Resilience is not about gritting your teeth and getting through or sucking it up. Resilience is about honoring our need to ask for and receive help. It is important to remember that you are not going it alone. There is always someone who can help and there is always hope. ~Dr. Mollie Marti, founder, and President, National Resilience Institute
To be emotionally resilient is the ability to bounce back. But that’s not all.
Before this word applied to people, it was a mechanical definition.
In an old dictionary from 1950, it means: returning to or resuming the original position or shape. Mech. (that means mechanical) capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture.
In an older dictionary from 1940, resilient isn’t even a word that stands alone. Instead, it’s listed as an elongation of the word resile. (I’d never heard of the word) Resile means to spring back or recoil. It gives the example of resiliency as a spring.
Modern definitions immediately apply resiliency as a quality people possess to recover quickly from difficulty, crisis, stress, and hardship.
Resiliency is a psychological strength to cope instead of falling apart. People with strong resiliency can maintain their cool even in disastrous situations. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel the stress, they simply have the means to handle it instead of running from it or emotionally shutting down.