Medically Reviewed by:
Medical Director, Compassion Recovery Center
Healthcare Writer
Licensed Psychologist (LP), Compassion Recovery Center
Healthcare Writer
Licensed Psychologist (LP), Compassion Recovery Center
Resiliency or resilience is the characteristic associated with people who respond well to stressors and who recovery quickly from trauma, mental health setbacks, and grief. For example, individuals with high resiliency are better-able to move through treatment, better able to put life into perspective, and more likely to seek healthy and healing coping strategies when faced with difficulties and life problems. It’s also more common than many people think. For example, the adverse childhood experiences study shows that people who experience traumatic experiences before the age of 16 are 63% less likely to have resilience than they would facing those same experiences as adults. Yet, 70% of adults have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience.
Most of us show some signs of resilience and working on building and expanding those traits can help us to navigate future mental health problems and battles. That’s true no matter where you are in your life and what you are building yourself out of.
Knowing that you can take on challenge is a critical part of resilience. It means that you know that when you spill milk, all you have to do is clean it up, no fuss, just a quick fix to a relatively simple problem. Understanding that you are competent and that you can take steps to solve problems when they appear will make you more resilient.
Often, that means building and working on your self-image as a competent person. Someone who can fix things. Here, interpersonal relationships are one of the easiest ways to practice this, because ruptures always happen in interpersonal relationships. Here, you can start learning skills to acknowledge, resolve, and remediate problems in those relationships. Counselors and therapists will also start you out on learning how to deal with and manage your own emotional responses.
This is closely linked to the previous trait of knowing you are competent. However, coping means putting coping mechanisms into place and coping in healthy fashions. That means turning to healthy processes and steps that you know will make you feel better when things go wrong. For example, if you’re feeling bad, going out and going for a walk, learning new skills, learning better emotional regulation, building routine, and asking for help. Good coping strategies depend on what the specific problem is, but people who are resilient work to identify them and put them into action whenever something goes wrong.
That means you look at the problem and figure out what will make you feel better long term and then try to stick to that as much as you can.
Everyone needs support. That’s also true for people who are resilient. Many of us gain strength from our networks and having people to talk to, to lean on, and to ask for help from makes us that much more resilient. People who are better-able to withstand trauma, mental health disruptions, and setbacks are those who have good social networks and strong friendships.
Of course, you don’t want to build social networks or meet friends because they are good for your resilience. However, it’s important to realize that socializing and spending time with others is an important part of your mental health and to invest it in.
Knowing who and what you are is an important part of feeling good about yourself. Knowing what you are contributing is also part of that. For example, people who struggle with substance use disorders often struggle with the ego, in that they feel bad about themselves and may not have a real sense of self. Most of us are also raised with the idea that we have to contribute in order to be valued. Knowing where and how that happens will help you to have the sense of self you need to cope with change and to be resilient. For example, many people work to build this by doing volunteer work and by contributing at self-help meetings and groups.
At the same time, it’s important to work to decouple your sense of self-worth and value from your ability to produce or contribute. Often, you’ll be more valued for who you are as a person, for providing comfort, for being someone to talk to, for making people happy, than you ever will be for your ability to sweep a floor in a meeting or take care of people physically. Both can be good, but it’s important to step back and see what matters for you.
Many people with mental health problems feel isolated and alone. It can feel like you’re an outsider. Yet, 21.1 percent of the American population aged 12 or older or 59.3 million people qualify for a mental illness diagnosis. Empathy affects you on an interpersonal scale in that you’re better able to interact directly with others and to form meaningful and deep connections. It also allows you to better understand why people say and do the things that they do. It also affects you on a larger scale because you’re better able to see that people all have something going on, that you are not alone, and that mental health impacts a very large number of people. With that in mind, you can better put your own problems into perspective and see them as a treatable and normal part of life rather than feeling overwhelmed and singled out.
Emotional regulation is a key skill for recovery from almost any kind of mental health problem including substance use disorders. Here, most therapists will put you into specific types of emotional regulation training, such as stress management, anger management, or general emotional regulation. The idea is that you should be able to step back from emotions and allow them to pass without allowing them to control you. For many of us, that’s a big step. But, it’s a key in resilience, because it means you’ll be able to see emotions for what they are, you won’t lose control of your actions when bad things happen, and you’ll be more in control, even of significant emotions.
Setting perspective means you’ll have the option to understand the context and the real impact of things. That means setting perspective and realistic expectations for everything. For example, for yourself. Resilient people understand their own capabilities and set expectations that match. They don’t decide whether they will be able to go to the gym every day or suddenly be able to keep their house tidy after months of burnout and being unable to do so. They create small steps and work their way forward and adjust expectations as capabilities change. That’s also true for outcomes from therapy and treatment. Resilient people don’t expect magic or quick fixes. They expect to work hard and to see slow improvement over time.
Resilience can look different depending on the situation. However, resilient people often show awareness of themselves and others, ability to adapt to change, a realistic approach to life and problem-solving, and the intent to find healthy solutions. All of that is learnable and you can work towards building and improving those skills as you go into treatment for your mental health.
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