Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
How many of you have ever been through a traumatic experience
and thought, How am I ever going to get through this?
Maybe you were trying to overcome an addiction
or beat an illness or get through a divorce.
Or maybe, you're feeling that way right now.
As the founder of Unlikely Heroes, an anti human-trafficking organization
that rescues and restores children from sex slavery all over the world,
I find myself intrigued with the tools
that people have developed to overcome trauma
because I want to do everything I possibly can
to help the kids in our care overcome theirs.
And so far, we've recovered more than 400 children from slavery,
opened 7 restoration homes all over the world
and developed a therapeutic treatment model
that's actually helping our kids to come out on the other side of their trauma,
experiencing success and having hope for their futures.
(Applause)
And what I was shocked to find is that there's actually a group of kids
who had been rescued out of some of the most horrific circumstances
any human has ever been forced to endure -
more than 2,000 unwanted sexual experiences in a year -
and yet these kids were coming out of our homes and graduating,
stronger, more resilient, more successful
than even other kids who had grown up
in safe, loving and stable home environments.
So I found myself asking a really powerful question,
which is, What are these resilient kids doing differently
to have positive outcomes in the face of trauma?
And what I thought at first was
that resilience was something these kids were born with,
like a personality trait,
but what I actually have found is
that resilience can be modeled, it can be developed, it can be practiced,
and it can be implemented into our lives
even during the most difficult circumstances that we find ourselves in
so that we can have better outcomes
and create lives that we actually want to live.
So that leads me to a question:
What are these resilient kids doing differently
and how do we apply their hard-earned strategies into our lives
so that we can achieve the same results?
Well, I was in the Philippines
in one of the worst red-light districts in the world,
and it was four o'clock in the morning, and I went into a brothel,
and there were 30 young girls and women sitting on these benches
that had nametags on with numbers on them.
And immediately, as soon as I walked in, the girls started jumping up and down
saying, "Pick me, pick me."
And our team was ushered into a side room, where the manager handed us a menu
with some of the most gruesome sex acts on the menu.
And she said, "Go out there
and pick any girl you'd like based off of her number,
and then bring her back in here.
And we said, "No, thank you.
We're just here to sing karaoke, and we want to go in the main room."
So we went into the main room,
where they assigned a man who could speak English to watch over us,
and a very young girl who was only about 16 years old,
who said she'd been in the brothel for less than a month.
And I started talking to this young girl,
and as I did, she was flipping through a Japanese dictionary on the table
so that she could talk to this man, Ajahn,
who'd been raping her for the last several days.
And as I sat and I spoke with her,
I knew exactly why she was trying to learn Japanese to talk to this man
because she decided that her only way out of this most horrific circumstance
was actually going to be for this man to marry her.
And a few moments later, she actually said,
"Will you come on stage with me to sing karaoke?"
So I went up there to support her.
And as soon as she got on stage and started to sing, she stepped forward.
And I looked into her eyes, and I saw something that I will never forget.
And it's something that I never see in brothels.
And it was hope.
And as she sang,
I saw something beyond the hope.
I saw something that's unmistakable - even in the midst of a brothel -
and that was resilience.
And I started to find myself getting emotional,
and I started to feel tears coming up,
but I choked them back down
because I knew the last thing that this girl needed was my tears.
I'm sure she'd already cried plenty of them.
What she needed was my strength.
You see, this girl was a resilient one;
she decided that she was going to do whatever she possibly could
to overcome the situation that she found herself in.
And this is the most core thread
that I have seen through our children who practice resilience
is that they have a core belief that "No matter what, I will be okay."
And here's how we apply that to our own lives:
We start to believe at the core of who we are
that "No matter what, I will be okay."
I remember sitting with one of the girls who'd been rescued at our homes,
and she's now living in freedom and she told me of her story,
of how she had to run away from her very violent traffickers.
And she had to run for several days without food, without shelter,
and no one was helping her, and finally, a woman that she stopped to talk to,
she said, "Will you please help me?"
