand firmly as he warmly greeted the couple.
Her husband’s co-worker had jet black hair that was shaved on the sides with a narrow path of hair from his forehead to his crown, pulled into a ponytail. His wife had bright pink hair with spikes on top enhanced by a shag that softly fell on the left side of her head; the right side was shaved from her temple to her ear.
Jillian’s alarm choked her. Then Cass, the pink-haired woman, spoke up and told her how glad she was to meet her. That most of her co-workers were middle- aged or nearing retirement, and she ached for friends her own age.
When she spoke, Jillian began to relax. What a warm and genuine person, she thought.
“May I help you in the kitchen?”
“Yes, I’d love the help!”
So the two of them disappeared into the kitchen to finish up with dinner, and their husbands settled in to talk shop and about their hobbies outside of work.
Jillian and Cass had so much more in common than she could have dreamed — and by the time they called the guys to sit down and eat, she had forgotten about the “strange” hairstyles. She realized that her perspective of the world in her small town had apparently been pretty sheltered. And she was thankful she had found someone who could be a true friend.
Resilience is Adapting to Your Situation, Which Helps You Bounce Back After Surprises, Disappointments, and Hardships
The point is, that Jillian adapted. She was experiencing a stressful situation, and it was affecting her emotionally. Sadness was growing as well as isolation and loneliness. If she’d remained unwilling to bend, she might have eventually plunged into depression.
But, after exposure to a stressor that felt threatening to her, she was instead willing to look beyond her distaste, and read the heart of a person who was ready and able to offer her real friendship. And many great adventures lay ahead as a result.
Resilience! It’s the new buzzword for a reason. Beyond reduced depression symptoms, resilience protects your life from being interrupted by a trauma or disappointment.
While this is an oversimplified example, it shows you how important it is to bend, rather than break. To change the way you think in a stressful situation so you can bounce back from disillusionment, disappointment, or betrayal.
Resilience! It’s the New Buzzword for Adapting and Growing Stronger
But, here’s the thing. Sometimes you face stressors that feel threatening to you when you don’t feel equipped to respond with resilience. In fact, sometimes you may not feel resilient at all.
Sound familiar?
Times when you’re drowning in depression or terrorized with PTSD. When you don’t have the energy to get out of bed, much less “bend with the wind.” What do you do then?
Ketamine Treatment Enhances Resilience
Well, that’s when you may need treatment. You need to get the help of your psychiatrist to get those symptoms under control. To empower resilience. And if the medications that have been prescribed for you haven’t helped, then you may need something more targeted, more potent.
One medicine we use at Innovative Psychiatry for exactly this is IV ketamine treatment. We’re experts in ketamine treatment and we’ve offered it for years–way before most doctors–and most people–ever even heard about it.
You may need something like that to help you enjoy resilience and to make it stronger. Because from its vantage point, ketamine has a list of actions that can help you develop the resilience that will see you through stressors and losses that may come along in the future.
Neuroplasticity Helps You Build Resilience
Ketamine stimulates neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the cells in the brain to change and adapt. That neuroplasticity can enhance your psychotherapy, especially when your therapy is 24 hours after your infusion.
It can also help you change your perspective of life and people. In doing that, it can help you learn how to “bend with the wind,” or whatever crosses your path. You can create and build up a level of resilience that empowers you to roll with the punches in life.
Numerous studies have shown that the more often you adapt to small stressors in your life, the stronger you’ll be at adapting to big calamities. And the more you change your thinking to adapt to difficulty, the stronger your resilience can be.
So, you can do things to strengthen your resilience…by choosing adaptive behaviors in smaller crises day by day.
For example, you don’t have to succumb to the same old habits when something frustrates you, or makes you angry. With the help of ketamine stimulating your neuroplasticity, you can choose to think a different thought. Then practice it.
I’m never going to get out of this job or this company. I’m doomed to a future of misery and mediocrity…
You have the choice to accept that thought…or to grab the wheel and change its direction, like so:
I’m not going to succumb to that thinking. I WILL excel at this job because I’m working hard to perform well. And I will be rewarded with promotions that will give me the resume that will promote me when I apply to new jobs. Bottom line, I’m not giving up..!
You have choices when thoughts come to you, and when your choice is empowered by the neuroplasticity of IV ketamine treatment, you CAN overcome.
Resilience helps you build a stronger remission of your symptoms... In fact, resilience is the reason so many people can undergo tremendous stressors, and bounce back.
People like you, and those you love. Because resilience isn’t something you’re born with or NOT born with. Resilience is something you can develop with practice, determination, and persistence.
That’s so important that I want to say it again: resilience is something that can be developed. You can develop it. And we can help you.
We want you to live as the best YOU, you can be. And you can with the ability to adapt, and to apply resilience.
Very helpful, gives me hope