Resilience (psychology)

In psychology, resilience, or resiliency, is the ability to adapt to stress and negative experiences in a healthy way. Just as courage is often misunderstood as an absence of fear, resilience is often misunderstood as the ability to withstand stress and negativity without negative emotional consequences. Resilience is, instead, the ability to effectively and healthily cope with the negative feelings that arise from negative experiences, while still being able to function in one’s daily life (though this also includes recognizing the need to take time off from everyday responsibilities in the face of extreme stress, such as bereavement time to mourn a death).

Brief History

Modern psychology has long embraced the idea that a healthy response to negativity allows for functioning in one’s life without denying the experience of negative emotion. The goal of psychoanalysis, developed in the early twentieth century first by Sigmund Freud and then his daughter Anna Freud, is in part to resolve internal tensions that result from negative experiences and to avoid the use of unhealthy defense mechanisms, such as denial or repression. Out of psychoanalysis came interests in child development and child psychiatry, which would both contribute to the formation of resilience studies in the early 1970s.

Many of the early studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s that first popularized the term "resilience" in the field took as their subject groups of children in difficult circumstances. Long-term studies like those of psychologist Emmy Werner followed such children into early adulthood and determined which children were able to overcome their upbringing and develop coping skills to be able to function well, whereas prior research had looked at factors that placed those children at risk for negative outcomes. Other researchers have examined the effects of singular potentially traumatic events rather than long-term exposure to adversity. Since the 1990s, resilience studies have expanded their focus to other subjects who have faced various hardships, including Holocaust survivors and racial minorities.

Overview

Early studies of resilience described it, implicitly or explicitly, as a personality trait or set of traits, but most resilience studies have come to describe it as a process. Therefore, it is not something an individual does or does not have, but something they can learn. It is key that the individual be able to respond to negative circumstances or a negative event by feeling negative emotions (fear, anger, distress, anxiety, hopelessness, sadness) but nevertheless taking action to cope with the results of the situation. People who are less resilient are more likely to blame themselves for the circumstances in which they find themselves, extrapolate from single events to their entire lives, or consider circumstances to be permanent or impossible to change; reframing such thoughts can help build resilience. Social factors like support from family, community, or local social or religious institutions significantly improve an individual’s resilience. Goal setting, communication, problem-solving, emotional regulation, fostering hope, self-care, and self-confidence are among the skills related to resilience. Twenty-first-century studies have increasingly focused on biological bases as well, especially the role of the nervous system in the stress response and epigenetic transmission of trauma responses. Resilience also appears to be context-dependent, as individuals may adapt well in certain areas of their lives but less well in others, for instance.

Cross-cultural psychologists have worked to get others in their field, and especially health care professionals and policymakers, to recognize that cultural differences in psychology are sufficiently relevant that a "one size fits all" approach to mental health policy can be detrimental. For instance, in the United States and Canada, resilience needs to be understood differently among racial minorities, in part because of the often overlooked role of resilience in dealing with both institutional and personal racism. Some studies of mental health among Native Americans, for instance, have suggested a cultural difference in how depression and resilience are experienced compared to White American culture: depression among Native Americans may be connected to genocide and colonial oppression of their people and the negative experiences of their culture as a whole, not just their individual experiences, in contrast with the expectations a non-Native mental health professional may have. Thus, resiliency in that context may involve a more community-oriented approach.

Bibliography

Belcourt-Dittloff, Annjeanette Elise, Resiliency and Risk in Native American Communities: A Culturally Informed Investigation. Diss. U of Montana, 2007. ScholarWorks at University of Montana. Web. 7 Sept. 2016.

"Building Your Resilience." American Psychological Association, 1 Feb. 2020, www.apa.org/topics/resilience/building-your-resilience. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Cozolino, Louis. Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains. Norton, 2016.

Desmond, Tim. Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy: Mindfulness-Based Practices for Healing and Transformation. Norton, 2016.

Fleming, John, and Robert J. Ledogar. "Resilience, an Evolving Concept: A Review of Literature Relevant to Aboriginal Research." Pimatisiwin 6.2 (2008): 7–23. PMC. Web. 7 Sept. 2016.

Hill, Daniel. Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model. Norton, 2015.

Levine, Peter A. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past—A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. North Atlantic, 2015.

McWilliams, Nancy. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structures in the Clinical Diagnosis. 2nd ed. Guilford, 2011.

"Resilience." American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/topics/resilience. Accessed 16 July 2024.