Masten – introduction to resilience

Resilience is really a broad umbrella term for the capacity of any system to recover from or withstand a disturbance with might cause it to fail or go off track, and that could refer to an individual’s life, whether they can recover from adversity, or it could refer to a family system, or an economic system, and I think the whole planet is hoping that we see resilience in the global ecosystem, so it’s any kind of capacity of a system to recover from a significant threat. But I study children and families who do well under conditions of adversity. 

Resilience is dynamic, it’s always changing, and resilience is always referring to how well you’re doing in a context of great difficulty at a particular point in time. So, you could be doing well following adversity at one point in time and then not be doing well, you know so you could, you know, look good and then flounder, or you could struggle initially after a major disaster or trauma it’s perfectly typical for people to struggle and not do so well, and if you went in there and measured everybody right then and there you might say “Wow, this isn’t going so well” but then people recover over time. So there’s different patterns, that people follow, resilience refers to the many processes of recovery and good functioning during or after a difficult challenge, but it’s certainly the case that a person who looks to be showing resilience at one point in time might not look good later or at a different point in time, and it’s also the case that people will show resilience in one domain of functioning and not in another.