Resilience

Resilience. What does it mean, and how does it work when it’s a human being at the centre of it?

Resilience. What does it mean, and how does it work when it’s a human being at the centre of it?

We use the word constantly across cultures and industries, whether describing a business recovering from collapse, a person escaping abuse, or a community surviving war or disaster. Yet most accounts focus on the event rather than the concept itself. That reflects how we use the word in everyday language.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces resilience back to “springing back” or “rebounding,” later expanding into two familiar frames:

• Psychological: mentally recovering quickly from shock, injury, or stress

• Physical: returning to shape after being bent or pressed

When we apply these definitions to human experience, they fall short. They are too narrow and too mechanical. Human resilience is not simply recovery or elasticity. It is physical and psychological, but also ethical, experiential, and for many, spiritual. It concerns how a person stands in relation to themselves and in relation to the world around them.

From my experience, reading, and conversations with others, I’ve come to see resilience as rooted in a person’s relationship with themselves, and how that relationship shows up in the social world around them. It involves both self-comfort and a sense of social value.

Here, I focus on the psychological dimension of resilience. Although physical resilience is closely linked to psychology, the two are distinct. Physical resilience can be strengthened through exercise, good nutrition, and basic self-care, all of which support mental health and resilience. Psychological resilience, however, develops differently: through education, social acceptance and relationships, moral and ethical values, and self-awareness.

Below is not an all-encompassing view of the psychology of resilience, just some framing so we can explore it more fully.

Psychology and resilience

Psychological research tends to frame resilience in a few overlapping ways, especially in trauma‑informed work. For example:

After a traumatic event, a person can shut down in ways that limit growth, or they can experience growth and even excel afterward. Resilience is often linked to the latter.

Resilience can resemble grit: facing the hard thing repeatedly and still making it through. It is an inner stance, the conviction that “I will get through this no matter what.” In this sense, resilience is the capacity to judge a challenge, regulate emotions, adapt behaviour, and keep going through adversity.

In psychological terms, resilience is shaped by early attachment and by relationships, both with people and with the wider world. It is also shaped by our relationship with ourselves. What we are resilient to, how we do it, and under what conditions it shows up is not just about the person in isolation. It is about all these factors feeding into the person, and how the person experiences them.

To my mind, resilience is closely linked to how we feel about ourselves. We put the hard work in because we want the best for ourselves. We avoid bad food because we want our future selves to benefit. We protect ourselves because we feel we have something to offer. I remember a martial arts instructor saying to me, and I am paraphrasing:

“Self‑defence can’t be taught. The method can, but the ability to defend ourselves is based on how we feel about ourselves, and how we value ourselves. If we don’t value ourselves, we will never fully defend ourselves.”

Although he used the words self-defence, I took the point to be about resilience: doing everything you can to survive and come through a situation intact simply because you value yourself; that value informing your resilience.

But this goes further. Education can strengthen our capacity for resilience. Simply knowing how to change a tyre can make us feel more capable when we break down with a spare in the boot, just as knowing the law can help us defend ourselves. Resilience develops through learning, as we become more capable within ourselves and more useful to others. Recently, I came across two people who were struggling to pay for a parking ticket. They asked me for help, and simply because I knew how to use the machine, I was able to assist them. In that small moment, I felt a sense of value.

This sense of value is what makes us feel we are worth something, and this is the sense of value that will allow us to defend or show up for ourselves.

From there, my compass points to the next step: a theological consideration, and then to philosophy. I take this step because, in my experience, and as wider research suggests, humans often make sense of the world through stories. Religious texts, in particular, present moral questions and human struggles through narrative, offering a way of understanding resilience as it is lived, tested, and interpreted over time.

Theology and resilience

This exploration is not a moral judgment on religion, nor is it an expression of guilt or apology. It does not claim that any religion is more or less true than another. I am simply reading these texts through my own experience and understanding, shaped by how I have encountered and interpreted them in life.

My position here is personal. I am a humanist, and an atheist who probably leans more toward agnosticism. I am not a theologia. I grew up with Hinduism at home and in a primary school that taught biblical ideals daily, and I have also read across Hindu, Abrahamic, and Buddhist texts. That combination has given me an appreciation for the teachings and values of religion, as well as its points of tension, and it has no doubt shaped many of my moral and ethical standpoints.

Within the Christian telling of the Judeo-Christian tradition, two stories in particular stand out: David and Goliath, and Samson and Delilah.

