What is RESILIENCY?

 Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.* 

It is important to remember that one’s ability to be resilient has absolutely nothing to do with how “mentally strong” a person is. At times, it is a challenge for every one of us to deal with the stressors and changes of life. Changes in family, relationships, work, or internal struggles with anxiety, stress, confusion and fears, or emptiness, are common and make life hard. Some are able to cope with it more without intervention, others struggle....the difference is one's resilience.

Resiliency is our internal ability to bounce back or navigate through life’s stressors and/or traumas. Life may still look different as we are experiencing stress or after a trauma has occurred, but 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.

The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University uses the concept of a balance scale or a see saw to further describe this with positive experiences/positive coping skills on one side and negative experiences/adversity on the other. With the fulcrum or the middle tipping point illustrating resiliency. This fulcrum can either tip the scales to positive or negative outcomes/experiences. The fulcrum/middle point starts at when we are born based on our genes/our DNA, and then it is shifted/moved over time, with negative or positive life experiences making it easier or more challenging to be resilient. There is a great video that illustrates this concept located here. This fulcrum can be shifted at any age, meaning that it is never to late to build your capacity for resiliency.

Some additional important aspects of this concept. The term mental “strength” is often used when talking about resilience.  It is often impossible to think about and talk about strength without implying a “weakness”, or an attempt to avoid “weakness”.  And often the analogies, metaphors, and language that are used to describe resilience assume able-bodiedness, words and descriptions like “resilience muscles” are used often.  We also have to remember that everyone has different abilities and different goals for their abilities.  We have to look at resilience through a lens that not only accounts for but embraces peoples, physical, cultural, and individual differences.  When the concept of resilience focuses on one own strength, is also leaves out the larger social issues that perpetuate violence and puts the responsibility of “bouncing back” only on the person who has been harmed.

*Merriam-Webster medical definition of "resilience."

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resilience#medicalDictionary]