Do You Have Grit?
People have asked me, “How are you managing?”
Often I answer with a spiritual response. But, sometimes I say, “Grit.”
I have grit.
Grit is an understudied attribute in humans. I did find one research study though examining the relationship between grit and resilience.
“The concept of grit is proposed to be a construct related to achievement and is worth study as a possible protective factor. In the definition by Duckworth et al, grit has 2 elements: persistence of effort in the face of adversity (perseverance) and consistency of interest (passion for long-term goals).11 Grit entails “working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”11 Duckworth and colleagues have found that grit is associated with retention in a variety of settings, including the military, sales representative jobs, graduating from high school, and remaining married.12 Although Duckworth et al do not discuss grit in terms of resilience in their articles, one hypothesis for these findings may be that individuals who have higher grit scores are more resilient, and this resilience enables them to overcome obstacles to reach their goals. Although relatively little work has empirically examined the relationship between grit and resilience, 2 studies have reported that the construct of grit is associated with lower rates of burnout and greater psychological well-being among medical residents.13,14 Further, in a survey of 548 physicians in the United Kingdom, a negative correlation between grit and burnout was reported.15 These studies lend support to the hypothesis that individuals with higher grit may also be more resilient.”
It was an online course entitled Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness that brought the concept of grit to my attention. Historically, I sign up for a bunch of online courses. I remain intensely interested– in life. And, like most people (according to the research around digital course completion) I rarely complete these courses. However, for this course, I had two women who held me accountable. We met regularly with coffee or tea and discussed.
In the midst of the course, I experienced a major shock trauma in my personal life. One day, as I was leaving to meet them to discuss our Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness material, I broke down. I am skilled at keeping my emotion at bay. I feel emotion intensely and have for as long as I can remember. I can become flooded by it. Except that I have developed a number of tools to help me navigate my sensitivity.
I am a skillful compartmentalizer. I can sometimes put an emotion in a box and say, “I’m not going to examine that until later.” Later might mean when I’m not in the middle of photographing my clients after 5 pm, or later might mean in my next life. Some would say this is not a good coping mechanism. They might be right. It’s definitely adaptive. Sometimes, I just have to carry on. And compartmentalizing is what’s helped me to do that.
One morning a number of years ago now, I witnessed a dog die in my studio parking lot. The details are not important here for the sake of a blog about trauma that I hope leaves you better than it found you and doesn’t trigger you, I’ll leave them out even though I can still recall the image vividly. I’ve learned with flashbacks and intrusive images that I can actually choose to look away, or to zoom in or out or see only the edges. That day was a sunny day. I was excited and about to photograph 40 individuals for a local publication.The schedule was tight, and I was to begin at 10 am and finish around 4 pm. I know it was 10 am because I was not alone, thankfully. The ladies who clean my studio were there with me. They come on Mondays at 9 am. And, they happened to be finishing up at the time of the impact.
They speak Spanish and I speak Spanglish, so we frequently talk about our families, but there is a definitive language barrier there. We communicate in the way that is not all that different than the communication within a somatic session. We are not concerned with connecting through our prefrontal cortex. We communicate with gestures and expressions that convey emotion and provide the joy that social engagement and connection can bring.
That morning, the three of us stood in the parking lot and anteloped. That’s not really a verb. It’s something I learned about in a somatic training about how animals in the wild when they are mourning, they huddle up and sway together in a herd. Kinda like a primal football huddle or something. Together the three of us arm in arm sobbed. Few words were spoken, and none of us said, “Even though we are business acquaintances, let’s set that aside and hold each other,” but healing rituals don’t necessarily require words– much less rational logic.
I walked upstairs to my studio, and I remember wiping my tears in the bathroom mirror, and splashing some water on my face and making a shift. Showtime. My first of many clients arrived. I set myself aside and immersed myself in the flow of the art. When the final client that afternoon canceled, I felt relieved. I was ready to tend to the residual activation from the morning. I called a colleague. “Can you see me?” There are all sorts of HIPPA rules about why you don’t see a friend, but she could sense my urgency. “I need First Aid,” I told her. Somatic first aid is to stabilize after a shock trauma. She agreed. And, it helped. I know it did because I slept that night and on the next morning when I pulled into the parking lot of my studio, that image didn’t have its hooks in me.
Unlike that day though, on the day of the Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness meetup, I couldn’t bypass my shock. The emotion came like a flood. I curled up in my deep studio chair and covered myself in a blanket and cried. When the gates opened, I couldn’t close them. And, honestly, to feel the emotion and let it move through you rather than pushing it away for later– this is perhaps the easier way. When it became apparent that I could not pull myself together and will myself into ventral vagal social engagement, I texted my friends.
“Girls, I was just about to leave and I got completely flooded and now I’m ugly crying and I need to just sit here in my studio and reground. I’m not going to make it. I hate that my life has made me unable to show up sometimes, but I am practicing the rain stuff I suppose.”
Rain is from Tara Brach. Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Nurture.
Curled in the fetal position in my chair I continued to investigate where the ache was held in my body. I nurtured myself. And, their return texts extending grace and support nurtured me, too.
Personally, I have been through the fire this year. I have thought again and again of that quote attributed to Will Rogers, “If you’re going through Hell, don’t pitch a tent.” After about 11 minutes or so, I got up out of the chair. The impulse to carry on with a life I love emerged.
That’s grit.
And, I recognize grit in my clients. Often, it’s expressed in their humor. I love to laugh. And, while it can become a defense mechanism, it can also be healing. Just as we can release trauma through tears,, we can release trauma through laughter. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” I’ve said, and a friend will say, “We have to laugh to keep from crying.” I have learned to love to cry. I have been known to tell my son, “Cry, Son. It will help you to cry those tears. You’ll heal faster.”
I don’t want to pass on to him the compartmentalization. I don’t want him to spend his entire adult life seeking how to return home to live in his body. This has been my work. This has been the story of my life. Grit doesn’t just happen. I learned it. I earned it. And, when I recognize it in others, I seek to call it forth and nurture it.