Adverse situations leave people with strong emotions and an intense sense of uncertainty. However, people tend to adapt well over time to life-changing events and stressful situations. What enables them to do this is resilience, an ongoing process that takes time and effort. Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, crisis, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace or financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences. People could be more resilient at one point in their lives and less during another, and they may be more resilient in some aspects of their lives than others. That said, it can have a different meaning between people, companies, cultures, and society. There is specific research into resilience in different areas, such as, social work, children and families, communities, organisations, and adolescents. However, there is also criticism of the concept of resilience and its relationship with vulnerability.
Research has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary. People commonly demonstrate resilience. Being resilient does not mean that a person does not experience difficulty or pain. Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity in their lives. In fact, it is common for the path to resilience to involve considerable emotional pain. Resilience is not a trait that people either have or don’t have. It involves behaviours, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop.
In positive psychology, hope, bravery and zest have the most extensive relationship with positive adaptation in the face of challenge, leading researchers to think that processes such as determination, social connectedness, emotional regulation, and others are involved. However, they don’t know whether resilience impacts our strengths or vice versa. Post-traumatic growth may help us build character strengths, showing the interconnection between resilience and positive psychology.
The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions holds that happiness is one emotion that helps us become more explorative and adaptable in our thoughts and behaviours, creating enduring resources that help us live well. People who frequently experience positive emotions such as happiness grow more satisfied with their lives by creating resources, such as ego resilience, which help them tackle a wide variety of challenges.
A key social work principle is that people should accept responsibility for one another’s wellbeing. Identifying resilience-building factors can help at-risk clients in the following ways: promoting their competence and improving their health, helping them overcome adversity and navigate life stressors, boosting their ability to grow and survive. Some strategies and skills social workers rely on to boost the resilience of their clients include:
- Providing clients with safety and necessities when faced with adversity or traumatic events; for example, talking calmly with distressed individuals, reassuring them of their capabilities and ability to get through their troubles.
- Listening, being present and honest, and learning from individuals’ stories while acknowledging their pain.
- Promoting interpersonal relationships, attachments, and connections between people in a community or society.
- Encouraging them to view themselves as a valued member of society.
- Modelling resilient behaviours, such as dealing with work stress in healthy ways.
In family resilience, it is proposed that the concept involves nine dynamic processes that interact with one another and help families strengthen their ties while developing more resources and competencies:
- Making sense of adversity – e.g., normalising distress and contextualising it, viewing crises as manageable and meaningful
- Having a positive outlook – e.g., focusing on potential, having hope and optimism
- Spirituality and transcendence – e.g., growing positively from adversity and connecting with larger values
- Flexibility – e.g., reorganising and reestablishing to provide predictability and continuity
- Connectedness – e.g., providing each other with mutual support and committing to one another
- Mobilising economic and social resources – e.g., creating financial security and seeking support from the community at large
- Clarity – e.g., providing one another with information and consistent messages
- Sharing emotions openly – including positive and painful feelings
- Solving problems collaboratively – e.g., through joint decision-making, a goal-focus, and building on successes
The key focus of community resilience is on identifying and developing both individual and community strengths and establishing the processes that underpin resilience-promoting factors. Its goals also include understanding how communities leverage these strengths together to facilitate self-organisation and agency, which then contributes to a collective process of overcoming challenges and adversity. While community strengths vary between groups, a few characteristics have a central role in helping communities develop resilience. These strengths, processes, and attributes include:
- social networks and support
- early experience
- people–place connections
- engaged governance
- community problem-solving
- ability to cope with divisions
A culture of organisational resilience relies heavily on role-modelling behaviours. Even a few credible and high-profile individuals in a company demonstrating resilient behaviours may encourage others to do the same. These behaviours include:
- persisting in the face of adversity
- putting effort into dealing with challenges
- practising and demonstrating self-aiding thought patterns
- providing support to and mentoring others
- leading with integrity
- practising open communication
- showing decisiveness
The best-known positive psychology framework for resilience is Seligman’s 3Ps model. These three Ps – personalisation, pervasiveness, and permanence – refer to three emotional reactions that we tend to have to adversity. By addressing these three, often automatic, responses, we can build resilience and grow, developing our adaptability and learning to cope better with challenges. The 3Ps are:
- Personalisation – a cognitive distortion that’s best described as the internalisation of problems or failure. When we hold ourselves accountable for bad things that happen, we put a lot of unnecessary blame on ourselves and make it harder to ‘bounce back’.
