First and foremost, every single individual has resilience. It doesn’t matter where they are, what their life experiences has been. Even someone that you might say, oh my gosh, that person’s in a really, really bad place. The beauty of human nature is that we are all resilient. It is tapping into that resilience. 

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF RESILIENCE?

So one thing about resilience is that resilience, we have to make meaning of adversity. So to really be able to tap into resilience is that capacity to be able to go through some hard times and make meaning of it. And that’s not always easy to do, but ironically, everybody does. Even if they don’t say it out loud, even if they can’t organize it in their thoughts, just through survival. We are all resilient individuals. So teaching it is not necessarily what’s important. It’s tapping into it, right? If you can tap into everybody’s individual resilience, then we can move them to a better place. Okay? Move them towards, I can go through some hard stuff and still come out on the other end in a way that’s healthy or productive, or as best as we can. So in resilience, what we’re looking for is protective factors. So when I’m working with a client, I’m always seeing them as a resilient person. It takes so much bravery to do therapy, to look at yourself, to come to a program. So just in that, there’s resilience, there’s somebody that I’m like, wow, they have a lot of internal strength and they’re doing their best and trying to make meaning of whatever’s going on for them, be it emotional, relational, be it a problem. So then we want to look into what are the protective factors.

WHAT ARE PROTECTIVE FACTORS?

Protective factors are things like the things that are going to help them cope, to get to tapping into that resilience. So it could be friends, families, it could be their ability to communicate and comprehend information, their intellect. It could be a job that they have. It could be a belief system, it could be spirituality, it could be their environment. So anything that we can tap into to enhance that capacity to tap into the resilience, because every individual, including an infant, is born with resilience to thrive and survive. We just kind of get beaten up sometimes, and so we just have to tap into it. It’s like you, you’ve made it this far. Let’s just get you to tap into your resources.