Recently I got thinking about the concept of resilience, as it occurred to me that resilience is a term that I use a lot - that we all use a lot – but that I didn’t actually know a lot about. In my mind, resilience was about ‘bouncing back’ when faced with adversity but I had a hunch that there was much more to learn about resilience, and I was right.

Autumn is my favourite season, and this past week in particular has felt like autumn is set in and winter is on its way. This changing of the seasons brings memories of autumns past and the way, here in Melbourne, we spent them in lockdown. Now however, more than a quarter of the way into 2022 we’re living life without lockdowns and I’m listening to people talk about what a joyful, celebratory time it has been. Socialising and activities are back, most can work from the office at least part time, people are travelling and schedules are full again.

We talk a lot about self-care and how important it is to take good care of ourselves. Sounds obvious, right? However, a lot of us find self-care really challenging, and I believe this is because of the common misconception that self-care means “I need to look after myself instead of others” rather than “I need to look after myself as well as others”.

A perfectionist: somebody who strives for absolute perfection and sets very high standards for themself.

The term perfectionism can hold positive connotations in our society. It’s what we often turn to as a humble ‘weakness’ in a job interview to imply that we are too hard-working. The assumption that perfectionists make the best employees makes sense, given that there are a lot of adaptive qualities about perfectionism. People who strive for perfection are often highly motivated, and tend to possess a high level of persistence, tenacity and drive. Those who strive to be perceived as perfect by those around them tend to also have extreme levels of empathy.

This all sounds pretty good, right? Well, not always.

Enabling is a pattern of seemingly helping a loved one. However, what seems like helping to keep the peace or not cause distress, is actually disempowering because it allows the issue to continue rather than being solved. This disempowerment occurs because it teaches the other person that regardless of what they’re going through, there will always be someone there to rescue them or make sure they don’t have to deal with what they’re going through. Enabling therefore allows loved ones to not face the natural consequence of their actions. Allowing this to happen can seem hard and almost cruel to allow, however patterns of unhelpful behaviours don’t change if enabling continues.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze, but what is fawn? Fawning is the art of people pleasing. Hands up if you’re guilty of this one. I’m raising my hand here. Fawning is a recently acknowledged anxiety state where we often acquiesce to people’s requests because we are full of apathy, overwhelm, guilt, and/or shame. These emotions are often driven by a sense of responsibility for wanting to do good by others as well as a desire to be accepted, to not want to be seen as a bad person, to be seen as helpful, resourceful, capable, and the list goes on. When we feel these deep emotions, we often disconnect from our own needs abandon our boundaries and lose our sense of self. In our bodies we can experience a feeling of anxiety, emotional overload, intense physical sensations and sometimes numbness. In this state we essentially sacrifice our own needs to ensure the needs of the people around us are met. If we do this relentlessly and forget about our own selves in the process, it can leave us feeling resentful which eventually leads to burnout. Sound familiar? So what do we do about it?