- Pervasiveness – assuming negative situations spread across different areas of our life; for example, losing a contest and assuming that all is doom and gloom in general. By acknowledging that bad feelings don’t impact every life domain, we can move forward toward a better life.
- Permanence – believing that bad experiences or events last forever, rather than being transient or one-off events. Permanence prevents us from putting effort into improving our situation, often making us feel overwhelmed and as though we can’t recover.
These three perspectives help us understand how our thoughts, mindset, and beliefs affect our experiences. By recognising their role in our ability to adapt positively, we can start becoming more resilient and learn to recover from life’s challenges.
A combination of factors contributes to resilience. The key is to identify ways that might work well for each person. Many studies show that a primary factor for resilience is having caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family. Supportive and trusting relationships provide modelling and offer encouragement and reassurance that help build resilience in a person. Other factors associated with resilience that anyone can develop include:
• The ability to make realistic plans and take the steps necessary to carry them out.
• A positive view of themselves and confidence in their strengths and abilities.
• Communication and problem-solving skills.
• The ability to manage strong feelings and impulses.
People do not react the same way to the same traumatic and stressful life events. An approach to building resilience that works for one person may not work for another. Here are ten strategies to work on:
- Make connections: good relationships with family, close friends, and other relevant people. Accepting help and support from people who care and listen to others builds resilience. Some people find that even though they have suffered losses during a disaster, helping others makes them feel good about themselves.
- Avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems: you can’t undo the waters and winds of a hurricane or catastrophe, but you can change the way you interpret the hurricane. Try to see beyond the current crisis to how future circumstances might be a little better. Notice if there are subtle ways in which you might feel a little better as you work through difficult circumstances.
- Accept change as part of life: accepting circumstances that can’t be changed can help you focus on those that can be changed.
- Move toward goals: develop some realistic goals. Instead of focusing on tasks that seem difficult to achieve, ask yourself, “What can I accomplish today that will help me move in the direction I want to go?”
- Take decisive action: work through adverse situations as much as possible.
- Establish new routines as soon as possible, even if they have to be modified again if circumstances change.
- Seek opportunities for self-discovery: people often learn something about themselves and may find that they have grown as a result of battling loss.
- Nurture a positive view of yourself: reconceptualise the way you think about yourself. If you were in the disaster or catastrophe, you are a survivor, not a victim of it. Recognising your own strength and resources for dealing with difficult situations can help build self-confidence.
- Keep things in perspective: even when faced with painful events, try to view the stressful situation in a broader context and maintain a long-term perspective. Look to the future with optimism: An optimistic outlook allows you to expect good things to happen in life. Try to visualise what you want instead of visualising what you fear.
- Take care of yourself: pay attention to your own needs and feelings and address them as much as possible.
Other ways to strengthen resilience are:
- To write about our deepest thoughts and feelings related to the traumatic experience or other stressful events in our lives.
- Meditation and spiritual practices help people build connections to restore hope.
- Learning from the past: focusing on past experiences and sources of personal strength can help build present and future coping strategies. Asking yourself questions such as:
▪ What types of events have been most stressful for me?
▪ In what ways do these events typically affect me?
▪ When I am in pain, does it help me to think about the people who are important in my life?
▪ Who have I turned to for support when going through a traumatic or stressful experience?
▪ What have I learned about myself and my interactions with others during difficult times?
▪ Has it been helpful for me to help someone else going through a similar experience?
▪ Have I been able to overcome obstacles? How?
▪ What has helped me feel optimistic about the future?
- Staying flexible: resilience involves maintaining flexibility and balance in life as a person works through stressful circumstances and traumatic events. This happens in a variety of ways, including:
▪ Allowing yourself to experience strong emotions and also realising that you need to avoid experiencing them in order to continue functioning.
▪ Retreating and taking action to address your problems and meet the demands of daily life, and also getting away from others and re-energising your life.
▪ Spending time with loved ones to get support and encouragement and also nurture yourself.
▪ Relying on others and also resting in yourself.
