The Resilience Toolkit for Stress & Anxiety

Stress management, resilience and trauma are getting more airtime these days, which is great! However, too often the solutions provided are neither trauma-informed, nor founded in the latest science about the human stress response. Too often, the tools offered are superficial, and even subtly blame the stressed-out person for their thinking, their “negativity” or for creating the stress in their lives.

This is not cool, and it doesn’t work! However, the Resilience Toolkit does.

I’m a Certified Facilitator of The Resilience Toolkit, a body-focused, trauma-informed, social justice-oriented set of eight practices that can calm the nervous system in under a minute. The practices are informed by 13 different scientific models, including research that is still ongoing. And they changed my life.

I’ve suffered from mental illnesses since childhood – depression, anxiety, trichotillomania, attachment disorder, developmental trauma – and I have an ACEs score of 3, which is high. My own life has been transformed since I learned these tools in January 2019. Not only am I now able to calm myself in ways I never could, I feel tremendously empowered by this ability! Over time, I’ve also seen subtle shifts in some of the lifelong patterns that have gotten in the way of me living as the healthiest, freest version of myself.

Since I became certified — 175 hours of study, training, and practicums — I’ve taught the Toolkit to hundreds of people in multiple walks of life in 13 countries. I offer private individual sessions and group sessions both in-person and virtually. I also incorporate Resilience Toolkit practices and a trauma-informed approach into coaching sessions as needed.

What does body-focused mean?

Body-focused, or “somatic” means that the practices involve body movement and body awareness. This is because trauma and chronic stress mostly live in the nervous system below the neck! Years of talk therapy and thinking exercises can be transformative (I know, I’ve been healed by these methods and still am!), but they’re not the most effective way to calm anxiety and relieve stress in the moment. Also, talking and thinking aren’t the most efficient way to start to heal the dysfunctional pathways that form in the body in response to acute or ongoing stress.

What does “trauma-informed” mean?

This is another term that gets tossed about, but isn’t always understood, nor effectively applied.  “Trauma-informed” means that an approach, modality or program adheres to six key principles outlined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). The six principles are:

How is the Resilience Toolkit social justice-oriented?

Will you preach at me about racism and injustice during a session?

First of all, no! Second of all, integral to the Toolkit is the notion that we can’t self-care our way out of all our stressors! The Toolkit was created by Nkem Ndefo, a nurse midwife of color (and overall brilliant badass), and part of its framework is an ecological perspective. This means that the factors which stress and deplete us – and also support and resource us – are multiple. Some we can control, such as individual choice and aspects of our interpersonal relationships. Many we cannot control, such as our genetics, family and generational history, social relationships, the zip code where we grew up, the state of our neighborhood, the behavior of institutions around us, the social and economic policies of our nation, and the quality of the environment.

To paraphrase Nkem, we can’t self-help our way out of racism, sexism, oppressive policies in our workplace, or a lack of a social safety net. However, the Toolkit practices not only equip us to live healthier, happier lives by relieving the effects of these stressors, over time they also increase our bandwidth to transform the oppressive systems causing many of our stressors in the first place!