What is Resilience?

While there is some debate amongst researchers regarding how to define resilience, most people are likely familiar with the following definition –

“the ability of an individual to recover quickly from the psychological effects of an adverse event”

. 1 Nearly every time I’ve heard someone talk about resilience in a podcast or interview or on social media, it’s almost always synonymous with the concept of one’s ability to ‘bounce back’ quickly. But when we apply this understanding of resilience to the context of trauma, it doesn’t quite fit. It’s very possible that you may not want to ‘bounce back’ to where you were before you experienced trauma. Or maybe you experienced trauma as a very young child and there is no known healthy resilient ‘before’ for you to bounce back to. Defining resilience as your ability to bounce back quickly assumes a few things including that you had a positive, healthy baseline to begin with. That may not be true for you. The idea of bouncing back also has an element of measurement to it – we are somehow quantifying the bounce. And, if we can be really honest, the bouncing back is measured by outcomes defined by society’s understanding of success. Which isn’t accurate. If we take resilience as defined above, I was a whopping resilience failure for a very long, weary and aching 7 years of my life. I didn’t have much to show for myself. I certainly wasn’t ‘bouncing back’ in any terms that at all resemble quickly. And yet, those 7 years unlocked a level of resilience and grit and tenacity that I didn’t know I had and arguably I never would have developed had I not gone through those seemingly never-ending 7 years.

There was a time, a bleak and wretched time, in my life when all I could do was hold on for dear life. Sometimes I didn’t even have the strength to hold on to anything – I just simply existed. To be completely honest, during this time I was very skeptical about everything that was happening in my therapy and treatment. But because I trusted my team, especially my wonderful EMDR therapist, I made a commitment to myself that I would always try anything asked of me. I never said no in therapy. And I was asked to do some very painful, difficult and deeply uncomfortable things. But I just had to let go and trust the process. And, trust me when I say this, it felt like everything I did led to more pain and absolutely no gain. Here’s how I described this in my impact statement that I read out in criminal court on the day the perpetrator was sentenced:

“Its like this. The doctors know somewhere in my body I have a broken bone that needs to be reset, but they’re not really sure where it is. So, every week they break one bone and then send me home. It hurts like hell, I hate it, but I either remain broken or I have to keep going back for more fresh hurts in order to heal. Who would want to put themselves through that?”