How resilient are you?
By Taru Bahl

SUVIDHA’s father and mother died within six months of each other’s death. They were killed in separate road accidents. Her brother, who was studying in the USA, decided to marry a fellow American student and stay on in the Big Apple. Her relationship with her long-standing fiance’, which was already under stress, was affected by her erratic mood swings and broke up within a year. She got into a string of short-term relationships, including a disastrous one with her married boss, which eventually cost her a job which was both cushy and challenging. She took to drinking and last heard she was attending sessions with the Alcoholic Anonymous.

Kaveri, a college student, was the sole survivor of her family in a train mishap. Her father’s business partner refused to cooperate with her on the amount of money her father had invested in the business. Her extended family distanced themselves from her. The Indian government gave her a paltry sum as compensation. Her landlord gave her a two-month grace period before he would hand over the house to new tenants. Finding herself at the crossroads, she had no one but herself to pull her out of the quagmire. She set about the task by scouting around for some of her father’s old friends. She approached various social welfare organisations and convinced them to take up her case.

In the face of personal calamity most of us flounder, lose our sense of direction and get into bouts of depression. Some of us come to terms with our loss and try to get our lives back on the rails. Like Kaveri, we take our time but eventually manage to put our loneliness, feelings of inadequacy and sorrow behind us as we go about trying to bring normalcy in our lives. There are people like Sunil who, from leading a wasted, debauched life of partying, moved on to setting up a successful conglomerate after the death of his father. What he could not achieve in his father’s lifetime, he resolved to do after his unfortunate death. His only regret was that his father wasn’t alive to see the new Sunil. And there are people like Suvidha who just crack up, unable to reverse the direction their life has taken, doing all the wrong things, taking losing decisions and making sure their lives plummet into nothingness. While Kaveri displayed a high degree of resilience, Suvidha failed to bounce back.

The dictionary defines ‘resilience’ as the ability to return to the original form or position after being bent, compressed and stretched. In physical terms, it is the power to recover from illness, depression and adversity. It is a quality which depicts buoyancy and elasticity. The concept of resilience is a paradox which combines, on the one hand, the psychological damage which the individual has suffered and, on the other, the enduring strength that is the direct outcome of a struggle with hard times.

None of us is immune to the aftermath of physical and emotional hardship. If it were possible to remain unaffected, all of us would be superkids, superwives, supermums, superstudents and superworkers we would be doing everything perfectly without allowing emotional upheavals to affect us in any visible manner.

Healthy, resilient people have stress-resistant personalities and treat life as a learning school. They are self-reliant and determined to find solutions and light at the end of the darkest tunnel. They are emotional and they feel as hurt as do the others, but their inner strength and clear sense of priorities and responsibilities does not allow their dark moments to become overpowering. Such people have a learning/ coping reaction in place of the victim/blaming reaction. They develop the capacity to fight their own battles and emerge as better human beings at the end of each ordeal by fire.

Research has shown certain common characteristics shared by people who are resilient. All of them show playful, childlike curiosity. They have a questioning bent of mind and they derive pleasure from the smallest of things. Their simple and trusting nature makes them easy to get along with. They have a large circle of friends, family and well-wishers who help bail them out in moments of trouble. They may not depend on this support, but it definitely gives them the requisite strength to hold out in movements of crisis. Their child-like innocence allows them express their feelings spontaneously, and as such they manage to win over even their adversaries.

Resilient people are observant and positive. They are quick to assimilate good and bad experience and draw practical conclusions from them. They do not make unrealistic demands on others. They enlist help from others to ensure that they minimise chance of going wrong the next time. They are intuitive and have a good sense of judgement. When most people get pessimistic, they insist on fighting it out.

Being temperamentally buoyant and elastic, they are mentally and emotionally flexible. They can, therefore, adapt to almost any situation. They don’t flap and panic at the drop of a hat. Within moments, they assess the gravity of a situation and begin damage control. Deep down they have faith in God, people and, above all, in the fact that tomorrow will be a better day.

It is their self-confidence and self-esteem which actually contribute more than 50 per cent to their resilience. They have realistic understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. However bad the situation may be, they set about undertaking repair work. They neither expect miracles nor waste time moping around, expecting others to come to their aid. They get better and better with the passage of time. They become increasingly life-competent, dependable and hardy, spending lesser time than others in surviving adversities, coming out stronger every time and having larger spells of happiness.

Interestingly, self-actualised, highly resilient people achieve a paradoxical integration of many opposite traits. Most of us are dismissive of people who are fun-loving and serious at the same time, or those who are at once meticulous and careless. They may also display high tolerance levels in one incident and be impulsive or anger in another. We feel they are contradictory, unreliable and confused. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, "In highly developed psychiatrically healthy people there could be times when they display both extraordinarily unselfish and selfish behaviour. Opposite traits could include selfish-unselfishness, flexible- stability, pessimistic- optimism self-critical- self-appreciation, moral lust and responsible rebellion." Yet the dichotomy and assumption that more of one means less of the other fades as each trait melts into the other, giving rise to an exceptionally resilient person.

Of course, there is the likelihood of a person with opposing personality traits turning into a schizophrenic or a social pariah who remains a mysterious figure amongst his peers. Most resilient people are conscious of maintaining this delicate balance. Their entire objective is not to go to pieces, or become entirely dependent on others as they see their lives crumbling around them like a pack of cards.