The sense of resilience (definition) – Typhaine Lacroix Sept 2021 (Psychotherapist)
Why do some people stand up better than others?
Why or how do some people come out stronger when facing life’s challenges, adversity, or trauma? How can we recover after an attack and rebuild? As Michel Tousignant (2005) puts it: “How to protect yourself, continue to fight, keep control over life, and preserve dignity, without feeling responsible or completely powerless when misfortune strikes?”
For a long time, this capacity was attributed to individual constitution. However, only recently—thanks to a systemic approach—has the modern notion of resilience emerged.
Definition of resilience
Originally, resilience was a physics term. It described a material’s ability to absorb the energy of a shock during deformation and then regain its initial shape rather than break. By extension, in IT, resiliency is a system’s ability to keep functioning during failures, hacking, or overload. In short, it adapts to both frequent and unexpected events.
In human sciences, resilience is a dynamic process that enables positive adaptation despite significant adversity. Unlike a metal bar, a person does not return to their exact initial state. Instead, they evolve and adapt to the new situation. Consequently, psychological resilience always contains a developmental dimension.
Historical contributions
Emmy Werner and Michael Rutter
The term “resilience” entered psychology in the 1980s (1989). Since 1955, Emmy Werner had followed 698 children from a highly disadvantaged Hawaiian island. Thirty years later, she observed that many who were severely affected at ages 10–18 had substantially repaired their difficulties by around 30. Notably, about two-thirds who were not resilient in adolescence became so in adulthood.
The concept in France
During the 1990s, the concept spread in France through Boris Cyrulnik, Michel Manciaux, Stanislas Tomkiewicz, and others. Between 2000 and 2015, French publications on resilience reached 609—7th worldwide (3.44%), far behind the United States (37.4%) (Jourdan-Ionescu, 2018).
Related notions often include stress, coping, risk/protective factors, vulnerability, self-esteem, locus of control, attachment (secure/insecure), and defense mechanisms.
Different angles and definitions
Resilience is defined more or less broadly. For example (Anaut, 2005), it can refer to:
Normal development under difficult conditions.
A process where an individual interacts with the environment to produce change.
The ability to integrate into society successfully despite high risk.
Exceptional adaptation despite significant stressors.
Therefore, resilience may look like a common adaptation process to life or, conversely, an exceptional adjustment to acute or repeated events.
Levels: individual, family, and community
Resilience can be viewed at several levels: the individual, relatives, and the population. In the case of a terrorist attack, institutions and the broader community are also affected. Victims suffer directly, families indirectly, and society often responds with community support (blood donations, spontaneous aid, hosting of victims).
Furthermore, disciplinary lenses differ. Psychosociology may study a country, whereas psychodynamic approaches focus on intrapsychic processes and the internalization of the environment.
Two major research directions
First, neurobiology. As Bustany (2012) notes, roughly a dozen brain stress-response systems—based on neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, or hormones—organize our vulnerability to stress and our resilience.
Second, modeling. Prince-Embury (2014) proposes three personal resiliency characteristics and their links: sense of mastery, sense of relatedness, and emotional reactivity.
All in all, definitions still vary. There is no clear reason to assume that resources used for trauma are entirely different from those used in daily adversity (Leys, 2018).
Two concise definitions
Claude de Tichey (2001): “The capacity to build and live satisfactorily despite difficulties and traumatic situations encountered in life.”
Manciaux, Vanistendael, Lecomte & Cyrulnik (2001): “The capacity of a person or group to develop well and continue projecting into the future despite destabilizing events and severe trauma.”
Importantly, the second definition makes the dynamic, evolving nature of resilience explicit.
A multi-causal process
Trait or process?
Is resilience a personality trait or a process that develops over time? If it were purely a trait, it would be acquired once and remain stable (Ashton, 2014; Cottraux, 1995). However, seeing it as a dynamic process opens the door to support and therapeutic intervention—in other words, nothing is written in stone.
Attachment matters. Bowlby (1950s) emphasized the role of attachment in resilience: a secure attachment fosters it. Since then, the plasticity of attachment styles has been highlighted (Anaut, 2005).
Not invulnerability
Early interpretations explained differences by internal vulnerability. Yet, this drifts toward an unrealistic idea of invulnerability—closer to pathological insensitivity than human resilience. Moreover, it ignores environmental parameters that can amplify or reduce the shock.
Manciaux’s “three dolls” metaphor (1999) illustrates this: if you drop a doll, breaking depends on (1) the force of the fall, (2) the floor, and (3) the material. Likewise, outcome varies by stressor intensity, context, and personal resources.
Correlates. Resilience correlates positively with openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, and negatively with neuroticism (Riolli, Savicki & Cepani, 2002). Oshio et al. (2018) suggest it is partly a trait. Nevertheless, traits that facilitate resilience do not prove resilience is a trait.
Hence: a multicausal, dynamic process
Resilience results from the interplay of internal variables (psychic structure, personality, defenses) and external variables (socio-emotional context). The dance between risk and protective factors may lead either to vulnerability or to resilience.
Additionally, some individuals seem “immunized” by previous adversity: repeated exposure can—sometimes—improve resilience capacities (Bonanno, 2004). As a result, resilience unfolds over time.
