Developing Resilience
Trait, Outcome, or Practice?
We can see resilience as a trait, an outcome, or a practice. Each of these different lenses gives us a different frame for the way we understand resilience and how to become resilient in the face of trauma, stress, or grief.
Resilience as a trait is the “stiff upper lip” or the ability to stay unaffected by problems. Which of course implies that you either ARE or are NOT a resilient person and there’s not much (if anything) that you can do about it. Not a very hopeful message.
Resilience as an outcome means you try a number of different things hoping to somehow receive or create resilience at the end. This implies that we just have to keep pushing toward the end goal of achieving resilience. Again, it creates a binary where we either have resilience or not and implies that if you don’t have it, you haven’t done enough yet.
Now, after several years of doing this work both personally and professionally, I have come to understand resilience as a practice. It takes intention and awareness to choose to use resilience practices to navigate intense situations like trauma, grief, or stress. As a practice, resilience isn’t something you ARE or ACHIEVE, it’s something you can always access when you need it.
Implications for Growth
If it’s true that resilience is a practice, and I do believe it is, then that implies resilience is a set of skills and habits that we can learn, use, and improve at.
I think this is incredibly important because when we’ve been through something very heavy, we don’t always have the capacity to use these habits and skills in the moment, but we can develop the capacity through practice.
Practice means that it’s always possible to start, even in small ways. We can choose to engage in resilience habits individually or in community. As a practice, this also means that whether or not we participate in resilience habits at any given time, we are not fundamentally defined by that choice as someone who either is or is not resilient.
Resilience as a practice or a process also precludes the idea of us ever achieving resilience once and for all. Being resilient through one hardship does not automatically grant us resilience through future difficulty. And we can develop resilience habits that work well at home but still need different practices in our jobs.
Resilience Centers Strengths
From the beginning of the research into resilience, the term was used to look at a person’s resources and not only at their mental health risk factors. Instead of just looking at what’s wrong with you, we can center the skills and habits that are healthy, supportive, and good.
A person’s resilience comes from a number of factors, both internal and external, and includes both individual and communal strengths.
These resilience factors can include things like friends and family, life satisfaction, having pets, hope for the future, and faith or religious belief. But it also includes biological and environmental factors outside of our control like our genetics, the number of cortisol receptors we have, our baseline emotional skills from our family of origin, and our attachments to others.
This is where the concept of resilience as a practice comes in. People without family, who have few friends, who have genetic predispositions to poor health, without a healthy family or origin can still learn and practice resilience to improve their outcomes.
Of course it will be easier for someone with a healthy, supportive community to learn and practice resilience skills, but it is possible for everyone.
The Most Important Resilience Factor Is…
A stable bond with a protective and well-functioning caregiver.
Great for people who were able to grow up with a supportive adult. But for those of us who did not have a safe, positive person as a child, it’s also an invitation and a reminder that we can still develop resilience although it may be harder.
This knowledge can help you recognize where you’re starting from. You can’t compare yourself to someone else who has had a different experience growing up. As you understand your baseline, you can have compassion and grace for yourself as you develop skills and habits that may never have been modeled for you by a supportive adult.
Resilience Skills
Emotion regulation skills
Cognitive reappraisal skills
Acceptance
Mindfulness
Mental and emotional flexibility
Naming values and morals
Faith, religion, or spirituality
Creating meaning, purpose, or mission
Altruism
Deepening relationships
Why Therapy Can’t Be Everything
(There’s More to Resilience)
As a therapist, I’m fully into the idea of therapy. But in the current day, it seems to be the solution for almost everything and that’s just not realistic. So here’s a very important caveat: if you don’t have safety, security, and your basic needs met, that needs to be the first step toward your healing and developing resilience.
When you’re coming out of trauma or grief and trying to develop your resilience skills, we need to start with safety and security.
You need a meaningful job that provides you with a living wage that can get you secure housing. You need health care that supports your wellness and meets your needs. You need enough physical and mental safety and assurance that your needs are met and will continue to be met before you can do the internal work of exploring your values, practicing mindfulness, and moving toward your fullest potential.
Therapy can help you manage your mental health even if you have socioeconomic insecurity, but therapy can also be used as a cover for the structural inequities that you’re facing. Similarly, we can’t heal from a traumatic environment while we are still in that environment. Many trauma responses are helpful and adaptive for you to survive in a bad space. Healing those responses can put you in more danger.