Both are often taught to children and retold in simplified forms, which is part of how they enter wider cultural memory. Although these stories belong to the Old Testament, I first encountered them through Christian teaching rather than through Judaism.

In the Book of Samuel, we get the story of David and Goliath. The Philistine champion, Goliath of Gath, stands as an overwhelming threat, while the Israelites live in fear of attack. Saul is their king at the time, and the standoff takes place in the Valley of Elah.

Among the Israelites is a boy named David. He begins as a shepherd, becomes a musician in Saul’s court, and eventually leads men into battle. Through belief, strength of will, and determination, he does what others will not. While others hold back in fear, he steps forward, challenges the giant, and wins.

He remains calm and stoic, holding fast to belief in God, which, for me, reads as belief in the value of self. He overcomes the enemy and later wins the people’s support strongly enough to become king. This is resilience: not being overwhelmed by impossible odds, but continuing under pressure with equanimity and resolve, doing what must be done and working with setbacks as they arise.

The second tale comes earlier in the Book of Judges, another story often taught to children and one I also learned through a Christian lens: Samson and Delilah. Samson is an Israelite and a protector of his people, a man marked by extraordinary strength given to him by God and symbolised in his uncut hair. The biblical reference points to his consecration as a Nazirite, the source of his strength, where dedication and restraint hold mind and body together in devotion.

The story shows Samson losing his way through desire and misplaced trust, becoming reliant on a partner to meet needs that were once grounded elsewhere. In my reading, this is a loss of self. Delilah, as the object of his affection and longing, misleads him and separates him from his consecration, with the cutting of his hair acting as the symbol of that severing. He becomes a shadow of the man he once was, until his hair regrows and he brings the house of the Philistines down by tearing at its pillars.

To me, the loss of self through betrayal is real. It happens in relationships and friendships, and sometimes through the institutions and governments people follow. Any of these can make a person lose that sense of value in themselves. In Samson’s case, he is misled through lust and through a loss of love for God, which here I read as the higher self, in exchange for a love for another. He loses value in himself and becomes a diminished version of who he was.

He loses the value in himself that gave him his strength.

Pain can teach. Through what he endures, he becomes wiser and finds his way back to himself. Realising he has been misled, and taking responsibility for his part in it, becomes an act of self-purification, symbolised by the growth of his hair. That is when his power returns. His resilience is what allows him to bring the house of his oppressors down, destroying the version of himself that was trapped there so that something stronger can emerge. His old self is also crushed in the falling house. Resilience comes after realisation and purification: the ability to remake oneself into a truer, stronger version. Though he does not emerge alive from the house he finds himself and his value through his sacrifice.

The texts I studied at school, and my later readings of the King James Bible, taught me a great deal. Even though I did not always learn those lessons well enough to protect me later on, they gave me something to reflect on. I could return to them and re-read them with a clearer eye for what I missed the first time, and with a deeper understanding, shaped by my own, hurts.

Alongside my learning of Christianity at school, at home I was learning the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Gita. These too came first as stories and then, as I got older, as texts I returned to with fuller context and deeper understanding. They taught me about resilience in a different way.

The Gita explores how Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, teaches Arjuna about the nature of life and how it fits into the universe. My understanding comes from my late teens, reading the Gita through Mahatma Gandhi’s commentary, alongside the wonder I learned through televised retellings of the Mahabharat and the stories my grandma passed down when I was a child. Though I have read many commentaries since then, including Chinmayananda, ISKCON, and others, that early grounding still shapes how I approach it.

With the Gita, we begin at a crisis point within the Mahabharata. Arjuna is facing battle with his cousins over power and stewardship of the realm; a place he and his brothers have arrived at through their own actions. He falters and turns to his most trusted adviser, Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu and asks, how do I face a battle where people I love, care for, and feel responsible for will likely die, and where the realm itself will be divided?

In my reading, Krishna also stands in for the wisest self, the part of us most aligned with our inner wisdom. Arjuna’s question is painfully human, full of worry and the weight of duty.

Krishna points him back to his choices and to the path that has led him there. He could have chosen another way earlier on, but now he cannot simply step back. He owes it to everyone involved, and to himself, to complete what he has set in motion and to face both the fruits and the harms of his labour.

It is an important teaching, delivered on a battlefield, with Arjuna’s chariot drawn up between two vast armies. The moment is loaded: weapons are ready, self-doubt creeps in, and resilience is at its lowest. Arjuna is admonished as he tries to step away from the responsibility of seeing it through. By the end of the exchange, wisdom reasserts itself. Right or wrong, he now has a duty to complete the path he has set himself, his brothers, and his cousins on.

