Obstacles Resilience Is Found Within The Struggle
”Obstacles Produce Overcomers: Resilience is Found Within the Struggle” This human existence called life often brings with it many challenges and obstacles. For some, those challenges prove to be too difficult and will lead to their demise, but for others the obstacles they face seem to bring about an inner strength that often they themselves have not discovered. So if human nature is designed to survive then why do some appear more successful than others? That fight for survival is often call human resilience. This paper will look at resilience as it pertains to human nature and will examine a few of the factors that might influence an individual’s degree of resilience. This project will attempt to prove that obstacles are one of the
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most significant influences because where there are great obstacles there are great overcomers.
Resilience defined: First, let’s look at resilience. Merriam-Webster describes resilience as the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens, as the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The oxford dictionary calls resilience the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness; the ability of substance or object to spring back into shape; to have elasticity. The American Psychological Association (APA) simply describes resilience as bouncing back from difficult experience. In none of these descriptions can one see the lack of hardship or struggle. Instead, those challenges appear to be the corner stone of one’s resilience. Psychologist Edith Grotberg gave an example in her book Resilience for Today. She defines resilience as “the human capacity to deal with, overcome, learn from, or even be transformed by the inevitable adversities of life.” Grotberg’s definition clearly portrays adversity as an unavoidable part of life, and describes resilience as the manner in which an individual used those adversities to better themselves. (Wicks, 2010)
Resilience in real life examples: There have been many shining examples of human resilience throughout history. Viktor Frankl is one such example. An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, Frankl wrote a book about his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl describes the influences of human resilience he found among his fellow inmates. He stated, “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to overcome.” Frankl found that there were many circumstances that could not be changed, but he also discovered that perhaps the most influential element of all wasn’t based on external circumstances. He believed that a man’s inner purpose, man’s meaning to life, was often the difference between life and death within such extreme conditions (Frankl, 2006). Helen Keller is another example of someone that has overcome hardship. She has a well-known name in the history books, but more recently she was depicted in a remake of the movie The Miracle Worker which tells the story of her struggles. Keller was born a healthy child, but by the time she was 19 months old she had become both deaf and dumb perhaps due to an illness. To be deaf and dumb in the 1800’s was little more than to be sentenced to total isolation for life. Keller became wild and unruly as a young child. Anne Sullivan was a 20-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind and on March 3 in 1887 she became Keller’s teacher. Sullivan spent day after day teaching Keller how to use sign language on the palm of her hand as a way to communicate and understand the world around her. Keller stated that the day Sullivan came into her life was the day her life changed. Keller went on to become the first deaf-blind person to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from Radcliffe College. Helen Keller faced hardship and she found a way to bounce back. She credits Sullivan with the turning point in her life so then was it Anne Sullivan that taught her resilience? Sullivan absolutely played an influential role, but I believe Anne Sullivan gave Keller the inspiration, the encouragement, she need to find her own source of resilience. I believe that resilience was already within Keller though she may have needed help to bring it fully to surface (American Foundation for the Blind, 2016). A more current example of resilience is the life of Jaycee Dugard who recently revealed an upcoming continuation of her personal memoir A Stolen Life. Dugard was abducted when she was only eleven years old and held captive for eighteen years. She was repeatedly raped, lied too and manipulated by a sexual pedophile and his wife. Dugard gave birth twice during captivity and preceded to raise her two daughters to the best that her conditions would allow. In 2009, Dugard and both of her daughters were discovered and rescued by authorities. In her first book, Dugard tells about those eighteen years as she experienced them. She describes profound traumatic experience after experience, along with moments of deep depression and hopelessness. In the introduction of her book, Dugard said, “For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived.” Dugard says in her book that hope was key to her survival.
