How Resilient Are You?

George Bonanno, one of the leading researchers on resilience, defines resilience as the ability to maintain relatively stable and healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning in the face of adversity. He says that resilient individuals may still be upset and disturbed by a loss or a very difficult event but that their upset is short-lived and that after a few days or weeks they are able to go back to functioning in their usual way.

“Many people are exposed to loss or potentially traumatic events at some point in their lives, and yet they continue to have positive emotional experiences and show only minor and transient disruptions in their ability to function," he says.

Unfortunately, because much of psychology’s knowledge about how people cope with loss or trauma has come from people who sought treatment, theorists have often viewed resilience as either rare or pathological.

Bonanno says that among adults, only 10 to 15 percent of bereaved individuals experience chronic distress or prolonged grief after a loss. This is a much lower number than we might expect!

He describes some people as “hardy,” that is, able to withstand difficult events and move on. While he has mainly studied adults, perhaps we can also think about this in terms of teens and children.

Bonanno says that people who seem to be hardy are usually committed to finding meaningful purpose in life, that they possess the belief that one can influence one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and also the belief that one can learn and grow from both positive and negative events in life. He also says that people who are hardy are likely to be more confident and able to use active coping strategies as well as social support from the people around them.

Another attribute which has been found amongst people who prove to be resilient is the trait of self-enhancement. Interestingly, people who think well of themselves, and perhaps even exaggerate their positive attributes, often do better under difficult circumstances. This has been found to be particularly true following severe loss.

Research has been done on people who were near the World Trade Center on 9/11 in New York City as well as on Bosnian civilians who lived in Sarajevo after the Balkan civil war. In both cases, people who were high on the self-enhancement scale were rated by mental health professionals as being better adjusted than those who were not as likely to engage in self-enhancement.

People who are full of themselves, people who are what some of us might consider overconfident, may sometimes be annoying to be around—but it turns out that this trait can have benefits when it comes to weathering adversity!

Other researchers have found that certain pre-existing characteristics help people to weather adversity. For example, one study done during the pandemic found that people who have a sense of being able to affect others and their environment (called self-efficacy) are more likely to return to normal functioning after a significant loss. The team summarized the findings of their study saying that a high degree of self-efficacy served as a protective factor against depression and grief among the bereaved individuals who lost their loved ones due to Covid.^[i]

In his review of the professional literature on this subject, another researcher found that individuals who were characterized as having what is called openness, who have a tendency to accept new experiences, who feel less nervous through disappointments, and who believe in themselves, also fare far better following loss.

Similarly, individuals who are agreeable, those with conscientiousness traits, those who exercise their abilities and recognize their limitations, and those who set realistic goals all tend to have increased ability to persevere and persist in challenging situations.

In an interesting study on children and teens, it was found that those who have a tendency to ruminate and reflect on their experiences are both negatively and positively affected by this tendency when they are faced with an adverse event. As it turns out, while rumination on negative events can lead to depression, it can also facilitate processing, integration and making meaning out of the negative things that happen to us.

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One last way that people who seem to be resilient are observed to cope with adversity is through the use of positive emotion and laughter. Often the use of positive emotions after loss and other difficult experiences has been seen as a sign of an unhealthy level of denial. However, in recent years, research has shown that positive emotions can reduce levels of distress following difficult events and it is thought that their use need not necessarily be seen as unhealthy.

It seems that those cultures that have a tradition of telling jokes and funny stories about the deceased at a wake or funeral were on to something important years before the social scientists!

Loss and exposure to difficult events may be very painful, they may be difficult, and recovery may be lengthy—but there are ways to cope, and many, in fact most, people are resilient in the face of loss and adverse events.