Born with the capacity? Resilience Re Visited

“Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists.” Maria Konnikova writes in her February New Yorker article, How People Learn To Be Resilient. “Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough never to experience any adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you are faced with obstacles, stress and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?”

I don’t know about Konnikova, but I’ve never met anyone who “was lucky enough never to experience any adversity.” Have you? After all, we have all lived through childhood, the teen years, marriage, the early parenting years, jobs, loss of every sort: the list is endless. In fact, to my way of thinking, to be alive is to experience both joy and adversity. There’s no way out of it. Sometimes a pile up of “stressors,”-- as Konnikova speaks of adversity—can feel like more than a person can bear.

 Konnikova addresses that issue. “What matters is the intensity and duration of the stressor.” That, according to scientists, seems to be the effective way resilience can be tested.

The study that Konnikova referenced in her article that interested me most was that of developmental psychologist, Emmy Werner. Werner, through her painstaking documentation and many years of follow- through, discovered that one third of the children she followed who had grown up in seriously adverse circumstances developed into “competent, confident and caring young adults.” The bottom line question was, what set these kids apart from the other two thirds who ultimately became wounded, destructive adults?

According to Werner, a child from a deprived background who demonstrated resilience might—with luck-- have met up with a particularly supportive adult: a teacher, a coach, a consistent mentor. But the surprising discovery was that the psychology of the one third of the children from deprived backgrounds who were found to be resilient, was different.

These children “tended to meet the world on their own terms. They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a positive social orientation. Most importantly,” Werner discovered, "these resilient children had . . . an internal locus of control: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. They saw themselves as orchestrators of their own fates.”

 An “internal locus of control.” “Orchestrators of their own fates.” Where did that awareness, that confidence, come from in traumatized kids: kids who had been abused, kids who had starved, kids who had little or no emotional support?

Genes? A gift from God? The accumulated knowledge of lifetimes? Whatever you believe, it is awesome that these kids had that gift. We should all be so wise! No whining, no blaming. Just getting on with it. That doesn’t mean no setbacks; it means understanding our setbacks as opportunities to learn, grow and to strengthen our ability to be compassionate.

 “Stressors “ can knock us for a loop. And if there are too many and the stress goes on over a sustained period of time, we can simply fold—whatever shape that takes for us. Still the evidence is clear that those who recover best and most quickly after a stomach-slam of suffering are those who have, as I noted in Resilience: Do We Have It? How Can We Get it? a “strong and unshakeable core of beliefs.”

Konnikova quotes clinical psychologist, George Bonanno. “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.” In other words trauma is in the mind and eye of the beholder. 

Bonanno also argues that the people who deal best with acute negative events are those who interpret them as opportunities to learn. (True, Mr Bonanno, but not until I have picked myself up off the floor.)

He goes on to say that the folks who do this best and soonest were “far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support” than those who had no “core of beliefs.”

The good news? According to Bonanno, is that we “can make ourselves less vulnerable by how we think about things.” We can learn to “reframe them in positive terms.”  

 We are definitely talking about the power of positive thinking here. We know this story; we may not be able to pull it off in our lives all that well, but we know this story for sure.

The power of positive thinking, (Dr. Norman Vincent Peale) used to be understood as a quasi/religious concept we could ponder. Nowadays study after scientific study have demonstrated its life-changing truth.

New to me are the results of Emmy Werner’s study, which demonstrated over years of observation that one third of the children she followed who came from abusive and poverty backgrounds did not learn the power of positive thinking, did not struggle to “reframe” their experiences. Instead, they were born with that power. Now that is something to ponder.

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Reminder: Beware of pointing out to a suffering friend the learning that might be gained from her experience. The friend has every right to deck you. Do  your best to remain compassionate; stay with her grief and allow her to discover whenever and whatever she may from the trauma.