Can We Bottle Ukrainian Resilience?

                         By Dr. Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. Executive Director ETSU Ballad Health Strong BRAIN Institute
 
You may still be reeling in disbelief at the attack of a sovereign Ukraine by its neighbor. You may be just as surprised by the resolve shown by the Ukrainian people, standing up to overwhelming military odds and inconceivable destructive force. Where do the Ukrainians get their resilience? At the Strong BRAIN Institute (SBI) we are interested in exactly this kind of question and strive to promote resilience in all people.   
 
Let’s start by defining what “resilience” is (and what it’s not). Resilience can mean very different things. It’s often defined simply as the capacity to overcome difficulty. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” right? On the flip side, failing to overcome difficulty makes you weak. Adherents to this definition tell their friends to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” or “get over it.” Unfortunately, this understanding of resilience just doesn’t fit the science. Resilience isn’t in a person. Thinking of resilience as in people prevents us from helping them become more resilient. True resilience emerges from a dynamic interplay between resources both inside and outside of a person.
 
In the SBI, we have adopted a scale metaphor from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child to think about resilience. It’s based on the concept of a teeter-totter such as one might see on a playground. It works like this. Throughout our lives, each of us has both positive experiences and negative ones. The good experiences stack up on one side of the scale while the bad things stack up on the other. How resilient we are depends on how our scale is balanced.
 
If the scale tips in the direction of the good side, then our scale is stacked in our favor. In this case, we can manage difficulty by drawing on the positive features of our lives, such as the love and support of our family or the income from a well-paying job. But if the scale tips to the bad side, then our scale is stacked against us and our ability to overcome difficulty becomes severely compromised. Perhaps we have no one to talk to or we have low-paying jobs with no healthcare or childcare benefits.  
 
An important additional element of the resilience metaphor is the fulcrum. The starting location of the fulcrum is determined at birth by the internal and external resources available to a child at the time. Babies born to loving families with great prenatal health care, for example, have fulcrum locations predisposed to tip their resilience scales positive. In contrast, babies born to abusive or neglectful families or who are born with adverse in utero conditions have fulcrum locations predisposed to tip negative. In either case, individuals’ resilience-potential are set by these starting conditions.
 
Over time the location of the fulcrum can be shifted, but it can be shifted in both positive and negative directions from both internal and external parts of a person’s life. When individuals develop cognitive and emotional regulation skills from high quality early learning environments and relationships, for example, they can shift their fulcrum toward the positive side even when the odds are otherwise stacked against them. We routinely witness such positive fulcrum shifts among individuals who emerge from abject poverty or poor health conditions to lead relatively successful lives. In contrast, negative fulcrum shifts resulting from drug or alcohol addiction can remove people from the supportive reach of their loving families or powerful professional careers into a low-resilience status.
 
In sum, it’s a mistake to think of resilience as something that’s inside of a person. While healthy mental hygiene is a key component for living resiliently, no amount of drive, intellect, wit, or belief can overcome all adversities. The key to enhancing resilience lies in leveraging social and community supports to bolster existing internal strengths as the individual strives toward being the best parent, family member, employee, community member they can be. Of course, we can also continue working on improving the internal strengths as well.
 
Ukrainians are probably not naturally more resilient than any other people. Rather, what makes them strong right now is their collective responsibility for each other and their collective drive to remain free. But we can learn from them. We all have the potential to muster resilience in the face of great adversity, even existential catastrophe.