Tough times breed resilience

Resilience is a word we use every day in mental health promotion and I’m keen to develop a deeper understanding of what this term really means.

Resilience has been explained to me as “bouncing back from difficulty with more smarts”, which seems simple enough, but what creates a resilient young person, or even adult or older person? After all, life’s difficulties don’t end when you hit adulthood.

I’ve been reading the evidence and speaking to lots of people about their concepts of resilience and how we get there. A piece of good reading I would recommend on the topic is Grit, published online by The Young Foundation.

Some key things strike me about resilience. To know you are resilient you have to demonstrate the capacity to get through hard times. Therefore it’s only by experiencing hard times that we learn to become resilient.

I’m guessing you have heard the term ‘cotton-wool children’, a theory that argues we are not teaching our children to learn risk analysis as we are removing all the potential risks they could experience, for example designing playgrounds where it is almost impossible to get hurt.

Are we doing the same thing emotionally? We protect our children from negative emotional experiences and don’t allow them to learn how to cope well when their emotions are overwhelming.

I’m a fair-skinned, freckly redhead and, yes, I was teased at school, so maybe those experiences helped shape me as a resilient adult.

I will admit that I’m simplifying the concept and there is some good evidence that shows particular skills are required to “get through stuff well”. These are: reflectiveness – the ability to be curious about your feelings and try to make sense of them; agency – the belief you are in control of your life; and relatedness – having at least one person in your life who you can count on and the ability to develop connections with others.

But all the same, shouldn’t we consider the tough times the main source of our later resilience?

Amanda Bradley, Northern Development Manager, Mental Health Foundation