STILL GOLD? RESILIENCE AND ITS ROLE IN MENTAL HEALTH

I'd like to begin by briefly telling the story of prisoner No. 119104 of the Third Reich — the regime that established and sustained what came to be known as National Socialism, or simply Nazism. The person who would, at a certain point in his life, become that prisoner was born in Austria in 1905 to a loving family. He had a happy childhood and, from a very young age, was drawn to a question most of us probably ask at some point, though not always in these exact words: what makes a life worth living? As a teenager he was already taking part in discussion groups with established intellectuals and even speaking publicly about the meaning of life.

He went on to study medicine, specializing in psychiatry and neurology, and worked with people at risk of suicide. Along the way he married Tilly, a remarkable woman he loved deeply, while carrying on his work at a mental health institution. When the Nazis annexed his country, the future prisoner No. 119104 went to work at the Rothschild Hospital, one of the few institutions in Vienna still allowed to treat Jewish patients. There, at risk to his own safety, he began altering diagnoses to keep psychiatric patients from being sent into the extermination program for those deemed "incurable." Because of his Jewish origins, it wasn't long before he was told he would soon be summoned to a "labor camp." He managed to obtain a visa to emigrate to the United States. He could have left — but he chose to stay rather than abandon his elderly parents.

In September 1942, he, Tilly, and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. The family would be torn apart piece by piece. His father died there. In 1944, Frankl, his wife, and his mother were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother was murdered; Tilly was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died as well. Before the deportation, the couple had already suffered another irreparable act of violence: Tilly had become pregnant, and the Nazi regime had forced them to terminate the pregnancy. His brother Walter was also murdered, while his sister Stella had managed to escape to Australia.

He would pass through Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim — the last two part of the Dachau camp complex — until American troops liberated him on April 27, 1945. Free again, he found his former life reduced to little more than ashes. But back in Vienna, he returned to and deepened a body of theory he had begun building years before his imprisonment: a psychotherapeutic approach that recognizes the search for meaning as one of the primary motivating forces in human life. The camps did not create his theory — but they subjected it to an extreme test and changed forever the way he would present it to the world.

The prisoner's name was Viktor Frankl. Beyond founding an entire theoretical and clinical approach to psychotherapy, he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, one of the twentieth century's best-known books on suffering, inner freedom, and responsibility in the face of life.

This is a story about what may or may not survive in us when the life we knew ceases to exist. Although Frankl never used the word "resilience" in the psychological sense it would later acquire, he anticipated and explored questions that speak directly to the concept today — above all, the role of meaning, of human bonds, and of the attitude still possible in the face of circumstances we cannot change.

How do some people manage to overcome the past and rebuild?

That question shows up in my practice in many forms. "Why did my sister go through the same terrible childhood I did and seem to turn out fine, while I didn't?" "How did that person manage to rebuild their life after losing everything?" "Am I just weak — someone who never managed to turn the page on the miserable life I've always had?"

Shall we think this through together? No two people ever go through exactly the same experience, even if they lived in the same house, grew up in the same family, or were in the same accident. Each event meets a different combination of personal history, temperament, relationships, material conditions, opportunities, physical health, past experiences, and emotional resources. And what we call "overcoming" can mean very different things.

For one person, overcoming may mean being able to return to work. For another, learning to trust someone again. For a third, learning to live with an absence that will never entirely stop hurting. Sometimes overcoming isn't forgetting, or leaving something behind, or going back to who you once were. It's managing to weave what happened into your own story without letting it become the whole narrative. And it's on that terrain that we run into the question of resilience.

From physics to mental health — with caveats

The word "resilience" was first used in physics to describe the capacity of certain materials to withstand deformation and recover their shape — like gold, a metal that can be melted, cooled, hammered, and reshaped, and after all that is still gold. We'll come back to that definition later, because it's a little more complicated than it sounds.

The metaphor is useful, but when it comes to human life it can be rather limited, especially as it's commonly understood today. After certain experiences, there may be no "original state" to return to: a loss can change the way we perceive the world; a trauma can call into question everything we thought safety felt like; an illness can change our body, our plans, even the identity we had built.

That's why resilience shouldn't be understood, gold-like, simply as the ability to go back to being what one was before. It can be defined as the process and the outcome of adapting reasonably well to difficult experiences, above all through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility. It doesn't mean crossing through adversity without pain; it means finding ways to keep functioning, to rebuild some measure of stability, and to preserve possibilities for growth.

In other words, what we know today is that resilience isn't merely going back to being who you were. It's discovering who it's still possible to be afterward — perhaps someone better than you've ever been.

