What Makes Some People Unbreakable

You can outlive your losses in life and keep going anyway — transformation is always available.

Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay

Hey friend - I know through hard-won experience that having a spiritual practice as you age is critical to a life full of meaning. Things happen - we will experience health issues, loss of the people we love, and challenges managing life in a chaotic world.

While I’m not religious, I consider myself deeply spiritual. Things have happened in my life that feel like divine intervention. As I look back on my traumas, I’ve found the positive things in my adversities - it always got to do with love. Life has taught me that there is a higher power at work.

I’ve learned to trust my Higher Power (HP). However, when I’m in a worry trance, I have to pull myself back from the brink and recalibrate my nervous system. I hope you enjoy this article full of good research.

Dr. Lydia Manning spent years sitting with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s — people who had survived illness, loss, grief, and the particular weight of a long life. She wanted to know what made some of them resilient while others crumbled under the same pressures.

Dr. Manning is a social gerontologist — a scientist who studies aging and is currently affiliated with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio — a leading institution in aging research.

What she found wasn’t what most people expect.

It wasn’t toughness. It wasn’t optimism. It wasn’t even a support system, though those matter. What she found, across hundreds of interviews and decades of research, was this:

the most resilient people weren’t just surviving their hardships. They were being transformed by them.

One of the women in her study had gone blind. When Dr. Manning asked her about it, she said something that stopped me cold when I read it. She said that as a child, a blind man had boarded with her family. She read to him, walked him downtown, listened to him talk about his life without sight. She had no idea then that she would someday lose her own vision. But looking back, she said:

“The Lord was preparing me for what was ahead. Blindness is both a blessing and a hardship. What I learned then helps me now. I learned how to trust God and myself.”

She didn’t just survive her blindness. She found meaning in it. She found a thread running through her whole life that she couldn’t see until she was standing in the dark.

Another woman in the study had survived not one but several illnesses her doctors had called terminal. Each time, she didn’t just recover — she accumulated something.

Skills. Strategies.

A kind of knowing that you can survive what you thought would break you.

That knowing becomes its own form of protection.

And then there was Ruth. When Dr. Manning asked her about her faith, she said:

“If I didn’t have my faith, the things that have happened to me — I don’t know what I would do without it. After my husband died, I still feel he helps me. No one could convince me otherwise, because there are too many unusual things.”

Too many unusual things. I know exactly what she means.

What Dr. Manning discovered across all of these women — and across the 64 people she studied ranging in age from 52 to 93.

The most resilient among them shared three things:

A sense of divine support, a maintained sense of purpose, and the practice of gratitude.

Not as a performance. Not as a coping strategy. But as a way of being that had been built, quietly, over a lifetime.

And here is what moved me most about her research: those three things — faith, purpose, gratitude — cannot be taken away.

You can lose your health. You can lose your independence. You can lose the people you love most.

But you cannot lose your inner life. You cannot lose your capacity for meaning. You cannot lose access to the force greater than yourself, whatever name you give it.

I think about this when I remember surrendering to my higher power and worrying if I would live as I was loaded in an ambulance in the middle of the Baja, Mexico, desert on the way to a rural hospital.

I didn’t have my health. I didn’t have my independence. I didn’t have certainty about anything. But something remained. Something that no surgery could touch.

That is what resilience actually is. Not the absence of breaking. The presence of something that cannot be broken.

The high road isn’t the easy road. But it is the one that transforms you. And according to the research — and according to every woman in that study who outlived her losses and kept going anyway — transformation is always available. Right up until the very end.

And say hello to my mom - Dorothy Barker - who is 98 1/2! This woman is part terminator - strong and resilient in the face of losses and tragedies. She is pure love.

Subscriber Gatherings in 2026

100-Day Visualization Project :: April 22, 2026

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✦ Wednesday, April 22

✦ 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT

✦ 7:00pm GMT · 8:00am Thursday NZDT

Visualization is not wishful thinking.

It’s not a vision board on a wall that you walk past without feeling anything. It’s not the same as hoping something will happen and waiting for the universe to deliver it.

It is neuroscience.

Researchers have shown that when you vividly imagine doing something — truly see it, feel it, experience it in your body — your brain activates the same neural pathways as if you were actually doing it. In one landmark study, basketball players who practiced free throws only in their minds improved nearly as much as players who practiced physically. Same neural pathways. Same results.

This is what 100 days of consistent visualization can do to a brain - it can rewire it.

At our April 22 Gathering on Zoom we’ll explore:

✦ What the science actually says about how visualization works

✦ Why most people do it wrong — and the one shift that changes everything

✦ How to begin your own 100-Day Visualization Project

✦ What you want to do, be, or have — and how to make your brain your greatest ally in getting there

I’ll share the research, tell you a story, and give you three prompts to begin your own practice. Then we’ll share with each other.

This Gathering will be recorded and sent to all paid subscribers.

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XO Sherold