Reclaiming Resilience: Why we’ve misunderstood one of psychology’s most important concepts

 How is your competent? doctor EXACTLY REBUILDING YOUR RESILIENCE to prevent dementia? Oh; DOING NOTHING, like usual!

Reclaiming Resilience: Why we’ve misunderstood one of psychology’s most important concepts

Few ideas in psychology have become as popular as resilience. It's now a staple of workplace wellbeing programmes, school assemblies, health and social care campaigns, and social media feeds. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — its popularity, resilience has developed something of a PR problem. Being told to "be more resilient" no longer feels encouraging. Instead, it can sound like a polite way of saying: cope with more, ask for less. 

So how did this valuable psychological concept become one of the discipline's most controversial?

Why resilience has a PR problem
It's not difficult to see where the scepticism comes from. Across many different sectors, people are increasingly being asked to do more with fewer resources. Against that backdrop, calls to "be more resilient" can feel less like support and more like an expectation to quietly absorb mounting pressures.

I've encountered this repeatedly when discussing my research with carers. Although many carers find resilience a useful way of understanding their experiences, some have described resilience as "a person's ability to absorb a lack of support" or "the system's excuse to leave us unsupported". These aren't criticisms of people's ability to adapt — they're criticisms of the way resilience is sometimes used to shift responsibility away from organisations and systems. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But perhaps we've begun to confuse the misuse of resilience with resilience itself.

Resilience isn't something we have 
Psychology has generated a vast evidence base on the risks associated with adversity, from stress and trauma to anxiety and depression. That work has been invaluable. But understanding vulnerability is only part of the picture. We also need to understand adaptation. How do so many people continue to function despite profound challenges? This is the question at the heart of resilience research. 

There's an important distinction between the way resilience is often talked about and the way psychologists understand it. Modern resilience research no longer views resilience as a fixed personality trait that some people simply possess while others do not. Instead, resilience is increasingly understood as a dynamic process of adapting to significant adversity over time. In other words, resilience isn't something we are or have. It's something we do. Because resilience is a process, it can develop, falter, and recover through interactions between individuals, their relationships, communities, and wider environments.

This perspective helps explain one of the most consistent findings in resilience research: resilience is remarkably common. The remarkable thing about resilience is not that it is exceptional, but that it is ordinary. Most people eventually adapt to adversity, even if that journey involves distress, uncertainty, and setbacks. Resilience isn't the absence of suffering; it's the process of moving forwards despite it.

Resilience is something we do
We can't simply 'download' resilience. It develops through interactions between individual strengths, supportive relationships, and wider environments — not through a self-help book, motivational slogan, or wellbeing workshop. 

Over the past decade, my research with carers of people living with dementia has pointed to one consistent conclusion: resilience rarely resides within individuals alone. Rather than thinking of resilience as something people carry inside them, it may be more helpful to think of it as an ecosystem.

Individual resources matter. Psychological flexibility, maintaining identity, and developing expertise all help people adapt. But these strengths rarely operate in isolation. Friends and family, sense of community, and accessible, timely health and social care all help sustain resilience.

What often looks like individual resilience is, in reality, the visible outcome of collective support. When those supports are strengthened, people are better able to adapt. When they're weakened, resilience becomes much harder to sustain. Understanding resilience in this way doesn't minimise adversity or shift attention away from people's needs. Instead, it provides a constructive framework for intervention by identifying the individual, social, and structural resources that enable people to adapt.

Why reclaiming resilience matters
None of this means we should stop questioning the way resilience is used in public discourse. If resilience becomes an excuse to justify preventable suffering or under-resourced services, then the criticism is entirely justified.
But abandoning resilience altogether would be a mistake. Properly understood, resilience doesn't shift responsibility onto individuals. It reminds us just how important supportive relationships, strong communities, and effective systems really are. 

The problem isn't resilience. It's how we've come to talk about it — treating it as something that exists independently of the conditions that make it possible.
Perhaps it's time we stopped using resilience as a demand and started recognising it for what the evidence base has long suggested it really is: not something we simply possess, but something we do — together. 

Dr Warren Donnellan is a Senior Lecturer based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool.

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