Above All Else, Resilient.

We are flexible self-regulators and we can be ok.

I recently accepted my offer of admission to a masters program; a clinical counseling degree specializing in early childhood mental health. Essentially, I’m on the track of becoming a child and family therapist who also does research. I actually do use what I learned in college all the time; in reflecting on these few years since, two particular pieces of information stick out as being the most important and which demand greater attention. The first: a single positive, influential adult figure in a child’s life can greatly offset the negative effects of childhood adversity; second, that humans are above all else, resilient. Meaning, that most of the time, most people turn out alright. I can hear my former professor of Abnormal Psychology cheering.

Messages of resilience are still out there, circulating through the zeitgeist. And yet, we would do well to receive more such messages: may we remember resilience. Messages of the validation of pain abound, in the form of identifying various types of trauma or childhood adversity that you think is still affecting you, and encouragement to seek therapeutic treatment. (I did write this a year ago, The Pathology of Pathologizing, if you want more on this topic.) Validation is indeed an essential part of moving past pain or challenge, but it is only the first step. What we do with our pain, and where we go after, is the ground resilience paves. That ground is good territory for digging into.

One of the most frequent critiques of the younger generations is that we are entitled, overly anxious, and are going to be ruined by social media. I think that at one point in time, similar accusations have been hurled toward every generation (except perhaps, regarding social media): generational criticism is a tale as old as time. Right now, the younger generations are still in the hot seat. Researchers, journalists, and cultural commentators—left and right—are remarking on how damaging social media is; how depression and suicide rates have skyrocketed; how instant access to disturbing media numbs us to the world while simultaneously making us more sensitive and on edge than ever. There is an energy of we’re not gonna be ok, or, the kids aren’t gonna be ok that I’d like to speak to directly, here. Has anyone else noticed this?

Let me do a little championing of the younger generations in the next few paragraphs, and remind us of our resilience. To the Boomers and Gen Xers in this audience, please join us—you’re still resilient too, and may even know it better than we do.

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Absolutely terrible things happen every day. Every day, people incur unbelievable suffering at the hands of great evil or of no evil at all—life is just really brutal sometimes. Most of us have experienced soul-crushing loss of some kind, and been swept into grief so cavernous we thought we would never make it out.

And yet, here we are. We made it here, somehow. And those people, who have suffered more adversity than we could fathom surviving? They’re here too—they made it too, somehow.

George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia whose research focuses on trauma and resilience. In the introduction of his 2021 paper titled “The resilience paradox”, Bonanno summarizes, “decades of research show that the most common outcome following potential trauma is a stable trajectory of healthy functioning, or resilience.”

Take that in—the most common outcome that occurs after experiencing trauma (what he calls a ‘PTE’—potentially traumatic event) is resilience.

Naturally, these finding have invited skepticism, which science loves. The skepticism has encouraged a robust body of resilience research, and a recent review of such research—67 analyses of outcome trajectories following potentially traumatic events (PTEs), to be specific—show that “two-thirds of participants show the resilience trajectory…resilience is consistently the majority outcome.”¹

In other words, most of us most often respond to trauma or adversity with the ability to adapt and grow after it. That’s really cool.

Despite knowing the high prevalence of resilient outcomes, researchers have a hard time pinpointing what makes a person resilient. The variety of reported “predictors” of resilience just don’t reliably lead us to be able to predict who will be resilient and in what situation (Bonanno, 2021). Here are some of those oft-cited predictors: “personality variables, supportive resources, financial and educational assets, coping and emotion regulation strategies, minimal search for meaning, and the experience and expression of positive emotions”²

So, naturally, psychologist researchers have set out to find what actually predicts resilient outcomes.

A main reason why it’s difficult to predict resilient outcomes is that behavioral responses to trauma (PTEs) usually vary greatly, within individuals and across situations.³ In essence, you tend to respond to the death of a loved one differently than you would to childhood neglect or someone bombing your home. Different situations call for different responses—we adapt differently, based on what’s happening, and what we have access to. While in one situation, emotional repression may be adaptive for survival, in another it may be profoundly maladaptive. It’s context dependent.

