Last year, I was at the International Symposium on Resilience Research in Mainz, hosted with the involvement of the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research. It was one of those conferences where you feel the field thinking out loud.
There were talks on trauma, stress, war, mental health, the brain, and the many ways human beings manage to remain psychologically intact under pressure. The atmosphere was serious but alive. People were not pretending to have easy answers. That, in itself, felt refreshing.
And yet, as I sat there listening, I kept noticing something quietly strange.
For a field that has spent decades studying resilience, we are still not entirely sure what resilience is.
Not in the shallow sense. Not in the pop psychology sense of “bouncing back” after a difficult week. I mean scientifically, conceptually, existentially. What exactly are we talking about when we call a person resilient?
Is resilience the absence of illness after adversity?
Is it the ability to function?
Is it emotional flexibility?
Is it recovery?
Is it transformation?
Is it something inside the person, something in the environment, or something that happens between them?
This was not my private confusion. Several talks at the conference circled around the same issue with admirable honesty. The field is rich, active, and full of careful people. But it is also still negotiating its own center.
And maybe that is exactly where the most interesting question begins.
We have studied survival more than we have studied the cost of survival
Resilience research often begins with a beautiful and necessary question: why do some people maintain mental health despite adversity?
This question matters. It has moved psychology away from only asking why people break, and toward asking how people continue. That shift has dignity in it. It refuses to reduce human beings to pathology. It notices strength, adaptation, protection, and the quiet intelligence of the nervous system.
Raffael Kalisch’s work has been especially important in this area, particularly his research on positive appraisal style and stress resilience. His model takes seriously something many of us recognize both clinically and personally: that the way we appraise stress does not simply decorate our experience — it shapes it.
I have had the pleasure of getting to know Prof. Kalisch during the conference. What I appreciate in his research is that it does not reduce resilience to a personality slogan. It treats resilience as something dynamic, measurable, and psychologically complex — something that unfolds through the relationship between stressors, interpretation, mental health, and time.
In the longitudinal study on positive appraisal style and stress resilience, he explored how people’s appraisal styles may help explain why some individuals maintain mental health under stress. I find this question genuinely valuable, because appraisal is not the same as blind optimism. At its best, it is the mind’s capacity to keep reality open — to avoid turning pain into a total verdict on life.
I find this line of research genuinely valuable.
How we interpret threat matters. Whether we see a difficulty as permanent or temporary, catastrophic or manageable, humiliating or human — these appraisals shape the body. They shape attention. They shape memory. They shape what kind of future the mind believes is still possible.
But there is another question that keeps returning to me, especially as someone interested in emotion regulation, self-compassion, trauma, and the strange ways the self can disappear from itself.
When we say someone “maintained mental health,” what exactly did they maintain?
Did they remain connected to themselves?
Did they still feel joy?
Did they still desire?
Did they still trust others?
Did they still know how to rest?
Or did they simply not develop symptoms severe enough to be counted?
This is where resilience becomes more complicated than its most comforting definitions allow.
Functioning can look like healing from a distance
One of the most dangerous things about human beings is that we can adapt to almost anything.
I do not mean this romantically.
Adaptation can be miraculous. It can also be tragic.
A person can adapt to emotional neglect by becoming low-maintenance. They can adapt to instability by becoming hyper-independent. They can adapt to criticism by becoming excellent. They can adapt to abandonment by becoming someone who never asks for anything directly.
From the outside, this can look like resilience.
They are productive. They are calm. They do not collapse. They do not make a scene. They keep appointments, answer emails, finish degrees, raise children, travel, teach, publish, smile at conferences, and remember everyone else’s birthday.
But internally, something may have narrowed.
The person may no longer expect comfort. They may no longer feel entitled to softness. Their nervous system may have learned that wanting too much is dangerous, so it edits desire before desire becomes visible.
In clinical language, we might talk about coping strategies, emotional suppression, dissociation, defensive organization, or learned patterns of regulation. In more ordinary language, we might say: the person survived, but not all of them came with them.
This is the part that resilience research sometimes has difficulty holding.
Because functioning is easier to measure than aliveness.
Symptoms are easier to count than the loss of inner music.
And survival, especially when it is elegant, can be mistaken for freedom.
The resilient person may also be the person who had no other choice
There is a particular kind of praise that makes me uneasy.
“You are so resilient.”
Sometimes it is a loving sentence. Sometimes it is true. Sometimes it is the only language people have for awe.
But sometimes, hidden inside that compliment, there is another message: you have learned to endure what should have changed.
This is where resilience becomes not only psychological, but ethical.
If a student performs well despite chronic stress, we may call them resilient. But we might also ask why their environment requires such endurance.
If a worker remains productive under impossible conditions, we may admire their coping. But we might also ask who benefits from their ability to stay regulated while being depleted.
If a child grows up too fast and becomes emotionally mature beyond their years, adults may call them strong. But early maturity is not always a gift. Sometimes it is grief wearing adult clothes.
