What makes some more resilient than others?

How we navigate a crisis or traumatic event depends, in large part, on how resilient we are.

A few years ago, an unimaginable thing happened in my life. I wanted to help someone I cared about, someone who was sick with an illness he was hiding. I went to his house, intent on a rescue operation that would end, I thought, with a trip to the emergency room. Instead, it ended with a trip to the morgue. What I found when I arrived was my ex-husband, dead on his bathroom floor. The hidden illness? An intravenous drug addiction.

It was, without question, the most traumatic event of my life, but not only mine. I had two teenage children at the time, who had unknowingly been given a front-row seat to their father’s slow suicide. It took two years for me to settle my ex-husband’s estate and I continued to live in what felt like a constant state of emergency.

Back then, I thought we would never really recover, that our lives would always be stained with this terrible sadness. But now, nearly five years later, we’re doing well — really well. Or we were, until recently, when along with the rest of the world we began living through the current convergence of crises.

Training for a pandemic!

It turns out that awful time in my life was good training for a pandemic, for political and social upheaval, for economic and financial uncertainty. The experience taught me that I never really know what’s going to happen next. I plan as best I can, but now I’m far more able to pivot my thinking. I have the capacity to cope with more of life’s unexpected slings and arrows, to accept the difficulties I face and keep going, even though it can be hard.

How we navigate a crisis or traumatic event (and the coronavirus has many characteristics of trauma because it is unpredictable and uncontrollable) depends, in large part, on how resilient we are. Resilience is the ability to recover from difficult experiences and setbacks, to adapt, move forward and sometimes even experience growth.

An individual’s resilience is dictated by a combination of genetics, personal history, environment and situational context. So far, research has found the genetic part to be relatively small.

“The way I think about it is that there are temperamental or personality characteristics that are genetically influenced, like risk-taking, or whether you’re an introvert or extrovert,” said Karestan Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Harvard’s T H Chan School of Public Health.

Koenen studies how genes shape our risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. “We all know people that are just very even-tempered,” she said. “Some of that is simply how we’re built physiologically.” Yet it isn’t true that some people are born more resilient than others, said Koenen. “That’s because almost any trait can be a positive or negative, depending on the situation.”

Far more important, it seems, is an individual’s history.

The most significant determinant of resilience — noted in nearly every review or study of resilience in the last 50 years — is the quality of our close personal relationships, especially with parents and primary caregivers. Early attachments to parents play a crucial, lifelong role in human adaptation.

“How loved you felt as a child is a great predictor of how you manage all kinds of difficult situations later in life,” said Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine who has been researching post-traumatic stress since the 1970s.

Van der Kolk said long-term studies showed that the first 20 years of life were especially critical. “Different traumas at different ages have their own impacts on our perceptions, interpretations and expectations; these early experiences sculpt the brain, because it is a use-dependent organ,” he said. You can think of resilience as a set of skills that can be, and often is, learned. Part of the skill-building comes from exposure to very difficult — but manageable — experiences, like the one my children and I had.

Stronger on the other side

“Stress isn’t all bad,” said Steven Southwick, professor emeritus of psychiatry, PTSD and Resilience at Yale University School of Medicine. If you can cope today with all that’s happening in the world around you, Southwick said, “then when you are on the other side of it, you’ll be stronger.”

How we cope depends on what is in our resilience toolbox. For some people, like my ex-husband, the toolbox is filled with drugs. For others it can be drinking, overeating, shopping. But, these don’t promote resilience.

Instead, the tools common to resilient people are optimism (that is also realistic), a moral compass, religious or spiritual beliefs, cognitive and emotional flexibility and social connectedness. The most resilient among us are people who generally don’t dwell on the negative, who look for opportunities that might exist even in the darkest times.