Bonanno surmises, if we can’t use predictors like “adequate financial resources” to predict resilient outcomes, there must be a multi-component mechanism by which resilience operates within us: “some way of working out, moment by moment, what the best response might be and then engaging in that response.”⁴

This mechanism is referred to as “flexible self-regulation.” This is how we figure out what to do in a given difficult situation to get through it with a resilient outcome. Flexible self-regulation is comprised mainly of the “flexibility sequence” and a “flexibility mindset.”

If you’re still with me, let’s go through what Charles Burton and George Bonanno suggest is the “flexibility sequence” for flexible self-regulation.⁵ Paraphrased:

1. “Context Sensitivity — where you work out the demands of a particular situation, which guide your responses.⁶ “What do I need to do?”

2. Repertoire — where you choose a regulatory response that will best meet the specific challenges you are facing, right now. “What do I need to do?” becomes “What am I able to do?”

3. Feedback Monitoring — asking yourself, “is this working?”, and either continuing on with your strategies, adjusting them, stopping or swapping them out as necessary.”

Since different situations call for different responses, and what works right now may not work tomorrow—the way we increase our likelihood of resilient outcomes is by cycling through this sequence as many times as necessary and adjusting consistently and accordingly. We exercise our ability to flexibly respond.

The second main theorized aspect of predicting resilience has been dubbed—in this research I’m covering, anyways—the flexibility mindset. In short, personality traits that motivate people to engage with the traumatic memory/problem itself instead of repressing it are associated with better outcomes. You do have to face your problem, even if it’s hard. Understandably, a more optimistic yes I can do this and be ok attitude lends itself to a mindset that is more able to flexibly respond to the problem at hand.

To conclude: most people are generally resilient. In Bonanno’s words—“If flexibility is the mechanism of resilience, and most people are resilient, then most people should be reasonably flexible.”⁷ Despite the inevitability of pain, challenge, and trauma, we’ve got a pretty good chance of adapting and being ok. (Still, more comprehensive resources and information for underserved groups would really help, but that’s a different topic.)

How then, may we foster more resilience in our children and the incoming generations? 

Well, by remembering that we are already designed to overcome challenge. We are able to appraise challenges as they come and respond accordingly and constructively. We must also have faith that the younger generations will figure it out. We will handle our unique challenges that the world has doled for us, and largely find resilient outcomes. Frankly, we must.

Holding faith that we can figure things out and be flexible self-regulators is a better basis to work from than believing we are doomed and continuing to spiral downhill. We don’t know what’s around the corner, but we can choose to believe that we can figure it out.

All my love to all the generations,

Maggie

1. Galatzer-Levy, I. R., Huang, S. H., & Bonanno, G. A. (2018). Trajectories of resilience and dysfunction following potential trauma: A review and statistical evaluation. Clinical Psychology Review, 63, 41–55. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2018.05.008

2. Bonanno, G. A., Romero, S. A., & Klein, S. I. (2015). The temporal elements of psychological resilience: An integrative framework for the study of individuals, families, and communities. Psychological Inquiry, 26(2), 139–169. doi: 10.1080/1047840X.2015.992677 [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to loss and potential trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7, 511–535. doi: 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526 [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

3. Bonanno, G. A. (2021). The resilience paradox. European Journal of Psychotraumatoly. 2021; 12(1): 1942642. Published online 2021 Jun 30. doi: 10.1080/20008198.2021.1942642

4. Bonanno, G. A. (2005). Resilience in the face of loss and potential trauma. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 135–138. doi: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00347.x [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

5. This sequence is taken directly from: Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591–612. doi: 10.1177/1745691613504116 [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

6. Aldao, A. (2013). The future of emotion regulation research: Capturing context . Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 155–8. doi: 10.1177/1745691612459518 [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

7. Bonanno, G. A. (2021). The resilience paradox. European Journal of Psychotraumatoly. 2021; 12(1): 1942642. Published online 2021 Jun 30. doi: 10.1080/20008198.2021.1942642