Learning From Resilient People: Lessons We Can Apply to Counseling and Psychotherapy

This book is about the ways resilient people navigate the troubled waters of life’s traumas. A number of researchers believe that resilience is the key to understanding how people successfully cope with traumatic life events and why they often come out of a crisis stronger and more certain of their goals and directions in life than before the crisis.  Although we think we know what it means to be resilient, we know far less about why some people are resilient, or how their resilience functions across the life cycle and through multiple life events. All of these issues will be discussed at length in this book, which continues the development of ideas found in two other books by Dr. Morley Glicken—Using the Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: A Positive Approach for the Helping Professions (Pearson, 2004) and Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice (Sage, 2005)—who explains:

In both books I’ve argued for a knowledge-guided approach to practice that focuses on client strengths. Much of what I’ve found in researching each book leads me to believe there is demonstrable evidence that many people are resilient and that we can learn about how they cope with traumas and apply those successful approaches to people’s lives.

Instead of writing a purely research-oriented book, I’ve tried to combine the current research with stories resilient people have shared with me about the traumas they’ve successfully dealt with. I’ve then compared their coping strategies with the existing research. Although Chapter 1 describes the way stories from resilient people are analyzed, the process of gathering stories about resilience needs to be explained. I asked people at professional and social functions, friends, colleagues, and people I met randomly who had stories of resilience to send them to me. The stories were to contain the traumas experienced by the storyteller, when they were experienced, what the storyteller did to cope with the traumas, and why the storyteller’s coping approaches seemed to work. The stories were then to be compared to the existing research on resilience to confirm or depart from current beliefs about resilience. The coping strategies that were clearly identified by storytellers and seemed consistent throughout the book would then be summarized in a series of suggestions for clinical practice.

This approach combines the objective with the more subjective. Although the stories included are single events, and generalizing to other populations of people experiencing similar traumas may be difficult, there is much to be learned from a more subjective approach. Proving or disproving theories of resilience becomes more likely when the bulk of the more than 50 stories included in the book agree or disagree with existing research. This approach also answers more fundamental questions about resilience throughout the life span and the ability of resilient people to cope with multiple traumas. Since I have included interviews with many of the people whose stories appear here, the reader has an opportunity to obtain additional information about resilience not necessarily included in the stories.

Like many of us who grew up in families that were overwhelmed with life problems, I learned about resilience from my blue-collar, immigrant parents. They dealt with illness, lack of finances, social isolation, and the bigotry of people against immigrant Jews in ways that modeled resilience. But being resilient and surviving serious life problems, while still achieving at a high level, isn’t done without a price, and the reader will note throughout this book that resilience is defined as successful social functioning. Some readers will take exception to this belief, feeling that truly resilient people must necessarily be happy and self-fulfilled.

Not everyone is resilient, of course, and to remember the many among us who suffer because of the harm done to them by others, this book is written for the abused and neglected, the homeless and the hungry, the victims of terror, the immigrants who suffer indignities to the body and to the spirit, the children who grow up with violence, and to our fellow citizens who live with unimaginable social and emotional pain. Their anguish should motivate us to open our hearts and minds to new ideas and, in Bertrand Russell’s words, to have “unbearable sympathy for the suffering of others.”