Blog Post #28: Resilience Pt 1

What is resilience? Obviously something the people of America desperately needs right now. It is the power to adapt well to adversity. It is the process of coping with and managing tragedy and crisis in our life and the ability to bounce back from hard times whether these are natural disasters such as wildfires, floods tornadoes blizzards etc. with global warming we are going to see more of these. Or a president was turning our government upside down although certain forms of temperament may be inherited that may help people be more resilient in a crisis and although certain forms of psychiatric cognitive disorders may interfere with the learning of these skills, most of what makes up resilience is learned and can be taught. Resilience is basically a set of skills and attitudes not something that we inherited genetically.

Resilient  individuals are aware of their feelings and able to discharge and manage them as well as manage others in a crisis; resilience does not involve avoiding one's feelings but involves confronting and managing them. Will it also involve being able to use thinking as a way of managing emotion? Again the good news is that these skills and attitudes can be learned and taught.

Individuals handle adversity in many different ways, with different approaches and strategies that they have learned through their culture, their society and the family systems that they grew up in. In the next couple of blogs, I will talk about eleven of the common skills and attitudes that emerge in the face of adversity.

Ron Breazeale PhD