LU HANESSIAN

What is resilience?

Resilience is not a one-size-fits-all skill or formula to be distilled and packaged for distribution. Resilience is an... integration. Across decades of research and multiple disciplines from developmental psychology to interpersonal neurobiology, metallurgy to cultural and social sciences, physics to neuroplasticity, scientists have studied the characteristics of resilience and the factors that might promote it. 

Studies in the neuroscience of trauma and healing have yielded insights and discoveries about how we are wired and how our innate chemistry, systems, and circuitry are impacted by thresholds of acute, recurring, and chronic (toxic) stress. Research has explored proactive coping skills and support networks (Charney, Southwick), "flexibility mindset" (Bonanno), cross-cultural resilience (Ungar), hope (Panter-Brick), "vicarious resilience" (Hernandez), and more. 

We might consider resilience as a dynamic biointelligence guiding, guarding, galvanizing, pushing us inward, outward, forward, toward. Resilience holds inherent paradoxes and possibilities. We are wired for interconnection and wired for threat detection. We can be vulnerable to the negative impacts of adversity and yet be strengthened in our vulnerability through relationship as a buffer and pathway to thriving. 

The dynamic complexities of resilience also integrate resistance. Harnessing collective imagination, hope, and living potential, resistance is embodied discernment, context sensitivity, and wisdom story that gives voice to vision, a catalyst for generative processes of growth, flourishing, and transformative change.