What Does it Mean to be Resilient?
Resilience is a learnable skill, but people didn’t always believe it to be. To understand resilience, we take a look at its history.
by Veronica Esposito
As the world closes in on trans people and doors close around us, it is more important than ever to stay mentally healthy. Therapist and writer Veronica Esposito brings you the second in a three part series on resilience and how to build and manage it. Read part one of this series here or part three here.
Part II: Coping vs Healing
Political commentators have predicted that as Donald Trump’s authoritarian fantasies fail, he will become increasingly erratic—which may result in increasingly harmful attacks on trans people. State governments have stepped up their persecution of trans people with crueler laws than ever, and the Supreme Court is set to rule on a case that may open the door to a Pandora’s Box of oppressive laws against trans people. Simply put, 2026 will be a year that tests the resilience of the trans community. This will be a challenging and grim year—it is my hope that in learning more about resilience, you’ll be better able to build a life worth living, even in 2026.
What Is Resilience?
Resilience is a notion that is crucial to trans lives. At its simplest it is defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity—it is what lets us persist in spite of a world that throws so many obstacles in our way. Resilience can also be imagined from an ecological point of view: it’s an ecosystem’s capacity to recover from adverse events like a hurricane or a drought.
Just as a tornado might look really different from a wildfire, there will be very different sorts of things that call on us to exercise our resilience. When we fight for medical treatment in spite of poorly trained doctors, gatekeeping requirements, and unhelpful insurers, we are exercising resilience. When we persist in our identities in spite of rejection and ridicule, that’s resilience. When we continue to work for a world where our lives are treated with dignity, that’s resilience.
When therapists and counselors first began to look at resilience as a part of our understanding of a thriving life, it was viewed as an individual responsibility that could be promoted through coping behaviors. This can be seen in various tests used to determine an individual’s resilience levels, which typically focus on individual statements like these from the Brief Resilience Scale:
I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times.
It is hard for me to snap back when something bad happens.
I usually come through difficult times with little trouble.
Tests like these are used to evaluate a person’s ability to overcome the difficult emotions that occur during setbacks and to marshall the necessary resources to regroup and find some way past an obstacle. Overall these resilience factors help people continue to push toward a goal in spite of disappointment and demoralization.
In the 1970s, when resilience studies were in their infancy, it was believed that only a subset of “invincibles” were able to rely on their inner strengths to overcome adversity—that is, only so much of the population could ever be resilient.
These were dark days for psychotherapy. One widely cited paper from 1985 examined the question of whether abused infants deserved to be abused: “are abused (and neglected) children less appealing to parents than other children and, if so, is that difference inherent in the child or a result of experience with a maltreating parent?” (Thankfully, the paper concluded that no, there’s nothing inherently awful about abused children that makes parents want to abuse them.)
But by the 1990s and early 2000s researchers were coming to understand that resilience consisted of traits that virtually anyone could learn and develop. One 1996 paper saw in Forrest Gump the perfect embodiment of the traits that made for a resilient person.
Forrest had a prosocial attitude. At every turn of his life, Forrest's ability to befriend others and find support (even in the midst of combat in Vietnam) allowed him to carry on. He had a sense of "required helpfulness" often seen in resilient people.
"Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get." This expression conveys Forrest's sense of self: Roll with the punches because life is full of them.
This Understanding that resilience was something that anyone could exhibit—as opposed to the special few who were naturally resilient, as was originally believed in the ‘70s—was a part of a mental health’s movement away from psychotherapy that once focused on “deficits”—all the ways that someone was diseased—and instead focused on capabilities: how individuals were succeeding in spite of adverse experiences. One central paper in resilience studies from 2001 put it like this:
The message from three decades of research on resilience underscores central themes of the positive psychology movement. Psychology has neglected important phenomena in human adaptation and development during periods of focus on risk, problems, pathology, and treatment. Attention to human capabilities and adaptive systems that promote healthy development and functioning have the potential to inform policy and programs that foster competence and human capital and aim to improve the health of communities and nations while also preventing problems.
The movement away from pathology and toward capabilities was in and of itself a major step forward for psychotherapy, but still something was missing.
Coping Vs. Healing
The understanding of resilience in the early 2000s was very much focused on the steps an individual could take to cope, without a complementary understanding of the structural aspects of adversity that might make it extremely difficult for certain people to cope as well as others.
This individualistic understanding of resilience was problematic for a variety of reasons. For one thing, ignoring the force of structural oppression could cause individuals to falsely conclude that their inability to cope with a hateful world was all their fault. Consider, for instance, the example of a trans person who is having trouble finding a job and wants to give up—without properly accounting for all the ways in which trans people in the job market are discriminated against, this person might wrongly conclude that they can’t find a job simply because they’re underqualified and bad at job interviews. Over time such perceived failures could turn into debilitating levels of demoralization, self-hatred, and depression.
