COURSE
Feeling overwhelmed?
Learn how to claim and build
your emotional resilience so you can be
happy, productive, and
able to weather every storm.
Introducing "Becoming Stonewall Strong: The Course"
I created this course to share what I have learned about emotional resilience from my own experience of loss, trauma, and living with a serious health condition; many interviews with resilient people and mental health experts; and a lot of reading over many years. I want to help make you more aware of how you already have survived challenging experiences—and confident that you can get through new ones, including a medical diagnosis that may have shaken up your whole sense of who you are. I understand because I have been there, lived it, and learned from it. You can too.
PART ONE: WHAT IS RESILIENCE AND WHERE DO YOU GET IT?
Part One defines our terms and emphasizes the important role in our resilience of how we talk about our difficult experiences.
LESSON 1: What do we mean by resilience?
LESSON 2: How do we tell our story to ourselves?
PART TWO: HOW TO BUILD YOUR EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE
Part Two offers practical 'how-to' lessons on specific things you can do to strengthen your resilience.
LESSON 3: Sfogato! Let in the light.
LESSON 4: Be true to yourself
LESSON 5: Claim your heroic legacy.
LESSON 6: Connection and community
LESSON 7: Get out into nature.
PART THREE: CHOOSING RESILIENCE
Part Three ties together the course's lessons to make it clear that being resilient is a choice, and how we choose will make us either the hero or victim in our life's stories.
LESSON 8: Conscious resilience
LESSON 9: Be the hero of your own story.
Join Becoming Stonewall Strong: Claim and Build Your Emotional Resilience. It's FREE!!!
and get instant access to all the course lessons and downloadable files.
• High quality video lessons
• Downloadable readings you can share
• Access to the private Becoming Stonewall Strong Facebook group.
About your instructor
An unexpected, shocking medical diagnosis in 2005 launched my effort to understand "what I am made of." Once I felt confident that medication would keep me healthy, I set out to learn how I had managed to become so resilient. Where had my hope and optimism come from? How was I able to remain positive in the face of such a terrifying experience--and all the mortal illness and death I had seen it cause in my friends and community?
I read through years' worth of my journals and slowly pieced together a picture of a young boy who grew up with many hard knocks yet managed to survive to middle age, still able to enjoy life. Where had that resilience come from? How did it develop?
As a longtime health/medical journalist, I began researching the subject of resilience and writing articles about it for The Atlantic and HuffPost. I explore the subject of resilience in my "Stonewall Strong" blog for Psychology Today. There I share stories from my own and others' journey, and insights from leading researchers and health care providers—as I do in my book Stonewall Strong: Gay Men's Heroic Fight for Resilience, Good Health, and a Strong Community.
I created this course to share the insight and wisdom I accumulated in my work and from doing my own best to become "Stonewall Strong." Besides being an author, journalist, and health advocate, I have developed and taught college-level communication and journalism classes, read my books and guest-lectured at universities and elementary schools, and been interviewed as a subject matter expert for TV, radio, and Internet media.
Since 2021, I have been senior writer for Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, in Atlanta. There I serve as an in-house storyteller, interviewing cancer survivors, care providers, researchers—and shaping their experiences into fascinating and inspiring stories that touch other people.
As a professional storyteller, I am skilled at creating powerful, compelling stories. I applied my skills to my own story, both in how I tell it to others and, most importantly, how I explain it to myself. This is why I am able to help others to reframe and tell their own stories as heroic tales, not tales of woe.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still have questions before joining? No problem! I've answered the most frequent questions below to help you decide whether this course is right for you.
Are the course lessons pre-recorded?
Each of the lessons includes a pre-recorded video, downloadable readings, and exercises. You can watch and read any time you want, with no need to show up at a specific time. Go at your own pace, in your own time. It's all about you!
What will I need to watch the lessons inside the course?
All you need is an Internet connection to stream the videos, and you can access the course on any desktop, mobile, or tablet device.
Will I need to purchase anything else inside the course?
No! Although I would be happy if you purchased my book Stonewall Strong because it offers an in-depth examination of emotional resilience and many stories to illustrate it, you do not need to purchase the book to successfully complete the course.
What exactly will the course do for me?
Becoming Stonewall Strong: Claim and Build Your Emotional Resilience will help you understand how to tap into the resilience you already have developed, while providing practical lessons on how to build it to face future challenges.
If I'm not happy with the course, can I get a refund?
I hope you will like the course, but if its content is not what you expected, you can leave your comments. No refund necessary since the course is FREE!
What is the course's ideal outcome?
The best take-away from the course is that it will help you to spend your energy enjoying your life today—not being controlled by memories of yesterday's challenges and traumas.
