Resilience

CORE DEFINITION

The process of adapting well when an individual faces adversity, trauma, tragedy, threat or major stress. It is not the avoidance of difficulty but the capacity to recover and grow within it, and it draws on protective factors such as emotion regulation, impulse control, causal analysis, self-efficacy, realistic optimism, empathy and the seeking of support. Its scaffold function is coping capacity in adversity: in crisis management, trauma recovery and stress adaptation it explains how resilience develops, and it helps people strengthen it by cultivating protective factors, building support networks, developing coping strategies and learning from setbacks, so that adversity becomes an opportunity for growth and post-traumatic development.