How People Learn to Become Resilient
By Maria Konnikova
Perception is key to resilience: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as a chance to learn and grow? Illustration by Gizem Vural
Norman
Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University
of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research.
But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with
an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at
school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in
between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make
any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure
that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the
ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with
a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.
The
boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He
belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on
to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult
circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy
would later identify as “resilience.” (He is widely credited with being
the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many
years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on
those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol.
He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social
worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children
whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely
to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of
pride? “What I was saying was, ‘Can you identify stressed children who
are making it here in your school?’ ” Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview.
“There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came.
If I had said, ‘Do you have kids in this school who seem to be
troubled?,’ there wouldn’t have been a moment’s delay. But to be asked
about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and
making it even though they had come out of very disturbed
backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.”
Resilience
presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have
it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but
on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never
experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are.
It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other
environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do
you succumb or do you surmount?
Environmental
threats can come in various guises. Some are the result of low
socioeconomic status and challenging home conditions. (Those are the
threats studied in Garmezy’s work.) Often, such threats**—**parents with
psychological or other problems; exposure to violence or poor
treatment; being a child of problematic divorce—are chronic. Other
threats are acute: experiencing or witnessing a traumatic violent
encounter, for example, or being in an accident. What matters is the
intensity and the duration of the stressor. In the case of acute
stressors, the intensity is usually high. The stress resulting from
chronic adversity, Garmezy wrote, might be lower—but it “exerts repeated
and cumulative impact on resources and adaptation and persists for many
months and typically considerably longer.”
Prior
to Garmezy’s work on resilience, most research on trauma and negative
life events had a reverse focus. Instead of looking at areas of
strength, it looked at areas of vulnerability, investigating the
experiences that make people susceptible to poor life outcomes (or that
lead kids to be “troubled,” as Garmezy put it). Garmezy’s work opened
the door to the study of protective factors:
the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could
enable success despite the challenges they faced. Garmezy retired from
research before reaching any definitive conclusions—his career was cut
short by early-onset Alzheimer’s—but his students and followers were
able to identify elements that fell into two groups: individual,
psychological factors and external, environmental factors, or
disposition on the one hand and luck on the other.
In
1989 a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner published the
results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. She had followed a
group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from
before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d
monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero,
poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children
came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and
happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” Like Garmezy, she soon
discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the
same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior
problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health
problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the
remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young
adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success—and
they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.
What was it that set the resilient children apart? Because the individuals in her sample had been followed
and tested consistently for three decades, Werner had a trove of data
at her disposal. She found that several elements predicted resilience.
Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong
bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like
figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and
had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a
young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own
terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new
experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not
especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had
effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient
children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”:
they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their
achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators
of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control,
they scored more than two standard deviations away from the
standardization group.
Werner also discovered
that resilience could change over time. Some resilient children were
especially unlucky: they experienced multiple strong stressors at
vulnerable points and their resilience evaporated. Resilience, she
explained, is like a constant calculation: Which side of the equation
weighs more, the resilience or the stressors? The stressors can become
so intense that resilience is overwhelmed. Most people, in short, have a
breaking point. On the flip side, some people who weren’t resilient
when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They
were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as
much as those who’d been resilient the whole way through. This, of
course, raises the question of how resilience might be learned.
George
Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers
College; he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and has been
studying resilience for nearly twenty-five years. Garmezy, Werner, and
others have shown that some people are far better than others at dealing
with adversity; Bonanno has been trying to figure out where that
variation might come from. Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an
observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response
system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with
other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using
that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the
question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently
or effectively than others?
One of the central
elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you
conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and
grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,”
Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’
belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially
traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is
straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it
might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not
to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative
events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience,
including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as
terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad,
but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with
meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say,
or to closer ties with the community**—**then it may not be seen as a
trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more
likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than
those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it
resides in the event’s psychological construal.
It’s
for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic”
events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it
comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological
data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not
predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a
negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it
endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t
guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that
adversity becomes traumatizing.
The good news
is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or
less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In
research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that
teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in
positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less
emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how
they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to
better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting
effects.
Similar work has been done with explanatory styles—the techniques we use to explain events. I’ve written before about the research of Martin Seligman,
the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who pioneered much of the
field of positive psychology: Seligman found that training people
to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad
events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow
thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my
life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation,
rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically
successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control:
not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and
performing better but changing your locus from external to internal
leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective
work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then,
seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience
where there was none.
Unfortunately, the
opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely
to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors
very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.”
Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor
thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive
ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing
that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame
adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal
with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a
threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem;
you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.
In December the New York Times Magazine published an essay
called “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience.’ ” It pointed out that
the word is now used everywhere, often in ways that drain it of meaning
and link it to vague concepts like “character.” But resilience doesn’t
have to be an empty or vague concept. In fact, decades of research have
revealed a lot about how it works. This research shows that resilience
is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be taught. In recent years,
we’ve taken to using the term sloppily—but our sloppy usage doesn’t mean
that it hasn’t been usefully and precisely defined. It’s time we invest
the time and energy to understand what “resilience” really means.