The problem is not that resilience research ignores context entirely. Good researchers know that adversity, social systems, relationships, and resources matter. The best work in the field is much more nuanced than popular culture’s simplified version of resilience.
Still, there is a cultural hunger for the resilient individual.
The person who absorbs shock.
The person who stays optimistic.
The person who makes suffering look meaningful enough that nobody has to feel too guilty about its existence.
This is where I want the field to become even braver.
Not less scientific. More scientific.
Because if resilience is the maintenance of mental health despite adversity, we must ask what kind of adversity is being normalized by our admiration of adaptation.
Positive appraisal is powerful, but it is not the same as permission to suffer quietly
I am drawn to Kalisch’s positive appraisal model because it gives language to something many therapists, researchers, and emotionally observant people recognize intuitively: the mind is not just reacting to the world; it is interpreting the world.
Two people may encounter similar stressors and experience them differently, partly because their appraisal systems organize threat, hope, control, and meaning in different ways.
This matters deeply.
A non-catastrophic appraisal can prevent pain from becoming total. It can create a little distance between the event and the self. It can help the nervous system avoid turning every difficulty into evidence that life is unsafe.
But positive appraisal becomes dangerous when it is culturally flattened into “look on the bright side.”
That is not what serious appraisal research says. And it is not what people in pain need.
There is a difference between flexible appraisal and emotional self-betrayal.
Flexible appraisal says: this is hard, but perhaps it is not the whole story.
Self-betrayal says: this is hard, but I should not feel it.
Flexible appraisal opens the future.
Self-betrayal protects the system by shrinking the self.
In trauma work, this difference matters. A person may survive by making the unbearable meaningful too quickly. They may call something a lesson before they have allowed themselves to call it a wound. They may turn pain into wisdom because wisdom is more socially acceptable than need.
This is one reason I think resilience research has to stay close to grief.
Not everything that helps us continue helps us heal.
Some interpretations protect us in the short term but keep us loyal to environments, relationships, or identities that continue to injure us.
Maybe resilience is not a trait but a question we ask over time
At the Mainz conference, what stayed with me most was not a single answer, but the honesty of the uncertainty.
There was something intellectually decent about watching a field admit that its central concept is still being negotiated.
In some areas of psychology, people hide conceptual confusion under technical language. But resilience researchers, at least in the spaces I encountered, seemed willing to say: we have measures, models, longitudinal designs, biological data, and theoretical frameworks — and still, the definition is not finished.
I respect that.
Maybe resilience is difficult to define because it is not one thing. Maybe it is a process in one context, an outcome in another, a capacity in another, and a story we tell afterward in yet another. Maybe resilience in the first month after adversity is not the same as resilience ten years later.
At first, resilience may mean not falling apart. Later, it may mean allowing yourself to fall apart in a safe enough place.
At first, it may mean emotional control. Later, it may mean emotional return.
At first, it may mean continuing. Later, it may mean finally asking whether the life you continued into is the one you wanted.
This temporal dimension is important. Survival has phases. What protects us in one season may imprison us in another.
The child who learned not to cry may become the adult who cannot feel relief.
The young person who learned to achieve through pain may become the successful adult who does not know who they are without pressure.
The partner who learned to expect little may call themselves peaceful, when really they have stopped imagining reciprocity.
If we only measure whether people “bounced back,” we may miss whether they returned to themselves.
Survival deserves respect, but it should not be the ceiling
I do not want to write against resilience.
That would feel ungrateful.
There are moments when survival is sacred. There are nights when making it to morning is not a cliché but a profound biological and spiritual achievement. There are people whose resilience is not a performance, not a neoliberal fantasy, not a research construct, but the only reason they are still here.
I honor that.
But honoring survival does not mean making it the highest human outcome.
A person can survive and still need tenderness.
A person can adapt and still deserve repair.
A person can maintain mental health and still feel that something essential in them has gone quiet.
Perhaps this is where self-compassion enters the conversation. Not as decoration, but as a corrective.
Self-compassion allows us to look at our own resilience without turning it into another demand. It lets us say: I am grateful for the part of me that endured. I am also allowed to ask what it cost.
That question is not weakness.
It may be the beginning of a more honest science of resilience.
The future of resilience research may depend on asking less convenient questions
The field has already done something important by refusing to see adversity only through damage. It has shown that many people do not simply break under stress. They adapt, reorganize, recover, and sometimes even grow.
But the next step may be more uncomfortable.
We may need to ask not only why some people remain well after hardship, but whether our definitions of “well” are deep enough.
We may need to ask whether resilience can include protest.
Whether it can include refusal, leaving, or finally becoming less convenient to the systems that praised our endurance.
This is not an argument against resilience researchers. Quite the opposite.
It is because the field is serious that it can tolerate serious questions.
A weak field needs slogans.
A mature field can sit with uncertainty.
And resilience, if it means anything worth keeping, must be able to survive even our critique of it.
