Resilience: bouncing back vs. moving through

When we talk about resilience there is a lot of talk of returning to “normal”, this can be hard and sometimes unrealistic, what if the normal that existed before is no longer an option? Resiliency is often thought of or defined as “our internal ability to bounce back”. But I would add an important “AND/OR”. Resilience can also be about navigating through life’s stressors and/or traumas. Life still will probably look different as we are experiencing stress or after trauma has happened, the important part about resilience is not that you are “back to normal”, but that you have redefined what you want your version of “normal” to be.

Resilience also is often used simultaneously with “mental strength”, and because we are human beings who tend to think in all-or-nothing pairs, good vs. bad, normal vs. abnormal, failure vs success. We then pair strength with weakness which means that if you are not resilient aka strong you are weak. Repeat after me, “there is no such thing as mental weakness”, only different states of navigating through tough things. And sometimes part of the “navigating through” looks messy, it looks like crying, yelling, dissociating, freezing, or not knowing what to do.

So why focus on resilience if it’s still messy? For two reasons (in my opinion), the focus on resilience acknowledges that there is something that we are navigating through, as stress or trauma, and can give a reason for why things are feeling messy (this is the concept of being trauma-informed or trauma-aware). Resilience is also the hope that we are navigating through something, that even though it might look and feel messy we are moving, we are focused on what can be vs. being stuck in what is. This is to me why the cliched images of flowers blooming through rocks resonate so much with this concept. It is difficult to navigate through something, but it important to have the hope that something, maybe something beautiful will be a part of the process.