Many years ago, I took a class from a woman who was doing her doctoral thesis on the topic of psychological hardiness. She was a nun, but not the black-and-white kind of nun I remember from growing up. This particular nun wore flannel shirts and swore from time to time, but that’s not what I remember most. What stuck with me over the decades was her study of psychological hardiness and what exactly that means.
In Chinese medicine, the ancients had a saying that if the “shen” was bright, the patient would survive; but if the shen was dull, the prognosis wasn’t so good. Shen, in Chinese, is the idea that the spirit, consciousness, memories, and being-ness of a person reside in their heart but is reflected in their eyes. As a practitioner of this medicine, I agree that looking into a person’s eyes is a good indicator of their spirit or psychological hardiness, and can be a gauge of their prognosis.
In the years since hearing about Sister Flannel’s thesis, I’ve thought about the topic of psychological hardiness, and why some patients seem to shrug off seemingly huge amounts of pain or disability while others are completely leveled by comparatively inconsequential health complaints. And while I don’t have all the answers, one word keeps cropping up to explain these phenomena—resilience.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly in the face of a tough situation. It makes me think of the element of wood in Chinese medicine—from the green shoots that singlemindedly sprout out of the earth each spring to the flexible strength of mature wood that can bend but not break.
Resilience isn’t one thing or another but is the sum of several pieces that make up the whole. The components of resilience are also the tools that help you get through difficult times, including:
We all know people who inspire awe because of their ability to live fully despite great hardship. Simply put, it’s the difference between coping and getting stuck. Whether you call it resilience or psychological hardiness, the ability to deal, bounce back, and maybe even learn some lessons from life’s hard times is how you get through them and maybe even come out stronger.