Resilience: Adaptive and restorative coping through life’s challenges.[1]
Although circumstances and events will vary for each person, everyone encounters challenges throughout their life. How individuals adapt to these challenges will significantly influence their healing and recovery as well as how they face future challenges.
Figure 1.2 illustrates the factors and characteristics that resilient individuals often highlight. These factors are categorized into:
Community: Social support networks that surround and support all the other factors.[2]
Identity: What makes a person who they are.
- Faith and Spirituality: connection to something bigger than oneself.
- Meaning and Purpose: what gives a person a reason for living.
- Moral Compass: an internal understanding of right and wrong.
Perception and Focus: How a person internally perceives and externally interacts with the world.
- Taking Responsibility: taking action toward one’s own well-being.
- Realistic Optimism: seeing the reality of difficult circumstances with hope.
- Mental and Emotional Flexibility: the ability to see events from varying perspectives and creatively problem-solve.
Factors Explained
Community: Receiving empathetic and practical support from family, friends, and loved ones is resilient people’s first line of defense.
Social support networks consist of everyone in a survivor’s life, including family, friends, and colleagues with whom they have a close relationship. Evaluating and intentionally developing this support network is critical for building resilience. Having people who are there for you during a crisis can strengthen all other resilience factors. Social support systems can also provide vital accountability for decisions and reactions, helping to manage emotionally charged responses.
Effective communication is key in utilizing this resilience factor. It is essential to communicate to others how they can support you, what your expectations might be (even if they change with time), and how your preferred coping mechanisms work to aid your recovery.
Identity Factors:
Faith and Spirituality[3]: Whether you consider yourself religious or not, studies show that faith and spirituality are crucial factors for resilient individuals. Those with a defined foundation of faith readily recognize how much their belief systems impact other areas of their lives. Faith and spirituality provide meaning and purpose and inform one’s moral compass. These factors often influence social support systems and enhance cognitive flexibility. They also serve as a source of optimism for those who believe in and hope for a day when all that is broken will be restored.
Meaning and Purpose: Meaning and purpose are often essential in helping individuals endure difficult circumstances.[4] To find meaning in adversity, one must cultivate mental and emotional flexibility and realistic optimism. Many resilient individuals also attribute their ability to find meaning and purpose in difficult circumstances to their faith beliefs.
Moral Compass:[5] A moral compass is an internal guide that helps decide right and wrong. While resilient people share this characteristic, having a rigid moral compass and a strong sense of justice can also have downsides. In times of crisis, many people feel they must choose between two wrong options without a better path. In these “grey areas,” a moral compass must be paired with other resilience factors, such as mental and emotional flexibility, faith, and purpose.
Interactive Factors:
Taking Responsibility: Resilient people are courageous, overcoming fear and uncertainty to take personal responsibility for their well-being. Taking responsibility empowers them to work through and with their fears instead of allowing anxiety to stop their momentum. It leads to active problem-solving instead of overanalyzing and mental paralysis.
Mental and Emotional Flexibility: When facing challenging circumstances, people often become stuck in a narrow mindset. Resilient individuals are flexible in their thinking. They possess the innate ability to view a situation from perspectives beyond the immediate emotions. This flexibility equips them to be adaptable and open-minded, which is incredibly helpful for solving problems in the moment and for long-term healing.
When paired with optimism, mental and emotional flexibility helps people evaluate challenging situations in ways that lead to positive change. Many individuals we have cared for who show this kind of flexibility express gratitude for the opportunity to learn from difficult experiences. They tend to humbly accept criticism in a way that encourages personal and professional growth in themselves and others. Cognitive and emotional flexibility helps individuals maintain a calibrated inner moral compass, ensuring that it does not become rigid and unforgiving towards themselves or others.
Realistic Optimism: Optimism is not just about looking for a silver lining but about realistically assessing and identifying the challenges within a situation while maintaining a genuine belief that things will eventually turn out well. Realistic optimism keeps your mind focused and helps prevent feelings of hopelessness. It fosters a sense of hope and positivity in the face of challenges. Optimism is closely linked with finding meaning in difficult situations. A person who can see hope amid hardship is resilient and can also help boost the resilience of those around them.
What resilience factors do you see in yourself?
Which factors do you need to develop?
What can you do in the next month to build your resilience?
Further Resources:
A Field Guide for Survivor Centered Care
Pursuing Wholeness: A Reflection Journal for Holistic Formation
[1] Josie Gwin. 2024. “Faith and Resilience.” Ph.D Research. Unpublished Manuscript.
[2] Anthony Charuvastra and Marylene Cloitre. 2008. “Social Bonds and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Annual Review of Psychology vol. 59: 4
[3] Southwick and Charney. 2023, Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, 110
[4] Viktor Frankle, 2014. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 99
[5] David Chandler, 2013. “Resilience Ethics: Responsibility and the Globally Embedded Subject, 184