Resilient people
Posted by Pilar
Resilience comprises two different elements: the ability to keep it together when you are subject to great demands and pressures; and the ability to overcome difficulties, to learn from mistakes and to develop creatively, by turning difficult circumstances into opportunities.
The word resilience comes from the Latin resilio which means to turn round, to make a leap or to rebound, like elastic bands when they are stretched and then return to their initial shape. This concept was first used in physics; it was Michael Rutter who applied it to the social sciences in 1972. The first studies into resilience focussed on people who had found themselves in extreme situations: concentration camps, poor children living on the streets or women who were the victims of violence. Those of them who had been able to survive and to keep on living without throwing in the towel were termed resilient. A clarification may be in order here: resilience does not mean being invulnerable; resilient people suffer like anyone else. What sets resilient people apart is their ability to have a decent quality of life despite all the painful experiences which they have gone through.
What makes it possible for people to have a decent quality of life even when they have been born into abject poverty, or had parents who were alcoholics, or been abused as children? The answer was provided by Emmy Werner who, over the course of 32 years, carried out a study into people in the Hawaiian island of Kauai who had grown up in extremely unfavourable conditions. All the people who had been able to overcome their initial circumstances and to develop as human beings shared one thing in common: they had been able to rely on one person, whether a family member or not, who had unconditionally accepted them as they were, regardless of their temperament, physical appearance or their past. Boris Cyrulnik, one of the pioneers in the study of resilience, also reached the same conclusion. When he was six years old he managed to escape from a concentration camp after seeing both his parents die there. He lived in different shelters until he was finally adopted by a farming family who taught him to love life and literature.
More than two thousand years ago Heraclitus said: “We never bathe twice in the same river.” The same is also true of resilience. After going through a difficult time, we never return to the same starting point. In other words we are, fortunately, not elastic bands. All the difficulties or changes which we go through do influence us, and they can help to transform us. We know that they usually come at just the wrong time, although there is never really a right time, is there? The challenge we face is to consider these difficulties as an opportunity to give the best of ourselves.