How it operates
Trauma and its impact
Resilience often follows trauma. Technically, psychoanalysis distinguishes between trauma and traumatic injury. The former concerns the psyche; the latter refers to somatic damage from an external force. A trauma may be a single massive event or an accumulation of aversive experiences.
Crucially, the affective impact is singular. It depends on perception and defensive capacities—therefore, it is subjective.
Phase 1: Emergency defenses
Faced with trauma, people mobilize emergency defense mechanisms: denial, projection, fantasy, affect repression, passive-aggressive reactions, etc. Their homeostatic goal is protection: preventing immobilization by anxiety or depression (Anaut, 2005).
As Braconnier (1998) writes, defenses are “means used by the ego to master and channel internal and external dangers.” Cyrulnik (2001) also speaks of early scaffolding (ego-building) and adaptive crash reactions (costly but protective).
Phase 2: Integration and repair
Subsequently, emergency defenses should give way to more mature ones: creativity, humor, intellectualization, altruism, sublimation. Claude de Tichey (2001) describes these as development mechanisms that help manage conflict and tension.
In parallel, mentalization grows: making sense of the trauma. For de Tichey, defenses support short-term resilience, whereas mentalization structures it long-term. Debray (1991) links mentalization to tolerating and negotiating anxieties and conflicts; Bergeret (1991) to the mental use of the imaginary.
Over time, a new narrative identity can emerge. Words do not erase the event, yet they transform its representation.
Protective vs. risk factors
Protective factors may include self-esteem, sociability, humor, a life project, a cohesive family (or at least one trusted attachment figure), and broader social support. However, protection is never total (Manciaux, 2001).
Conversely, disordered family links, abuse, or parentification can become traumatic contexts. Therefore, the family may either protect or injure.
Clinically, rigid, costly defenses (e.g., persistent emergency defenses) can be spotted. The goal is to support a shift from suffering forms of “resilience” to truly salutogenic processes.
Natural vs. assisted resilience
Some people cope with chronic adversity without diagnosable disorders. Ionescu calls this natural resilience. Others benefit from help—assisted resilience (Ionescu, 2004).
Care pathways and therapeutic practices
Strong emotions disrupt brain functioning. That said, most researchers consider resilience a potential present in everyone. Michel Lemay (1999) calls it “a great health reserve” available to each person. Development varies by individuals, life stages, and socio-environmental contexts.
Immediate psychological intervention
We must distinguish early from long-term support. Early support first ensures safety for a pre-verbally injured person—but without forcing speech. Some need to talk immediately, yet not necessarily about the trauma. Speaking often serves an affective rather than an informative function (Cyrulnik, 2018).
Crucially, people should be free to speak or to remain silent. Forcing disclosure may add a verbal source of trauma and worsen the situation (Bonanno, 2004). The aim is to add helpful verbal traces to memory—not to recite the trauma.
Longer-term intervention
Chronic post-traumatic syndromes involve re-experiencing, non-specific anxiety/somatoform/behavioral symptoms, and personality changes after the impact. Treatments combine (1) psychotropics for insomnia, anxiety, and inhibition and (2) psychotherapies that reconnect meaning and integrate the event into the life story (Crocq, 2010).
Approaches—CBT, hypnosis, supportive therapies, psychoanalytic inspiration—share a cathartic logic (Freud, 1893): revive the event with its affects and then associate, re-inscribing it within the person’s network of meanings. Individual therapy often lasts months to years; peer groups can also help, though improvements are usually partial.
The resilience model in practice
The resilience model complements classic views centered on vulnerability and risk. It widens clinical perspectives by integrating salutogenic characteristics, not only pathogenic ones.
Measurement tools are numerous, revealing how hard it is to capture resilience precisely (Leys, 2018). Meanwhile, programs aim to stimulate protective modes based on existing or developable characteristics: cognitive efficiency, autonomy, environmental mastery, self-worth, interpersonal skills and empathy, anticipation and planning, and humor.
Mobilizing resources
Professionals adopt a resource-oriented stance: beyond symptoms, they identify and mobilize personal, familial, and community strengths. Consequently, they drop fatalism, transgenerational determinism, and perfectionism, allowing people and families to build their own pathway (Manciaux, 2001).
In everyday adversity, tools like the Enneagram can help mobilize relational adaptation and personal resources.
Conclusion; resilience & sense
Resilience refers to renewed personal development after a traumatic crash. It is never permanently acquired; it evolves. A person seen as resilient can encounter setbacks during stress accumulation. Moreover, resilience can emerge at any life stage, including old age. Placed on a timeline, mentalization explains why resilience inevitably fluctuates (Tychey de, 2001).
Narrative identity
What matters is not only self-perception in adversity—appraisal, future projection, and so on—but also how others look at the injured person.
By recounting the past—through speech, writing, drawing, theatre, altruism, or other cultural expression—the individual reorganizes cognition and creates meaning. This process lifts denial and splitting, restoring coherence.
“I am the one who experienced the crash and healed, more or less. This is what you will need to consider in our new relationship.”
« Je suis celui qui a connu le fracas, qui a plus ou moins bien cicatrisé ; c’est avec ça que vous aurez à établir vos nouvelles relations » (B. Cyrulnik, 2001).
Bibliography – Resilience (Sense)
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2010-2019
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