The Woman's Book of Resilience: 12 Qualities to Cultivate (Miller, 2005)

The Woman's Book of Resilience: 12 Qualities to Cultivate (Miller, 2005)

Thriving Through Good Times and Bad

Product Description
Beginning years ago with her work with women in grief, Beth Miller has helped hundreds of people in her therapeutic practice to learn to be resilient and survive life crises to become deeper, more powerful, and authentic human beings. Packed with information and exercises, The Woman’s Book of Resilience is a smart, often funny, book that can help any woman thrive amid life’s ups and downs. When we cultivate resilience, we mine the awful, or merely annoying, experiences in life to find meaning and purpose.
The Woman’s Book of Resilience is an accessible, practical guide to bouncing back. "We know that resiliency reigns because we survive to tell our tales of misfortune, trauma, abuse. Indeed, we are built to be able to go to the edge of life and come back with heart and soul elevated. . . . We are built to be resilient, to be able to take sure and steady steps over rocky terrain."

Miller offers 12 qualities that help women develop and learn resilience. Readers learn to:

1. Admit and embrace vulnerability

2. Practice and increase the ability to connect

3. Find manageable parts of the problem

4. Discover their needs and get them met

5. Recognize their gifts and talents

6. Develop the ability to say no and set limits and boundaries

7. Practice transforming resentment and forgiving

8. Use their sense of humor

9. Use the power of staying and leaving

10. Find meaning in crisis

11. Endure suffering through crisis

12. Stand alone

Each of the twelve is a chapter with case histories, stories, and plenty of try this, this, or this—exercises to turn to again and again. With a foreword by June Singer, author of Boundaries of the Soul.

[JLJ - this book is useful to men as well. It might help you to better understand that special woman in your life.]

p.1 We want to be resilient. We want to bounce back from misfortune and thrive from difficulties.

p.1 Sensing its importance to people's ability to cope with adversity is how I came to study the quality of resilience a little over a decade ago.

p.3 We can learn to be resilient. The work that I have been doing for the past ten years is based on the reality that resilience can be cultivated, relearned, developed.

p.4 The center of the resilience wheel, I have found, is making friends with your vulnerability.

p.7 The ability to be resilient is what helps us bounce back from the edge, helps us find our strength in adverse circumstances, helps us thrive in this life - and it most often begins with opening the inner doorway to our own vulnerability... the truth is we are all vulnerable.

p.26 imagination, the ability to construct internal images of situations and see through various possible outcomes in "our mind's eye." It has been found that people who show natural resilience in difficult situations use precisely this imaginative function in order to structure and sequence the event and adapt accordingly... Imagination allows us to see all the views of the situation, the varying pieces of the puzzle, and gives us the opportunity to arrange and rearrange to our heart's content. We can imagine the possible consequences of "If you say this or do that" as we include the potential responses you will receive.

p.45 "The resilient have an uncanny ability to get their needs met"

p.52 It is the marriage of knowing when and how to get your needs met and knowing when and how to seek alternatives and let go that results in a resilient response.

p.132 People who are resilient know how to be flexible.

p.185 Resilient traits include creativity and... insight into ourselves and what we are going through at any particular phase in our lives.