How people learn to become resilient (2016)

I would argue that privilege comes in other forms than wealth, and at a certain point no amount of wealth might make up for a rough childhood, or broken relationships, and those things can drive people too. Some people don’t work 70-hour weeks because of the money, or even because they enjoy it, but because on some level they are broken and it’s an acceptable “addiction” that lets them avoid confronting their inner demons

I have many friends coming from wealthy backgrounds, and about half of them are very depressed. I myself am coming from a wealthy background, and have severe psychological and physical problems. I don't think this privilege stuff has much meaning in it.

An interesting, and different aspect of “resilience” you sort of touch on but don’t spell out is resistance to temptation. Avoiding gluttony if you refer to the deadly sins.

Some family environments may “spoil” the child because wealth allows the care-givers to provide a “Brave New World” like environment to grow up in.

This is very different than an environment where food and shelter isn’t being met and the challenge is to acquire the basics.

In an environment where “getting spoiled” might be an issue what is lacking is the fundamental need to develop autonomy and self-efficacy.

This is the environment I grew up in.

While a student—my dad was always trying to cheer me up with fancy dinners, and sumptuous gifts instead of trying to teach me how to create this same environment for myself.

Later, as an adult—they would discourage me from all attempts to overcome struggle.

Once I had a problem with a supplier while trying to launch a business and the first reaction out from my dad was that I should quit. My struggle was too much for my parents to bear. He didn’t believe I could endure the challenge.

Two things further complicate the situation.

1-

The child in question may also be continually told that they are lucky to be provided for. Isolation may ensue.

2 -

If only one parent is the breadwinner—the spouse may also end up being spoiled because they are out of touch with the circumstances that created the financial privilege.

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Without going too much more into it, I do believe I have developed a much better sense of what to accept and what to reject as gifts. I’m not perfect at it, but here is my thinking right now.

Reject material goods. Reject rent payments. Reject the payment of household expenses.

Accept experiences and time together. This is not as easy as it sounds.

For example, how should I pay for extra activities if my dad has picked out a luxurious resort and is inviting me on his dime? If it was my dollar, I would have opted for a much cheaper backpacking trip where 7 days camping equate to to one night at said resort. Still—I don’t want to have a bad time while I’m on vacation and so I choose to do these activities which he is more than happy to pay for. (Previously I have been on miserable vacations where I did nothing fun because I felt bad about spending his money. Truth is—I can’t afford this place on my own.)

At the end of the day—we are a family and we need to get along and we need to understand each other. We need to spend time together. We actually even like spending time together.

If I’m ever as financially successful as my father I need to make sure that these rules are clear up front for my children.

The more complicated wrinkle is with my mother who divorced my father. She is spoiled and spends her money very poorly. There is nothing I wish for more than to see her run her life with self-efficacy. She should have enough self-restraint so that she can actually enjoy the very exciting things she does do in life. Still—she dosen’t. In fact, she may never develop the capacity to do this for herself.

Money is a powerful creature. If used correctly—it can really enhance life. If used incorrectly, it can destroy you. In my life—I have seen it do both.

As opposed to people experiencing trauma and failing to meet the challenge?

I guess no matter what backgrounds we have, we have our own ways of failing.

If you are saying you don't think your own resilience is anything to be proud of, I think you are failing to consider those who faced trauma and failed to handle it.

I too know the "what the fuck else am I supposed to do" feeling in response to people saying stuff like "how did you deal with something like that?" or "you're so strong" but I think it does a disservice to yourself to ignore that crumpling under the pressure was a possibility, and one that was avoided if you're still here.

We either read different articles, or have almost contradictory viewpoints. I have deep background in developmental trauma, developmental psychology, and trauma is in fact what destroys the resilience mentioned in the article.