- Places to go for help: getting help when you need it is crucial to building resilience. Beyond caring family and friends, people find help by turning to:
- Self-help and support groups: sharing information, ideas and emotions helps you not feel alone, to reaffirm yourself and to incorporate new learning.
- Books and publications by people who have successfully handled adverse situations. These stories may motivate readers to find a strategy that can help them personally.
- Online resources: information on web pages can be a source of ideas, although the quality of the information varies depending on the pages consulted.
It is important for a person to get professional help if they feel that they cannot function or perform basic activities of daily living as a result of an adverse situation or a stressful experience.
The concept of vulnerability can be a powerful analytical tool for describing states of susceptibility to harm, powerlessness, and marginality in both physical and social systems, and for guiding the normative analysis of actions designed to enhance well-being through reduction of risk. However, mainstream resilience thinking downgrades issues related to social stratification and unevenly distributed harms in favour of the development of strategies of adaptation to crises framed as both inevitable and unavoidable. Rather than addressing the fundamental causes of vulnerabilities, their formation and persistence, it frames them as the product of non-linear or random events.
An example is viewing resilience in mental health as a positive character trait. It has been construed to direct blame upon individuals, rather than powerful social or political forces. It represents a shift from accepting that mental illness is multifaceted with no one clear cause. When mental strength is viewed as originating within an individual, any external sources of oppression or suffering are excused or disregarded.
By emphasising personal strengths and internal resources, the dominant discourse around resilience places the responsibility of ‘recovery’ with the individual. This aligns with neoliberal ideologies, which promotes individualism and self-reliance. However, when emphasis and value are placed on individualism and independence, it leads to reduced social safety nets. Resilience is seen as something akin to a personal strength, or a positive character trait. It excuses structural causes of distress. For people living with severe and enduring mental illness, being told they must be resilient, or more resilient is both insensitive and damaging, with the potential to cause medically-provoked harm. Service users, and psychiatric survivors, have created a vast and rich literature detailing their contention of the concept. When people are told they ‘need to be more resilient’, it minimises a multitude of complex external factors such as poverty and interpersonal relationships. It displaces blame onto the individual, ignoring any factors contributing to mental health challenges that are outside someone’s control.
Another criticism is that the Western concept of resilience assumes a tacit universal understanding of adversity and strength. This disregards cultural nuances and diverse perspectives and reinforces ethnocentric biases.
Numerous studies have explored the notion of resilience in nursing, and they consistently recommend organisations to reduce stressors and provide adequate support for nurses. However, despite these recommendations, there is a prevailing tendency to blame individual nurses for their lack of resilience. This blame places an unfair burden on the nurse to develop resilience without considering the impact of the work environment. It ignores that the responsibility for resilience should lie not only with the individual nurse but also with the organisations and systems that shape the working conditions.
Mental health services have a history of turning innocent and benign words into overused cliches. Resilience has now reached this status as the latest buzzword or cliché. Both overused and devalued by mental health services, it has become a weapon to add further hurt and distress to service users, and staff. In the future, alternative language for resilience therefore runs the risk of corruption and misuse and becoming jargon, or ‘weasel words’. It’s time to question what exactly we mean when we use the term resilience and what we are referring to, be it courage, bravery, or an acknowledgment of the devastating impact of external factors beyond someone’s control, and their ability to continue living.
Resilience is clearly something that can be cultivated by many people in adverse situations, but we also need to recognise that this option is not available to everyone. Therefore, we need to balance its importance in relation to vulnerability and the resources available to all individuals or groups to allow them to cope and move on. Maybe it’s time for a change in language and a call for institutions, business, frontline mental health professionals and service users to unite, all affected by the often unreasonable expectations of ‘bouncing back’ from adversity in a society and system that promotes neoliberal ideologies and unrealistic expectations. I propose that we need both, to learn to become more resilient if we can, and to have a public safety net which can catch us when we are vulnerable and unable to ‘bounce back’. If you feel you need to be more resilient, please use some of the ideas included here, but seek help if that’s too much for you.
Sources:
Fisher, J. & Jones, E. (2023) The problem with resilience. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 00, 1–4. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13220
Anthony McKeown, Dang Hai Bui & John Glenn (2022) A social theory of resilience: The governance of vulnerability in crisis-era neoliberalism, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 9:1, 112-132, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2021.1997616
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