Resilience.

Scientists are exploring the ability of good people to bounce back from bad situations. What they learn may affect your health, wealth, and happiness -- even how long you live.

In this article:
New strength for a timeless idea
Yes; resilience can be learned.
How resilient are you? Take this test.
How to thrive after a rotten childhood

resident Clinton has it, and Monica Lewinsky needs it. Christopher Reeve is the epitome of it. Even the stock market is exhibiting classic signs. Over the next few years, you'll be hearing more about it than the "Y2K computer problem." In fact, it may help solve the Y2K problem.

"It" is resilience, the ability to get through, get over and thrive after trauma, trials and tribulations. Instead of asking why bad things happen to good people, researchers are now focusing on how good people can best overcome bad events or situations. Some go so far as to call resilience the "it" skill of the next millennium.

"Because our lives are so constantly under stress in the '90s, because change is everywhere, we realize we can't just look for calm waters anymore," says Froma Walsh, Ph.D., co-director of the Center for Family Health at the University of Chicago and author of the recent Strengthening Family Resilience (Guilford Press, $35). "We have to find a way to thrive in the face of these stresses. Resilience means we can be challenged and not break down."

Indeed, resilience is fast becoming the talent du jour. Schools across the country are abandoning self-esteem programs in favor of resilience lessons. Companies such as Questar in Salt Lake City offer employees resilience training, and job placement firms such as the Rhode Island-based Lee Hecht Harrison Career Services sponsor seminars in career resilience. Prominent psychologists such as the University of Pennsylvania's Martin E.P. Seligman, author of the classic Learned Optimism, are campaigning for a new "positive psychology" that builds on strengths and doesn't just treat problems.

Resilience also is popping up in the popular media: Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, who lost her good friend Princess Diana and then her mother to car crashes within one year, hosted a recent popular TV talk show called Sarah, Surviving Life. On the nation's bookshelves, more than 20 personal-development books about resilience have come out in the past year alone, and self-improvement gurus such as Tony Robbins now tout "bounce-back" skills.

In sports, a hot field of inquiry is how and why some athletes and teams perform better after defeat - athletic resilience.

Even in the sciences, resilience is now serious business. The National Cancer Institute recently called for more study of resilient cancer patients - those who survive the worst possible odds - to better understand what might work in treating the disease. Molecular biologists say cell resilience may hold the key to curing serious illness; soil resilience is a hot topic in ecology circles; and one of the newest terms among computer programmers is resilience, or how to make computer systems recover after crashes and mistakes.

Go to top

New strength for a timeless idea

The ability to create a successful - even happy - life despite hard knocks obviously is not a new concept. Carol Orsborn, author of The Art of Resilience: 100 Paths to Wisdom and Strength in an Uncertain World (Crown, $15), points out that resilience has been around for ages at the core of many religious philosophies. Most religions, she notes, have a "profound understanding that we need to go through a period of a dark night or void or introspection in order to reach spiritual maturity." And reports of what helped people survive slavery, war or disaster have long fascinated researchers and the general public. Plenty of celebrities (or their children) have hit the best-seller lists with anecdotal books detailing their struggles to get past difficult childhoods or addictions.

But for the first time, a significant body of scientific and systematic research has defined the essential qualities that make a person resilient. Concrete categories are offered by studies such as that of Emmy E. Werner of the University of California at Davis, who since 1955 has followed a group of more than 500 Hawaiians born into poverty, addiction and other difficult circumstances. Those studies, dismissed for decades by a culture focused more on the causes of hardship, are now being embraced: Werner's work is one of only a handful included in Radcliffe College's "Landmark Studies of the 20th Century" conference next month.

So what does make a person resilient? Werner and others say one of the most important skills is the ability to be and feel connected to others. In studies of children who have come from abusive home situations and then gone on to lead successful and happy lives, almost all found an adult or mentor outside the immediate family - a grandmother, a minister - who gave them a sense of being loved and important. Studies also have shown, Werner says, that "elder mentors can make a difference even later in life."

Unfortunately, notes the University of Chicago's Walsh, that message is a hard sell in a "culture that has the myth of the rugged individual who is supposed to pull him- or herself up by the bootstraps." Yet strong relationships pop up near the top of every list of resilience skills. It is one of the seven key "resiliencies" cited by Sybil Wolin, Ph.D., and Steven Wolin, M.D., who study those who thrived after horrible childhoods. (see bottom of this page)

Other important traits listed by resilience researchers include capabilities such as intelligence and problem-solving, plus having a mind that is accustomed to asking questions. "The people who are most resilient have a learning reaction, not a victim reaction, to bad events," says Al Siebert, Ph.D., author of The Survivor Personality (Perigee, $12) and a resilience consultant for more than 25 years. "It's distressing, they don't like it, but the question is, Do they have a learning/coping reaction or a victim/blaming reaction?"

