Pat Caslin: 'There is no gift of resilience that someone will give you', Aware Resilience Series - 2019

December 2019, Based on keynote delivered at Aware National Conference, Dublin, Ireland

I'm a child of the 60s. Grew up in Terenure in Dublin. One of six kids. We had a very happy normal childhood. It turned out well. I did a good degree. I did very well in college and as a result of that I was one of the kids that was very much in demand. I ended up working in KPMG where I worked for about three years and then got on a career development program. Went to the States for a year and a half. Came back and then I left and had a 30 year career in industry.

When you're young you compare yourself with other people Comparing yourself with others is a really invidious thing to do because there's always going to be people that are greater or lesser than you. There are always going to be people that are more or less successful than you.  It took me a long time to realize that I have to live the life that I live not the life that other people want me to live.

I got really odd sensations in my legs. It felt like the skin had just been tightened and it had become too tight for my ankles. It took me about a week or ten days to get a diagnosis. It was originally diagnosed as transverse myelitis. I asked the doctor to write that down so that I could go and look it up when I got home, which I did. I realised reasonably quickly that this was going to turn into multiple sclerosis.

It was very slow moving and for the first five or six years. I was fine. I started cycling because I could. I played a lot of golf. We didn't tell anybody about my multiple sclerosis until I was probably five or six years diagnosed because I didn't want to be treated any differently. I also didn't want to be excluded from job opportunities. But then my walking began to get bad and then we had to tell people. And  then it was out in the open.

The big challenge that I had at that time was to get myself through the fear of this becoming progressive. That was probably the darkest time. The worry about would this become progressive. What would that look like? Would I be disabled? When would I be disabled? How disabled would I be? And oddly, when it became progressive, that was the time that I faced up to it and in facing up to it I've come to a completely different view of what life of multiple sclerosis is like.

In trying to understand the circumstances that I found myself in, I began to read and read a lot, read a lot of philosophy, read a lot of psychology. I particularly turned to stoic philosophy. Stoic philosophy is about acceptance. It's about facing up to your challenges. It's about going towards adversity and not shying away from it. I found that really, really valuable and it gave me a lot of a lot of tools, simple things.

I read Viktor Frankl's book “Man's Search for Meaning” in which he says that we don't get to control what happens to us in life but we do get to control how we think about it and react to it. That was a really empowering moment because I realized that how I deal with things is how I perceive them.

Support is everything. Loneliness is toxic. The superficial things that go on, the small rows that you have, the difficulties that everybody goes through, if you can set those aside in the knowledge that the person that you are with, your friend, your wife, your kids are fundamentally on your side, when all the chips are down, they are with you, that is the bedrock on which your mental health is built.

For somebody who's going through difficulty, who finds their life has been derailed from the path that they had planned, the critical thing for me is to accept what you're given; is to embrace that fate whatever it is; to look at the things that you can do and to try and put the things that you can no longer do behind you, because if you try and hold on to the things that you used to be able to do, if you try and cling to the life that you had when patently that life has changed, well then you're going to end up in a really, really difficult place.

Everybody has resilience within them. Everybody has the capability to achieve that if they're prepared to work on it. There is no gift of resilience that somebody will give you. Resilience is a process. It's something that you have to work at. It's something that you have to face up to, and it's something that you need support to do. But if you do all of that, you can become resilient.

Everybody has it within them.