Ideas
Resilience - Weathering the storm
Published 24 July 2006
Why are some people so much better than others at bouncing back?
Shit happens. Life throws emotional, physical and professional crises at all of us. Naturally, some lives are more insulated than others (no one would claim David Cameron had a tough start in life). But everyone can get knocked for six. What differentiates people is their ability to bounce back. Psychologists, social scientists and policy wonks are increasingly interested in the notion of resilience. This means, for people or communities, pretty much what it means for objects or substances, which, according to the OED, is being "able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or being compressed".
The US psychologist Martin Seligman recently presented to the government's Strategy Unit a scheme designed to increase resilience among young people. The Penn Resiliency Programme gives adolescents the tools to cope with difficult circumstances by building optimism and enhancing longer-term thinking. It has proved highly effective as a protection against depression. But while resilience can be improved, a good chunk of it comes down to a variable that Seligman calls "grit". Similarly, studies of social mobility show that although there are a number of interventions that can improve life chances, there is always a substantial residual factor. Back in 1990, the British sociologist Doria Pilling turned the usual approaches on their head and studied not losers, but winners: people who had triumphed despite huge disadvantages. What she found was that these people simply had more drive, more self-belief and, above all, a greater capacity to withstand negative shocks. They were, in other words, highly resilient.
Resilience is in some ways merely the politically correct version of "character", which sounds Victorian and judgemental. There are other terms: having backbone, being made of the right stuff, being a survivor. All these phrases are getting at the same essential characteristic. The question (and it is an important one for policy-makers) is: What are the sources of resilience?
Some trends are evident. Resilient people seem to have a greater sense of their own agency, and an optimistic temperament: they believe both that things will get better, and that they can help to make them so. Equally, resilience is built from exposure to stressful or risky situations: consequently our neurotic attempts to protect children from all risk are counterproductive.
Resilience, paradoxically, is an attribute that may be harder to acquire in societies where many everyday risks have been greatly lessened. However, it is no less important given that some risks - especially of employment dislocation - have, if anything, increased. There's a saying in West Africa that works as well in West Drayton: you know how well the roof has been built only when the rains come.
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