Go to top

Yes, resilience CAN be learned

The question facing most researchers today is whether such skills can be learned - by children and adults - or whether resilience may be, as Werner puts it, a "phenomenon made up of many different protective factors," such as personality, environment and plain old luck.

There is no question, say a few such as Michael Resnick, a pediatric expert at the University of Minnesota, that some individuals start with the benefit of genetic predisposition. "They come into the world with a physical hardiness and calmness as opposed to easy excitability or irritability," he says. "That certainly makes resilience easier."

But Resnick, the Wolins and others are coming to believe resilience can be fostered, thanks to what Glenn Richardson of the University of Utah calls the "third wave" of resilience research: programs that help children and adults tap into their innate resilience.

"The question always comes up, 'How do you re-access something like humor?' Some people are so beat up that it's hard to find anything funny about life," says Richardson.

Real training in resilience "shakes people up like the Marines," gets rid of preconceived notions of how to approach life, and redefines goals.

"Resilience is more spiritual," he says. "It means going back to your childlike nature: your curiosity and questioning nature, your playfulness, the innate morality and nobility that children have."

Too touchy-feely? Some executives say resilience training helps the bottom line. Listen to Rick Graham of Questar, a $2 billion integrated energy resource company where employees get training in personal resilience and relationship-building skills: "In the past, if someone hit a disruption in their life - a divorce, a family illness - we would lose them for several months," he says. Resilience training helps them get back on their feet, "reintegrate more creatively and become stronger." Not only is productivity up and sick leave down, but "we have people who say it has changed their lives. It's made a huge shift for us."

Thanks in part to such testimonials, resilience experts report they are in hot demand.

Adding to the demand are social trends such as increasing job insecurity: A poll by Shell Oil last fall found that more than half of all American workers have been "downsized," have worked for a company that has merged or been bought out, or have moved to a new city for employment reasons.

"More and more people are expected to be of value without a traditional job description or family role, like the huge number of people starting home-based businesses," says Survivor Personality author Siebert.
"People have to become more self-reliant and flexible - more resilient - than ever in modern history."

Go to top

FIND OUT HOW RESILIENT YOU ARE From 1 to 5, rate how much each of the following applies to you (1=very little, 5=very much)
1 2 3 4 5	Curious, ask questions, want to know how things work, experiment.
1 2 3 4 5	Constantly learn from your experience and the experiences of others.
1 2 3 4 5	Need and expect to have things work well for yourself and others. Take good care of yourself.
1 2 3 4 5	Play with new developments, find the humor, laugh at self, chuckle.
1 2 3 4 5	Adapt quickly to change, are highly flexible.
1 2 3 4 5	Feel comfortable with paradoxical qualities.
1 2 3 4 5	Anticipate problems and avoid difficulties.
1 2 3 4 5	Develop better self-esteem and self-confidence every year. Develop a conscious self-concept of professionalism.
1 2 3 4 5	Listen well. Read others, including difficult people, with empathy.
1 2 3 4 5	Think up creative solutions to challenges, invent ways to solve problems. Trust intuition and hunches.
1 2 3 4 5	Manage the emotional side of recovery. Grieve, honor and let go of the past.
1 2 3 4 5	Expect tough situations to work out well, keep on going. Help others, bring stability to times of uncertainty and turmoil.
1 2 3 4 5	Find the gift in accidents and bad experiences.
1 2 3 4 5	Convert misfortune into good fortune.

Your total _______

Add numbers to get your total. If you scored 60-70, ou're higly resilient. 50-60: You're better than most. 40-50: Adequate. 30-40: Struggling. Under 30: Seek help!
NOTE: To improve your resilience, practice more of the traits above. Adapted from The Survivor Personality by Al Siebert, Ph.D.

Go to top

How to thrive after a rotten childhood

In a study of those who survived and thrived after horrible childhoods, Sybil Wolin, Ph.D., and Steven Wolin, M.D., who run Project Resilience in Washington, D.C., focused only on specific steps resilient people used to get beyond difficult backgrounds.

They identified seven resiliencies. Which are you strongest in?

• Insight: The mental habit of asking searching questions and giving honest answers. Example: "What's really going on with my mother and father, and is it really my fault?"

• Independence: The right to safe boundaries between you and others. "Every person told us they emotionally distanced themselves from their families; they felt at a very young age they were different from these people and wanted different things."

• Relationships: Developing and maintaining intimate, fulfilling ties to others and engaging them in your life. Or, as Sybil Wolin says, "selecting people who would benefit you."

• Initiative:Taking charge of problems rather than letting your situation dictate what you can and cannot accomplish.

• Creativity: Expressing pain or frustration through some artistic form, such as painting, music or writing.

• Humor:Finding the comic in the tragic, the ability to laugh at yourself.

• Morality:Knowing what is right and wrong and being willing to take risks for those beliefs.