Moreover, in some cases attempts to adapt to a system of oppression can leave a marginalized person even worse off. Take, for instance, this trans woman, who explained that for years she didn’t transition due to internalized transphobia:
That’s the primary reason why I didn’t transition originally. I figured that, if I did, I would be like one of those people I’d been hearing about all my life. I would be crazy, I would be selfish, I’d be predatory, I’d be sexually twisted or deviant.
From an individualistic standpoint, this person might be better off—after all, she’s successfully avoided the oppression that out trans people have to face—but looking with a wider lens would see an individual who has simply perpetuated her own oppression and has not taken the opportunity to seek real liberation. As a major review of transgender resilience puts it:
Targeting resilience as an individual trait or process may again place the responsibility of psychological well-being on the individual without addressing the systemic issues that are intrinsically linked to psychological symptoms of distress. Resilience defined as ‘‘successful adaptation’’ to a stressor may include conforming to dominant/oppressive cultures, which would not actually promote the wellbeing and liberation of marginalized groups and instead manifest as internalized stigma.
Because of these gaps in the original understanding of resilience, researchers and therapists from marginalized communities worked to create a more holistic understanding of the concept that takes into account systematic oppression and the ways that marginalized communities respond to it.
As the field of psychotherapy evolved through the 2010s and our understanding of structural oppression emerged, we began to learn that resilience was about much more than just coping. A very extensively cited piece published in 2020 lays out a plan for moving beyond individualistic resilience and toward radical, communitywide healing. The paper’s lead author is Black scholar and licensed psychologist Bryana H. French—although the paper speaks specifically to healing for people of color and indigenous individuals, many of its insights can be applied to other marginalized groups such as trans people.
Part of French’s argument for going beyond coping is that healing gets us closer to the root of the problem by centering “on resisting oppression and other barriers to wellness.” While coping may help an individual function better, healing can transform the fabric of a society into a more just version of itself.
Central to French’s vision of healing is the idea of a critical consciousness. This idea was coined by Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire and is best expressed in his classic work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is hard to overstate the importance of this book—an analysis of Google Scholar data conducted by scholar Elliott Green found that the title was the third-most cited book in the social sciences. It centers around a call for schools to teach critical thinking—as opposed to construing students as passive vessels in which to deposit information—and it argues that dialogue should be the basis for active participation by students in their education. It is through this dialogue and critical thinking that individuals can develop a critical consciousness.
Although the concept of critical consciousness is complicated and multi-layered, French sums it up well when she describes it as recognizing “the importance of helping oppressed people develop a critical awareness of oppression as a way to psychologically liberate themselves from oppressive forces.”
This is how it might play out in a therapy session with a trans client who seeks help for elevated anxiety. Whereas coping might be teaching this individual skills such as breathing exercises to help them better live with the stress of being marginalized, critical consciousness work would center around talking about why trans people are so often forced to live with escalated anxiety. Crucial to this work is depathologizing this person’s challenges—helping them see that their escalated anxiety isn’t due to personal failings but rather is the logical result of having to live in a world that actively oppresses them. This understanding would give into ways of metabolizing oppression—such as discovering personal language and narratives for articulating their experiences and struggles—in addition to helping the client learn coping activities to reduce their symptoms of anxiety.
Another key part of building a critical consciousness is connecting with a community that helps people thrive. This takes problems like societal transphobia away from the realm of the individual and poses them as a matter of collective struggle. This shift gives individuals opportunities to fight back against their oppression through actions like spreading important information that can help the community survive, working to help heal and inspire other community members, distributing money and resources to support collective support, and taking action to fight back against oppressive policies.
Actions such as these can help to take oppressed people out of a survival mindset and help them to move toward thriving. As French puts it, “healing is a concept that scales up coping by moving beyond the goal of merely surviving within an oppressive society to thriving.”
To be sure, a focus on healing should not be taken as an indictment of coping. It is still essential to learn skills for survival in an oppressive world, and to do the necessary self-work to become a more resilient person. But with that said, an individual’s capacity to cope will be more potent and will be more likely to lead to the sort of social change that furnishes justice if a focus on coping is taken in the context of an overall perspective of healing.
Onward
In Part III we’re going to look at specific methods for building resilience and thriving. Remember that these are long-term changes, and some of these actions may even seem daunting or out of reach. Please try to read it with an open and curious mind, and remember that change takes time.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.