She talks about her hope to see her family again and how that kept her holding on. Her daughter’s also gave her hope. They gave her a purpose, something to live for. When asked about her future, Dugard said that she sees herself helping families like her own. She beautifully describes the power of fostering resilience though support systems: “families are like snowflakes: the come in many shapes and sizes and no two are the same. And like a snowflake, they are very delicate and must be protected and guarded from elements that threaten to destroy their precarious balance. When two or more snowflakes merge, they strengthen their chances of surviving in an ever-changing world. Unlike snowflakes, given the right tools families can survive through the worst conditions.” (Dugard, 2011).
Resilience an innate part of human life: The source of one’s resilience or one’s lack of resilience has often been a debate among researchers. Some believe that resilience is a learned behavior, some believe that it is genetically acquired, and others believe that resilience is an innate part of human life that derives from one’s fight for survival. More recently, researchers have taken a more integrated view of resilience, it’s existence, and its ability to grow. In their book, Overcoming the Odds: High-Risk Children From Birth to Adulthood, authors Werner and Smith describe resilience an inborn capacity for self-righting. They believed that despite high-risk factors each child had within them the ability to develop into competent adults (Werner and Smith,
1992). In her book, Resilience for Today, Psychologist Edith Grotberg talks about the innate development of resilience and the potential growth, “We have the human capacity to become resilient, which allows us to deal with the bombardment of events causing so much stress. And in dealing with these events we become stronger, more confident in our abilities, more sensitive to the stress others are experiencing and even more able to bring about change to minimize or eradicate the sources of stress…We are no implying that resilience protects us from these stresses, these risks, these dangers. That is not the role of resilience. We want protection, yes, but resilience involves not only supports, strengths, and skills, but actions to deal with the inevitable adversities we all face in life” (Wicks, 2010, p. 23). Bonnie Benard is a researcher that has spent the last 25 years studying, writing about, and teaching about resilience. In 1995, she published an article titled Fostering Resilience in Children. Benard stated: “Resilience research validates prior research and theory in human development that has clearly established the biological imperative for growth and development that exists in the human organism and that unfolds naturally in the presence of certain environmental characteristics. We are all born with an innate capacity for resilience, by which we are able to develop social competence, problem-solving skills, a critical consciousness, autonomy, and a sense of purpose” (Benard, 1995). Ann Masten published an article in the American Psychologist in 2001 that described resilience as an ordinary factor. She explains how resilience isn’t an extraordinary phenomenon, but instead it is common and developed through everyday struggles. In her words: “The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena. Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems” (Masten, 2001).
Resilience fostered by adversity: Researchers suggest that life’s obstacles might be the key to well-developed personal resilience. Richard Dienstbier came up with the toughness model that actually gives credit to life’s difficulties. Dienstbier believed that with the stress of life comes added adrenaline activity, the same adrenaline that is activated during regular exercise, that increase in adrenaline on a regular basis can result in a stronger resilience to life’s circumstances. He explains that there needs to be a balance of challenging circumstances and non-challenging circumstance. If a person only experiences the negative with any positive or if a person experiences only positive and no negative, the result is a lack of resilience. The perfect condition for the development of resilience is a combination of the two (Dienstbier, 1989). A study was done in 2010 that also made mention of Dienstbier’s theory. This study was called Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience. Seery, Holman, and Silver surmise that adversity in life has the potential to generate a resilience that might not otherwise be available. Their study showed a correlation between well-developed resilience and low levels of adversity, which suggests that adversity itself might foster resilience. They believe that low levels of adversity might teach coping skills and generate a sense of mastery, all qualities that would also benefit an individual facing high levels of adversity. However, no exposure to adversity and exposure to extremely high levels of adversity both have an adverse effect. Without adversity one doesn’t have the need for stress management and therefore doesn’t have the opportunity to develop resilience, while extremely high levels of adversity might overwhelm one’s supportive resources and abilities and result in a sense of hopelessness (Seery, Holman and Silver, 2010).
