What is Resilience?

This post is for the June 2015 Carnival of Aces on Mental Health. It is cross-posted to Prismatic Entanglements.

[tw: invalidation, gaslighting, vague mentions of abuse, ableism and compulsory sexuality]

If you spend much time around survivor spaces, you’ll see a lot of talk about resilience. What does it really mean, though?

Basically: resilience is the ability to recover from really tough, painful situations. But there’s so much more depth to it than that. This isn’t the kind of thing that you either have or you don’t. If you’re dealing with PTSD, you may be tempted to blame yourself (as I did) for not being resilient enough, for not recovering on the timeline that others think you should, or for even having PTSD at all. But don’t. Or at least, try not to. Because it’s not your fault. And you are resilient. If you didn’t have resilience, you wouldn’t even be here at all.

Everyone has some degree of resilience. And it’s something you can always improve. It’s like how in World of Warcraft, you have a base percentage of the Resilience stat, and then you can add onto it. Unlike in WoW, however, it’s not as simple as putting on a different set of clothes.

Components of Resilience

Resilience is a complex abstract idea that doesn’t mean much until you break it down into the factors that make it up, and concrete practical applications of them. There are several components that are thought to contribute to overall resilience. Each of these is a skill that can be developed, or a practice that’s built up based on skills that can be developed.

In one of my first sessions with my current therapist, she gave me a little notebook, and had me write down these components of resilience:

• adaptability
• creativity
• ability to manage affect
• support network
• tenacity
• discernment
• ability to develop a positive framework for life’s issues

Looking over this list, I realized that I’m a lot more resilient than I tend to think I am. I’ve always been habitually creative, and have used that as a coping skill—in fact, my blog was created as a way of coping creatively, sorting out issues (discernment), and developing positive frameworks for them. It allowed me to access a support network, at a time when my other avenues for support were suffering.

These are things that not everyone has equal access to, though. Support networks in particular seem to be one of the most important factors in ease of recovery, but it’s also the component of resilience that most heavily depends on other people, and can be very severely affected by any kind of fallout from abuse affecting friendships, or complicating needs due to intersectional aspects of oneself that others may not understand or be willing to accommodate.

Of that list above, I think my support network and (confidence in my own) discernment have been hit the hardest—by constant gaslighting and social pressure due to being ace. And the way that others just… don’t get either asexuality or abuse.

When (nearly) everyone is telling you, over and over again, that you can’t possibly know your own sexual orientation, that it must be because of some medical or psychological issue that can be fixed, that you’re missing out and oh what a waste… well then, how can you expect to be treated any better by a partner?

And where can you go when something happens, if it’s just expected that you should be treated that way? When behavior that erodes or crosses your boundaries is considered to be “just trying to help” you “discover” yourself?

I’m fortunate to have never had any therapists who overtly tried to change me—although I had one session with one who might have, had I ever gone back (more on that another time). I’m fortunate to have found the asexual community early in life, too. So I at least had that much support. But I’ve lost a lot of friends (or simply become distant from them) who just have no idea how to support a survivor (or an ace person), and frequently rely heavily on places like Facebook to communicate, which has become inaccessible to me. The ace community itself is sometimes hostile to survivors, sometimes ableist, sometimes just hard to engage with because the whole internet is scary and triggering. So sometimes, I’ve had to disengage and just stay offline for a while.

It’s better, sometimes, to build what Laura calls a Fortress of Solitude, or to just unplug and get out into the wilderness for a while, well out of cell phone range. It may not do anything for (and might have a detrimental effect on) your support network, but going to a nice quiet place where everything is more peaceful is a fantastic way to manage your affect (emotions), and that’s part of resilience too.

One thing that I think we tend to collectively excel at in the ace community is in building positive frameworks. We are truly obsessed with analyzing, and way over-enthusiastic about creating new models and ways of thinking that just work better for us. I mean, even last month’s Carnival topic was Identity, Labels, and Models.

We’re that way largely because we have had to adapt. The existing social scripts and frameworks just don’t work, and are often used against us. So we fight them by creating something different, and adopting existing alternative models from other places as well (there’s a reason why polyamory is so common in the asexual community!). Queenie’s Five Factor Model of Relationships is a really good recent example of this, and I highly recommend trying it. It can help you discern aspects of your relationships, and find ways to bolster your support network. As you can see, it builds up several different components of resilience at once!

I think we’ve also all been pretty much forced to develop some level of tenacity just by existing in the world as ace people, because we face constant invalidation, marginalization, erasure, and compulsory sexuality. It’s exhausting! But we still have to get up every day and face more of the same, to a greater or lesser extent.

Food for Thought

I think, more than anything else… resilience is a practice of each of these things, and practicing resilience amounts to a form of self-care. Here are some questions that may be helpful for you to think about your own resilience:

• In what ways do you demonstrate each of these components of resilience in your own daily life? (Don’t tell me you don’t, because I assure you, you do!)
• Which areas do you excel at? (Are you very good at dealing with change? Very creative? Stubbornly tenacious?)
• Which area do you feel needs the most work, and can you think of any small steps to build that up?
• What little things can you do every day to practice each part of resilience?
• Are there any big things that you want to work towards, that you’d want to set as a goal? What realistic steps can you take towards achieving that?

You don’t have to answer these here, although you can share if you’d like. Writing it down privately or even just thinking about it can help a lot.

Remember also that resilience is something that is important for everyone, and everyone has it to some degree. It’s ordinary, not extraordinary. You may not have nor ever develop any mental illnesses, but pain and grief are part of life. Building resilience as part of a wellness practice is just as important—it’s as much preventive care as it is a key part of recovery. Not “prevention” as in “bad things will stop happening to you” or anything like that… prevention as in, you’ll be able to bounce back more quickly when it does, and the severity of the effects on your mental health will be reduced.

Remember that whatever has happened to you, it is not your fault. You are already resilient enough to have survived to read these words! Focus on that as you go through your healing process. And remember that we’re always here for you.