Perhaps you’ve heard that one of the most influential factors in resilience and mood management is self-talk. According to Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, self-talk – the internal monologue going ’round in our heads – is how we make sense of our world; it’s how we explain what’s happening. And our explanations are often, by habit, pessimistic or optimistic. And that gets me to wondering about all those family clichés we heard growing up. Take my Irish/German Mother’s answers to almost every crisis:

As a kid I used to ponder over each of these sayings, wondering, what does that MEAN?

Take “No news is good news”

Did that mean that ALL news is BAD news because no news is ever good? This conclusion left my 8 year old brain puzzled. More than a half a century later, in my elder wisdom, (smirk) I realize Mom’s context for no news is good news: all our relatives lived half a continent away, we rarely heard from them. And Mom worried over her Pa, and our extended family of brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles. So her muttering probably meant: take some comfort in not hearing any news because that means everything’s OK, you only hear when it’s bad news. Hence the corollary, “Bad news travels fast.”

My healthy alternative to no news is good news: look for the good news in everything! And no, I don’t consider this Pollyanna-thinking. It’s just my little resilience tactic for keeping on even keel. And it shields me from over-reacting to the negative news prevalent on today’s news media.

These days, when we (my husband and I) get medical news, there’s a bit of both bad and good news. We survive by accepting and doing what must be done, and/or can be done, regarding the bad news. And we thrive by celebrating even the smallest of wins. Our biggest win – we’re still standing. Despite each of our battles with cancer – he’s a 20-month and counting survivor of esophagus cancer and I’m a 7-year and counting survivor of breast cancer – we’re still standing. Looking for the good news wherever we can find it helps us bounce back from all the bad news that comes our way.

And then there’s “It’s the luck of the Irish”

This phase was usually spoken with a heavy SIGHHHHH. Or it was framed in a huge, jolly and self-satisfied SMILE. This ambiguity led me to believe that us Irish could count on both bad luck and good luck. No telling what would happen. But, for sure, it happened because we were Irish! (Call it fate?)

I’m still not sure what to do with this one except save it for the occasional dramatic utterance whenever there’s an unexpected win or loss – It’s the luck of the Irish! But Seligman warns us that when we attribute wins and losses to “fate”, we risk falling into the pessimistic habit of “learned helplessness”. And THAT really cripples your bounce back muscle! Better we should frame unexpected outcomes from an optimistic point of view: wins will be well-deserved and worked-for boons; losses are temporary setbacks unique to themselves. Feels like a good starting ground to me.

“You’ll be well before you’re married”

My Mother whispered this in times of small hurts like stubbed toes and scraped knees. And big hurts that required trips to the ER and stitches…and disappointments like not being chosen for the May Queen Court or the Girls Baseball A-Team. I guess it’s supposed to be the Gaelic version of optimism: “time heals all wounds.” But at the time, being a little, Irish lass, red-headed and fiery, it triggered only belligerence. “No it won’t” I’d pessimistically proclaim! Being married had no relevance to a grammar school child. Now I wonder, since I’m already married, when will I be well???? My answer: Always and Never. Take your pick, whichever helps you get through the day.

“What goes around comes around”

This was my Mother’s way of saying: if you’re mean to others, they’ll be mean to you, so start being the instigator (yeah, she liked that word) of kindness and goodness. Like an 8 year old could get such deep thinking! Yet, over time I came around to knowing that I have the power to change the path of a relationship from enmity to acceptance and perhaps affection. It takes patience, time and kindness. Try it. (And give it back to yourself when you just couldn’t, wouldn’t or didn’t. It’ll be OK. You’ll get another chance.)

And then there’s “Knock wood”

A ritual performed whenever we’d “dared the devil” by expressing an assumed blessing. As in, “We’re still standing. Knock wood.” It was our way of saying – I’m not trying to tempt fate or dare the devil to take away all this goodness. So we would look for wood and, knock it. That protected us from the devil and fate??? These days, with real wood so hard to find, does knocking fake wood protect us from the wrath of the technology ninjas???

Actually, I always felt sacrilegious knocking wood. Felt like I was giving wood magical powers. And then I learned the origin of the saying: Ancient humans believed that God was in the wood of trees and, by knocking on wood, they were asking for God’s beneficence. I like that. Now I consider knocking wood a prayer of gratitude and acknowledgement of God’s graces. Works for me.

Remember Your Heritage & Revise as Necessary

Put the bounce back in your self-talk TODAY! It will make you more resilient in the face of the inevitable adversities that are bound to come. Seligman tells us that we can learn to be optimistic; we can manage our moods by changing our self-talk. Perhaps we all need to remember our heritage of family sayings – those knee jerk clichés that reverberate through the decades and influence how we explain our lives today – and revise them as necessary to reflect a more optimistic point of view. Because, in this case, it seems to be true: What goes ’round in your head, comes ’round in your life!

Let us know: Which of your family’s favorite sayings needed revising?