Resilience has the potential to grow: During her research, Benard has also studied the specific characteristics of resilient children. She has found that children who demonstrate the highest levels of resilience have a few common attributes. Those children show skills in social competence and problem-solving; They have a healthy sense of autonomy and purpose. According to Benard, one can strengthen their resilience by developing those same attributes. She directs much of her studies toward the education of resilience and ways to foster its growth in high-risk children. She goes on to note the environmental factors of resilient children. Resilient children feel they can be heard, they are worthy, they can contribute, they are loved by at least on caring person, and that most of their problems can be resolved. Benard believes that helpers can work toward improving those environmental conditions, and encourage the further development of personal resilience, in an effort to better the lives of high-risk children (Benard, 1991). APA psychologist Ron Palomares, PhD says “Knowing how to build resilience helps individuals deal with traumas better and lessen the effect of traumatic events. So much of what we do as psychologist is deal with people during or after they’re in crisis, but with resilience training, we’re able to engage in prevention and talk about things parents and children can do now to help ease the impact of traumas in the future.” Palomares describes resilience as a muscle that might be strong or weak, but something that we all have. He says the more one uses resilience the stronger their resilience muscle becomes (Kresting, 2005). Dr. Robert Wicks who is known as a leading expert on stress and stress management wrote a book entitled Bounce where he educates individuals in methods of building their resilience. “Every person has a personal resiliency range,” he says, “The essential point in this book is that we must do all we can to maximize our own range through self-knowledge and self-care.” He believes that our level of resilience is affected by self-care, personal stress, mindfulness, positive psychology, and self-awareness (Wicks, 2010, p.167).
Applying what I have learned: As a student in the human services department, my focus has been on effective and efficient trauma therapy. One cannot study trauma and its effects without coming across very inspiring accounts of human resilience in the face of obstacles. Those accounts led me to question about this concept of resilience. I found myself questioning the individuality of resilience and wondering if it might be bottled up and given away. This research project gave me the opportunity to answer those questions. Resilience research has taken on many different specific points of focus during the last several decades, which resulted in an abundance of material but limited perspectives within each of those different focus areas. However, as I review the collected material, I was able to formulate my own understanding. I truly believe that resilience or the capacity for resilience is within each of us from birth without respect for gender, race, or economic status. This capacity for resilience has the potential for growth, and adversity is key to fostering that growth. As a future counselor, I find this to be a very important factor of trauma recovery. I believe the goal is not to protect our clients from adversity, but instead to help our clients generate their own source of resilience in the face of obstacles.
most significant influences because where there are great obstacles there are great overcomers.
Resilience defined: First, let’s look at resilience. Merriam-Webster describes resilience as the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens, as the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The oxford dictionary calls resilience the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness; the ability of substance or object to spring back into shape; to have elasticity. The American Psychological Association (APA) simply describes resilience as bouncing back from difficult experience. In none of these descriptions can one see the lack of hardship or struggle. Instead, those challenges appear to be the corner stone of one’s resilience. Psychologist Edith Grotberg gave an example in her book Resilience for Today. She defines resilience as “the human capacity to deal with, overcome, learn from, or even be transformed by the inevitable adversities of life.” Grotberg’s definition clearly portrays adversity as an unavoidable part of life, and describes resilience as the manner in which an individual used those adversities to better themselves. (Wicks, 2010)
Resilience in real life examples: There have been many shining examples of human resilience throughout history. Viktor Frankl is one such example. An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, Frankl wrote a book about his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl describes the influences of human resilience he found among his fellow inmates. He stated, “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to overcome.” Frankl found that there were many circumstances that could not be changed, but he also discovered that perhaps the most influential element of all wasn’t based on external circumstances. He believed that a man’s inner purpose, man’s meaning to life, was often the difference between life and death within such extreme conditions (Frankl, 2006). Helen Keller is another example of someone that has overcome hardship. She has a well-known name in the history books, but more recently she was depicted in a remake of the movie The Miracle Worker