Beyond Bouncing Back: A New Way to Think About Resilience

Nov 09, 2026 12:15 PM

Karin Lewis, CPC

Beyond Bouncing Back: A New Way to Think About Resilience

We often think of resilience as the ability to bounce back when life gets difficult, to keep going, push through, and return to the person we were before. But what if resilience isn't about going back at all? In Beyond Bouncing Back, Karin Lewis offers a more compassionate and useful definition of resilience, drawing from both her professional experience and her own extraordinary journey through adversity. She explores what happens when the strategies that once helped us survive and succeed, perfectionism, control, independence, and always being the one who can handle it, no longer serve us. Rather than asking us to become harder or stronger, she invites us to learn how to find our footing when life changes underneath us, without turning against ourselves in the process.

Bio:

Karin Lewis, CPC is a Boston-area Certified Professional Coach, speaker, and founder of the Center for Resilience and Growth. For more than two decades, she worked in the eating-disorder field, developing and leading treatment programs and ultimately founding the Karin Lewis Eating Disorder Center. She also created and hosted Recovery Bites, a podcast featuring conversations with clinicians, advocates, authors, and others about recovery without shame.

Karin's work today focuses on resilience, self-compassion, shame, perfectionism, and the challenges of navigating major life transitions. Her approach is informed not only by her professional experience, but by her own journey through anorexia, surviving a four-story balcony collapse in San Francisco, profound personal loss, and a significant professional crisis that forced her to reconsider identity, success, and what it means to begin again.

She speaks about resilience not as simply “bouncing back,” but as learning to find your footing, meet yourself with compassion, and grow forward when life changes underneath you.