Resilience here is completing the journey you have started and accepting both the losses and the bounties that come with it.

The Bardo Thödrol, known in the Western world as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It literally translates to the intermediate state, hearing, liberation - or liberation through hearing in the intermediate state.

It is a core Buddhist text that I first read in my twenties and have returned to since. It taught me something I will probably never fully master: that I cling to the very things that keep me bound to my own suffering, and that releasing these is part of how I move closer to my higher self.

As an atheist, I do not take its exploration of life, death, and rebirth in a literal sense. Instead, I read “rebirth” as the many versions of ourselves we move through across a lifetime. In that light, releasing what keeps me in suffering becomes a kind of death, one from which rebirth offers the chance to let parts of myself die: habits, attachments, identities, so that I can be remade with less weight each time and live with greater serenity.

In the Bardo Thödrol, the next life is shaped by the patterns of mind a person carries with them, and a person returns to life formed by that patterning. Read as metaphor, the next stage is not improved by action alone, but by an inner recognition: you are not the owner of the fruits of your labour. Life, as you move through it, is slippery and illusory; you possess nothing in any final sense, and the self you cling to is less solid than it feels. When you see this, you can begin to loosen your grip on the things that bring suffering. You also start to recognise that joy and sadness are fleeting and entangled. The tighter you hold to what brings you joy, the sharper the suffering when it begins to slip away.

Resilience in this context is not the ability to manage or endure suffering to get through it, but the recognition that suffering exists only as it is experienced. In The Matrix, this is captured in the line from the boy monk to Neo: “there is no spoon.” The point is not that there is nothing to resist, but that experience changes when the mind’s relationship to it changes. When that recognition lands, the mind shifts back toward the true self, and the will becomes grounded and uncompromised.

These traditions and ideas shaped much of my youth and still shape me in my forties, and I have little doubt they will continue to shape me until my end: final peace, rebirth, or awaiting judgement, depending on what you believe.

From there, the next natural step is toward philosophy. While theology explores resilience through story and meaning, philosophy turns to more abstract thinking, examining how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. It asks how we live, how we act, and what we believe to be true, not through narrative alone, but through reflection and reason. In this way, philosophy provides a framework to test and interpret the experiences and values first encountered through story

Here, I will look at how philosophy can guide us in understanding the nature of resilience and in developing our own inner sense of it.

Philosophy and resilience

Philosophy asks the big questions about the human condition: ethics, metaphysics, meaning, why we act as we do, and much more. This is in contrast to the answers that theology offers. At its best, it can lead to genuine realisations about the world and ourselves, giving us a better handle on how to behave and act within it. At its worst, it can take you on a mushroom trip to nowhere, though in The Good Place, Doug Forcett still manages to map out the afterlife with 92 percent accuracy while high.

Here, I look at how philosophers have wrestled with righteous action, and how those debates feed into my own ideas about resilience.

Stepping into Kantian ethics, we are met with ideas of steadfastness and rational will: that our duty is to act according to principles we could will for everyone, not just ourselves. Kant is not giving us a loophole to hide behind. He is pointing us toward reason in service of a higher purpose and asking what our so-called “truth” is doing. Does it serve our rational duty, or is it a tool to control the people around us? If it is the latter, then it is not a true purpose, and it is not the truth.

Within a Kantian framing, the inner self is guided by clear judgement and a purpose grounded in moral steadfastness and rational duty. When those align with the betterment of society, a person is better able to withstand the heavier difficulties of life. A purpose like that, once found and followed through reason, makes it easier to face the slings and arrows of experience and stay on the path. The strength to carry on is found through truthful purpose and, in a roundabout way, this echoes what Krishna said to Arjuna on the battlefield.

For me, this reading is not a simple moral binary. Although I think Kant does explicitly posit a right and a wrong, my more modern framing is that, while there are certain ultimate wrongs, such as rape, murder, and theft, much of real life is harder to fit into clean binaries. So, in what I would call a modern retelling, or at least my own framing of Kant, the task is to find your identity and moral grounding, and to act from that position. If that grounding is secure, then even when you face stress and challenge, you are more likely to feel less burdened within yourself and more capable of taking the actions you need to take. That requires being so deeply rooted in your convictions that you can withstand the slings, because they cannot reach that inner sense of righteousness. Think of Mandela or Gandhi facing prison and undertaking hunger strikes.