which tells the story of her struggles. Keller was born a healthy child, but by the time she was 19 months old she had become both deaf and dumb perhaps due to an illness. To be deaf and dumb in the 1800’s was little more than to be sentenced to total isolation for life. Keller became wild and unruly as a young child. Anne Sullivan was a 20-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind and on March 3 in 1887 she became Keller’s teacher. Sullivan spent day after day teaching Keller how to use sign language on the palm of her hand as a way to communicate and understand the world around her. Keller stated that the day Sullivan came into her life was the day her life changed. Keller went on to become the first deaf-blind person to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from Radcliffe College. Helen Keller faced hardship and she found a way to bounce back. She credits Sullivan with the turning point in her life so then was it Anne Sullivan that taught her resilience? Sullivan absolutely played an influential role, but I believe Anne Sullivan gave Keller the inspiration, the encouragement, she need to find her own source of resilience. I believe that resilience was already within Keller though she may have needed help to bring it fully to surface (American Foundation for the Blind, 2016). A more current example of resilience is the life of Jaycee Dugard who recently revealed an upcoming continuation of her personal memoir A Stolen Life. Dugard was abducted when she was only eleven years old and held captive for eighteen years. She was repeatedly raped, lied too and manipulated by a sexual pedophile and his wife. Dugard gave birth twice during captivity and preceded to raise her two daughters to the best that her conditions would allow. In 2009, Dugard and both of her daughters were discovered and rescued by authorities. In her first book, Dugard tells about those eighteen years as she experienced them. She describes profound traumatic experience after experience, along with moments of deep depression and hopelessness. In the introduction of her book, Dugard said, “For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived.” Dugard says in her book that hope was key to her survival.
She talks about her hope to see her family again and how that kept her holding on. Her daughter’s also gave her hope. They gave her a purpose, something to live for. When asked about her future, Dugard said that she sees herself helping families like her own. She beautifully describes the power of fostering resilience though support systems: “families are like snowflakes: the come in many shapes and sizes and no two are the same. And like a snowflake, they are very delicate and must be protected and guarded from elements that threaten to destroy their precarious balance. When two or more snowflakes merge, they strengthen their chances of surviving in an ever-changing world. Unlike snowflakes, given the right tools families can survive through the worst conditions.” (Dugard, 2011).
Resilience an innate part of human life: The source of one’s resilience or one’s lack of resilience has often been a debate among researchers. Some believe that resilience is a learned behavior, some believe that it is genetically acquired, and others believe that resilience is an innate part of human life that derives from one’s fight for survival. More recently, researchers have taken a more integrated view of resilience, it’s existence, and its ability to grow. In their book, Overcoming the Odds: High-Risk Children From Birth to Adulthood, authors Werner and Smith describe resilience an inborn capacity for self-righting. They believed that despite high-risk factors each child had within them the ability to develop into competent adults (Werner and Smith,
1992). In her book, Resilience for Today, Psychologist Edith Grotberg talks about the innate development of resilience and the potential growth, “We have the human capacity to become resilient, which allows us to deal with the bombardment of events causing so much stress. And in dealing with these events we become stronger, more confident in our abilities, more sensitive to the stress others are experiencing and even more able to bring about change to minimize or eradicate the sources of stress…We are no implying that resilience protects us from these stresses, these risks, these dangers. That is not the role of resilience. We want protection, yes, but resilience involves not only supports, strengths, and skills, but actions to deal with the inevitable adversities we all face in life” (Wicks, 2010, p. 23). Bonnie Benard is a researcher that has spent the last 25 years studying, writing about, and teaching about resilience. In 1995, she published an article titled Fostering Resilience in Children. Benard stated: “Resilience research validates prior research and theory in human development that has clearly established the biological imperative for growth and development that exists in the human organism and that unfolds naturally in the presence of certain environmental characteristics. We are all born with an innate capacity for resilience, by which we are able to develop social competence, problem-solving skills, a critical consciousness, autonomy, and a sense of purpose” (Benard, 1995). Ann Masten published an article in the American Psychologist in 2001 that described resilience as an ordinary factor. She explains how resilience isn’t an extraordinary phenomenon, but instead it is common and developed through everyday struggles. In her words: “The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena. Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems” (Masten, 2001).