And I found myself, at this moment of the story, starting to relax,
and I thought, finally, someone's going to help her,
this woman is going to be the person that brings her into freedom.
But instead, the woman just gave her a cup of water
and told her to be quiet and sent her on her way.
And there was a part of me that I started to think,
"How could she not have done more?
How could she not have given her food or clothing
or make sure that she got to safety?"
But then, this resilient child went on to explain
that because this woman gave her a cup of water,
that she had the hope to keep running and to keep going
and so that she could actually find herself a way into freedom.
You see this girl, who practices resilience,
has a core value strategy that no matter what, she will be okay.
And when this woman gave her the cup of water,
it validated her core belief and gave her the hope to keep going.
And that brings me to the second strategy
that these resilient kids have applied in their lives
is that adding on to the core-value belief that "No matter what, I will be okay,"
they understand
that "Even though life is not the way that I want it to be,
I will still be okay."
And this right here is such an important key
because these kids are practicing the skill of acceptance.
Here's how this looks practically:
Many of the children in our homes
were actually trafficked by their own family members,
sometimes even their own mothers.
And you'll hear the kids in our home saying,
"I want to go home," or, "I want to visit my family,"
which are totally normal feelings for any child to have.
But see, the resilient ones understand home is not safe,
and they allow themselves the freedom
to let go of their pain and their past trauma,
and they start to believe pictures for a future
that is safe, that doesn't include their family members who trafficked them.
They're practicing acceptance.
And what I've noticed is that the kids who actually struggle with resilience
often get stuck in their past, often times romanticizing it
thinking about a family picture that never even actually took place
and forgetting the pain that they endured.
We actually train the parent-like guardians in our homes
to take the skill of resilience and to model it for our chldren
so that they can have more successful outcomes.
So if you're a parent
who's helping a child go through a difficult circumstance -
let's say your family's going through a divorce -
here's how it looks to model resilience:
First, you wait for the right moment, and then you ask questions.
But your goal here is not to get information;
it's actually to create connection.
So you would say, "I know this is really difficult for you.
Now, you have two homes you have to live in.
You have to leave your school uniform in one house
and remember where you kept your school project.
What's one thing that I could do in the midst of all this change
that would actually help to make this easier on you?"
Now let me explain what you're doing in this moment;
first of all, you're understanding where this child's at.
Change is hard for all of us; it doesn't matter how old we are.
But then you're actually reinforcing the idea of resilience,
that there are some things that no matter how much you want to -
even as an adult you cannot change -
you cannot change the fact
that your family's going through a divorce.
But when you ask the child,
"What's one thing that I could do to make this better for you?"
you're actually letting the child know
that even though I wish that I could change these other things and I can't,
I still care about you and your emotions in the midst of this change,
and you're letting the child know that they're valuable to you.
So let's say you're an adult
and you're going through a difficult circumstance,
maybe a doctor has said that you have to make dietary changes in your life
because of a health diagnosis.
Here's how you would practice resilience:
Instead of thinking about all the foods that you can no longer eat
and getting stuck in that picture of things that you've lost,
you actually intentionally look forward into the future
and start to think about what it would be like
to make healthier foods or to make healthier choices,
and you start to dream about that new picture that you have
that could even be broader and higher than you'd originally hoped.
What would your life look like if you're really living a healthier lifestyle?
How would you feel?
What would it feel like to wake up in the morning
knowing that you were living this lifestyle
that you're more proud of than you were even before?
You see, we have to understand
that resilience is not about ignoring what's wrong;
it's actually about accepting what's wrong,
letting go of the things that we cannot change,
and allowing ourselves to develop a posture to start dreaming of a future
that we'd actually want to live.
Practicing resilience is a skill that we can all apply to our lives
that will allow for better outcomes.
And it starts by aligning ourselves with the truth
that "No matter what, I will be okay."
(Applause)