The difficulty is that human beings can lie, even to themselves. Even when we know the difference between right and wrong, we can still find excuses or explanations to justify what we do. In my experience, that does not just chip away at our standing in the world around us; it also erodes our inner strength with every lie we tell ourselves. In this context, resilience is not undone only by what lies outside our control, but by how we come to see ourselves. We become, in our own eyes, less worthy and less valuable, and to echo my martial arts instructor, less defensible.

We live in a modern landscape where images fill every part of our lives through media and, even more so, through the social media we constantly consume. In that world, we can become desensitised to other people’s suffering, or at least that is what the philosopher Susan Sontag would argue. When suffering becomes something we capture, scroll past, and consume through a camera lens, it can distance us. It can numb us. It can even quietly encourage us not to help.

Resilience here is the refusal to let that numbing win. In Sontag’s framing, we have to stay true to ourselves, because we cannot really remove ourselves from the suffering of others. We have to remain able to see it, respect it, and care for those who carry it. Through that, we can meet our own suffering with more honesty, and we can also earn and offer the care and understanding of the society around us.

My view is that this framing can be taken further in relation to how much of ourselves we share, and what we choose to share. Here, we have a moral duty to curate carefully, not the image itself, because that should remain truthful, but the frequency with which we offer it. If we need to communicate harm, we cannot overwhelm an audience with an endless stream of images or with our own perspective alone. In the end, that creates numbness and a kind of dead weight, which the observer is more likely to turn away from, or worse, become morbidly fascinated by, than moved to act.

This brings us to what these theologies and philosophers I feel, have been hinting at all along: our relationship with ourselves. In the end, the only thing we can truly control is our own mind, which takes us to Stoicism, the inner citadel, and Marcus Aurelius. The Stoic idea is straightforward: we control what happens within us, and the actions we choose to take. If those actions are aligned with a higher purpose, we can remain in the inner citadel, steady even when the world around us is in chaos.

Being stoic, in my framing, is not self-reliance at the expense of working within our communities, friendships, and families. It is recognising when you need help and being open and honest with those closest to you in seeking that help and support. It is also taking responsibility for yourself, and recognising that you can only do your best. The lion can hunt, but no matter its training or skill, it may still miss the meal. The deer may run, but no matter its speed or skill, it may still become the meal.

The challenge, then, is identifying who your people are, who you can trust, and who will actually be there for you. You should expect to make mistakes on this front, and learn from them.

In that inner citadel, fortified through good action and clear intention, Samson would not be undone by Delilah. By remaining yourself, and staying true to the purpose you have identified, you avoid collapse and the loss of self and dignity, whether through your own acts or through the harm you see in the world. This does not mean withdrawing from the world, or refusing love, or refusing to lean on others. It means being less shaken by the things that harm or disappoint you, because you still hold governance over yourself.

From Kant’s ethical and moral framing, through to what we take in from the world and what we release back into it, and on to the inner citadel, we begin to see how resilience is formed. It starts with understanding yourself and your moral and ethical grounding. Do not be swayed by the world around you. Share yourself carefully, keep your own counsel, and take time to learn whose trust you can truly place your faith in.

Conclusion

We can take these philosophical values, the inner citadel, ethical clarity, and the choice to stay true and warm to humanity even when we are surrounded by images of the world at its darkest. In that sense, philosophy echoes theology. Resilience is more than avoiding a bad event, or even a run of them. It is the ability to understand the nature of our own suffering, to know what we can and cannot control, to separate ourselves from the outcome of our labour, and to recognise our choices in any given moment. It is also the choice to tie ourselves to a higher purpose.

Here, resilience is not about how we win, or even what we survive. It is about how we show up, and how we exit. Are we living out a Shakespearean legacy like Macbeth, led by the stories and ambitions of others, hollowed out of our own meaning? Or are we closer to Imogen, true to ourselves, loyal, and steadfast?

To me, resilience is not just whether we hold firm, bend, break, or bounce back. We are all of these at different times. Resilience is also how we view the world, how we view ourselves, and how we hold our relationship to both.

So, through this rounded journey the question was:

“Resilience. What does it mean, and how does it work when it’s a human being at the centre of it?”

My short answer is that resilience does not have a single fixed meaning. Its meaning is shaped by what you have lived through, the challenges and battles you have faced, and the way you come to understand and frame those experiences. And it works through the stories, values, duties, and meanings we hold, the inner frameworks that help us stay ourselves when the world presses hard against us.

Resilience is framed through how much we value ourselves and the relationship we have with the world around us.