You don't become resilient due to going through trauma, you are resilient when your body is in a certain physiological state (which is reflected throughout, from brainwaves, to vagal tone, to digestive system functioning, to immune system etc). Trauma is an event that takes the body out of that state into a state of fear/fight-or-flight. This state can become chronic if the perceived state of danger is maintained (even if the actual physical danger may no longer be relevant, the thought patterns developed could continue for the rest of person's life for instance). Some people go their whole lives with the coping behaviors developed in response to that trauma (whether it's workoholism, addiction etc).

Also important to mention is that there's a window of time between birth (and even before) and the very early childhood when the brain structures related to affect regulation are developed. Trauma in that period is likely to affect a person severely for a lifetime.

In other words, trauma is what makes a person less resilient. Lack of stressors does not make a person less resilient, on the contrary. Learned helplessness is an extremely common outcome of severe trauma, which is quite the opposite of resilience.

In the article Konnikova (and Seligman) describes resilience as a product of methods that can be taught. The framing is that resilience is an interpretive skill.

The Konnikova article links to a NYTimes article [0] which in turn (in the reader comments) links to a HuffPost article [1] by a medical school specialist on PTSD. Quoting from that: "The American Psychological Association defines resilience as 'the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of threat.' ... Resilience is common and can be witnessed all around us. Even better, we learned that everyone can learn and train to be more resilient. The key involves knowing how to harness stress and use it to our advantage. "

The problem with resilience as a skill is that "resilience" may be a skill you don't have before you need it. How can one be expected to have total control over one's "construal"? Trauma, like grief, is personal and subjective. Emotion is immediate. We feel the way we feel. In a crisis, should one feel worse because you are not yet deploying the resilience? Resilience is not one sure trick but an interpretative mindset set that may or may not be available to you when something that you may or may not be able to understand has happened to you. One could view therapy as a process of developing over time a resilient response to experienced trauma.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/the-profound-emp... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trauma-resilience_b_1881666

I tend to think of resilience as a psychical equivalent of the calluses on your fingers that you get from playing the guitar.

Developing them is painful, but they give you power to try and do something bigger.

I am using Brave, which is Chromium based, and I had no problem loading the article.

Sucks to hear you having that issue.

For what it's worth, I don't think the twelve step program should be universally lauded such as it is. Does it help people? Absolutely. Could there be a better way? Probably.

"In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects."

For some additional prescriptive details.

People naturally build bonds with others in traumatic circumstances. It is called trauma bonding. One unfortunate side effect is that it makes out harder for abuse victim to leave abuser. Unfortunately, that mechanism works regardless of who caused the initial issue.

Is that where "builds character" comes from?

The article actually says the opposite, that these kids weren’t particularly smart.

“Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively”

At least that’s how I interpreted the above quote.

>Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

This sort of reasoning is exactly why I intentionally moved away from leftist frameworks that (although many of them I would argue are more correct) focus heavily on systemic critiques. This is my main problem with a good amount of leftist philosophy and why I much prefer the frameworks of post-modernists.

Even when the systemic analysis might be correct, if your goal is to improve your life it is far more important to move the locus of control into yourself rather than examine things outside your control that might be working against you.

Edit: e.g. if you want to get a new/better job it's far more productive after receiving a rejection letter to ask questions like "what did I do wrong?" and "what can I do differently next time?" than it is to worry about what systemic factors make you less likely to get the job.

I also want to be explicit that this is not a critique of the validity or importance of systemic critiques, more so just what I found to be practical in my life.

"Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.”"

It isn't that difficult to draw parallels lol.

You mean the people who are out there (to use terms from the article) meeting the world on their own terms, believing that they (and not their circumstances) affect their achievements?

You realize that the idea of characterizing a large and active social movement as an idle demand for a handout and government coddling is just spin, right? Have you ever met a serious SJW? Do they seem like apathetic victims to you, or do they have the kind of "resilience" detailed in the article?

You seem to be taking the article to mean that "injustice is OK because <insert disadvantaged group> can just be resilient and endure it"?

That's one of the main findings from the book "The Coddling of the American Mind". Overprotective parents raise children that don't know how to handle conflict, and colleges give in to the student demands for protection from conflict because the colleges care more about collecting tuition than educating.