I am Resilient!

As I entered the lunchroom with my co-workers we began talking about a few students we have been working with.  The students we work with come from very stressful and dysfunctional situations. As we were talking about the hardships our students face, situations most of the staff would have a very hard time imagining, but it made me think.  How can some people go through their lives hardship after hardship?  This is the life of many people on this planet and how do they continue to get through these situations.  We see students everyday, attending school to achieve a better life than they have lived so far in their lives or better lives than they witnessed their parents having. It is amazing what one human can get hit with and still be able to communicate, get to places they need to go, care for a child, and the list goes on, seemingly as though nothing has happened. In many of my students, I find it most interesting, what the human mind and body is capable of.  This is the idea of human psychological resiliency. What a great capacity rooted deep into each one of us. For better understanding of this term, Psychological Resiliency refers to an individual's capacity to withstand stressors and not manifest psychology dysfunction, such as mental illness or persistent negative mood.  Psychological stressors or "risk factors" are often considered to be experiences of major acute or chronic stress such as death of someone else, chronic illness, and sexual, physical or emotional abuse, fear, and unemployment and community violence.

I just feel this is an amazing characteristic human’s carry.  When we think we cannot imagine these major stressors happening or when we say we could never deal with these tough situations we see others dealing with, we can back up and say, we can!  We all have this incredible resiliency within ourselves.  So why then, do some people seem as though they are not coping?  The three explanations I have come up with is this:

1)    Is it an environmental result that either gives us a higher tolerance for stressful events? Does repeated risk factors give us a better resiliency? Or do we have less resiliency with  the lack of exposure to highly stressful events?

2)    Or is resiliency innate?  Do we have this built-in ability or inability to cope with stressful situations? 

3)    My own personal query: Is mental illness or risk-taking behavioural problems the result of a lack of resiliency?  This is an interesting question to ponder and I am challenged, it may be a question that is unanswerable, however, we can look to find what others have decided about our human capacity to be resilient in the toughest situations.

Some therapeutic approaches to intervening with at-risk children and youth come from promoting resiliency as a skill.  This skill is believed to be a technique that will help children cope in order to succeed in school.  It is used as a way to teach coping strategies, which is where the terms coping and resiliency become interchangeable, which, I believe to be two separate ideas. Coping skills can be taught, but resiliency, we do not know at this point.  I want to say no. Are coping skills and resiliency different? We have read into the definition and theory of resiliency in humans, coping follows this path:

Coping is to face and deal with responsibilities, problems, or difficulties, especially successfully or in a calm or adequate manner. 

I like to believe our resiliency is one’s personal attachment and recognition of God. Are we following the path of solving problems before they emerge into bigger problems?  Perhaps without the vision of God, the path is less clear.

I would like to leave this question open-ended, I would like to leave it as an amazing aspect of Human Lives.  Next time you hear of a situation and think to yourself or say, “I could never deal with that, or how do they still function each day,” think to yourself,

I AM RESILIENT!