Resilience fostered by adversity: Researchers suggest that life’s obstacles might be the key to well-developed personal resilience. Richard Dienstbier came up with the toughness model that actually gives credit to life’s difficulties. Dienstbier believed that with the stress of life comes added adrenaline activity, the same adrenaline that is activated during regular exercise, that increase in adrenaline on a regular basis can result in a stronger resilience to life’s circumstances. He explains that there needs to be a balance of challenging circumstances and non-challenging circumstance. If a person only experiences the negative with any positive or if a person experiences only positive and no negative, the result is a lack of resilience. The perfect condition for the development of resilience is a combination of the two (Dienstbier, 1989). A study was done in 2010 that also made mention of Dienstbier’s theory. This study was called Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience. Seery, Holman, and Silver surmise that adversity in life has the potential to generate a resilience that might not otherwise be available. Their study showed a correlation between well-developed resilience and low levels of adversity, which suggests that adversity itself might foster resilience. They believe that low levels of adversity might teach coping skills and generate a sense of mastery, all qualities that would also benefit an individual facing high levels of adversity. However, no exposure to adversity and exposure to extremely high levels of adversity both have an adverse effect. Without adversity one doesn’t have the need for stress management and therefore doesn’t have the opportunity to develop resilience, while extremely high levels of adversity might overwhelm one’s supportive resources and abilities and result in a sense of hopelessness (Seery, Holman and Silver, 2010).
Resilience has the potential to grow: During her research, Benard has also studied the specific characteristics of resilient children. She has found that children who demonstrate the highest levels of resilience have a few common attributes. Those children show skills in social competence and problem-solving; They have a healthy sense of autonomy and purpose. According to Benard, one can strengthen their resilience by developing those same attributes. She directs much of her studies toward the education of resilience and ways to foster its growth in high-risk children. She goes on to note the environmental factors of resilient children. Resilient children feel they can be heard, they are worthy, they can contribute, they are loved by at least on caring person, and that most of their problems can be resolved. Benard believes that helpers can work toward improving those environmental conditions, and encourage the further development of personal resilience, in an effort to better the lives of high-risk children (Benard, 1991). APA psychologist Ron Palomares, PhD says “Knowing how to build resilience helps individuals deal with traumas better and lessen the effect of traumatic events. So much of what we do as psychologist is deal with people during or after they’re in crisis, but with resilience training, we’re able to engage in prevention and talk about things parents and children can do now to help ease the impact of traumas in the future.” Palomares describes resilience as a muscle that might be strong or weak, but something that we all have. He says the more one uses resilience the stronger their resilience muscle becomes (Kresting, 2005). Dr. Robert Wicks who is known as a leading expert on stress and stress management wrote a book entitled Bounce where he educates individuals in methods of building their resilience. “Every person has a personal resiliency range,” he says, “The essential point in this book is that we must do all we can to maximize our own range through self-knowledge and self-care.” He believes that our level of resilience is affected by self-care, personal stress, mindfulness, positive psychology, and self-awareness (Wicks, 2010, p.167).
Applying what I have learned: As a student in the human services department, my focus has been on effective and efficient trauma therapy. One cannot study trauma and its effects without coming across very inspiring accounts of human resilience in the face of obstacles. Those accounts led me to question about this concept of resilience. I found myself questioning the individuality of resilience and wondering if it might be bottled up and given away. This research project gave me the opportunity to answer those questions. Resilience research has taken on many different specific points of focus during the last several decades, which resulted in an abundance of material but limited perspectives within each of those different focus areas. However, as I review the collected material, I was able to formulate my own understanding. I truly believe that resilience or the capacity for resilience is within each of us from birth without respect for gender, race, or economic status. This capacity for resilience has the potential for growth, and adversity is key to fostering that growth. As a future counselor, I find this to be a very important factor of trauma recovery. I believe the goal is not to protect our clients from adversity, but instead to help our clients generate their own source of resilience in the face of obstacles.