The myth of the invulnerable person

Across a range of studies, higher levels of resilience — or more adaptive trajectories — are associated with less psychological distress and less severe depressive, anxious, and post-traumatic symptoms. That doesn't mean, however, that resilience works as a kind of vaccine against illness, or that becoming ill proves a lack of resilience.

Adaptive coping strategies — seeking support, keeping up routines, practicing gratitude — are associated with greater well-being. That view is correct, but it has always raised plenty of questions: Is resilience innate — something you're either born with or born without? Are resilient people those who developed some special personality that made it easier to "be in the world," get along beautifully with others, and slip free of suffering whenever it tried to take hold? Are people who suffer weak? Does being resilient mean feeling no pain?

Let me answer that straight away — strictly from my own point of view, of course, and therefore acknowledging and respecting other interpretations. Keep that in mind. Resilience cannot be reduced to a fixed trait handed to us ready-made at birth. Individual characteristics play a part, but its expression depends on the interplay between the person, the adversity being faced, their relationships, their history, and the resources available at that moment. Many of the processes that foster resilience can be learned, strengthened, and sustained. Resilient people suffer too — they simply manage to reorganize that suffering in constructive ways. And there is no such thing as an "emotional superhero": we all have vulnerabilities. The beauty of resilience lies precisely in our capacity to fall... and get back up. That's what successful adaptation means.

When the earliest researchers began studying children who had grown up in extremely adverse conditions, some seemed to develop far better than anyone expected. These were children exposed to poverty, violence, neglect, mental illness in the family, or other potentially devastating circumstances. Even so, some of them reached adulthood without the harms observed in others exposed to similar risks.

Today, when we explore the subject and ask what strengths a given person has, we first need to ask who is actually standing beside them. Do they have a place to live? An environment where they can let their guard down? Access to treatment? Someone who matters in their life? Surroundings that recognize their needs? Real opportunities for change?

"Individual" resilience, then, doesn't cancel out our collective responsibility. Quite the opposite: it shows that relationships, institutions, and communities can act as protective factors — or, disastrously, as additional sources of harm.

What we've learned so far

Viktor Frankl himself, who concluded that meaning in life is a factor in psychological survival, along with Carl Rogers and Maslow, who saw in human beings an innate potential for growth and self-actualization, were hardly the only researchers drawn to the subject. The concept kept developing and is still expanding today.

Research on resilience gained real momentum when investigators stopped looking only at the children who broke down under adversity and began asking why others, exposed to similar risks, showed surprisingly adaptive trajectories. Norman Garmezy was one of the pioneers of that shift. On the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith followed an entire generation born in 1955 for decades and observed that some of the children exposed to multiple risk factors developed better than anyone could have predicted, sustained by personal characteristics, reliable bonds, and opportunities offered by family or community. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the British child psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter helped shift the focus away from a supposed individual "invulnerability" and toward the protective mechanisms that soften the impact of risk, interrupt chains of negative consequences, strengthen self-efficacy, and open new possibilities at decisive moments. More recently, Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker helped delineate the construct, stressing that we can only speak of resilience when two conditions coexist: significant adversity and some form of positive adaptation. Scales such as the CD-RISC made it possible to measure aspects associated with the phenomenon, while the American psychiatrists Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney brought clinical research closer to the contributions of neuroscience, social support, cognitive flexibility, and the construction of meaning. Martin Seligman, one of the leading names in positive psychology, popularized the idea of "learned optimism": the way we explain our defeats and setbacks can nurture hope and persistence or, on the contrary, deepen helplessness and surrender. The optimism at stake here is not a naive expectation that everything will work out, but the capacity not to turn one bad event into a permanent verdict on an entire life.

Developmental psychologist and researcher Ann Masten found an especially lovely phrase for what the research was beginning to reveal: "ordinary magic." Resilience tends to arise less from extraordinary qualities than from the workings of ordinary human systems of care, belonging, learning, and protection.

Perhaps the real magic lies right there: a teacher who notices the "forgotten" child at the back of the classroom, a friend who doesn't vanish when things get complicated, a grandmother who offers a first experience of secure affection, or a professional who sees a whole person where others see only a diagnosis.

Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful offers an artistic portrayal of how a relationship can mediate the way a child comes into contact with a potentially traumatizing reality. By turning fragments of the horror into a kind of game, the father doesn't eliminate the danger, nor does he guarantee his son will come through unscathed; he tries to preserve, for a while, a psychic space where bond, imagination, and hope can still exist. The film reminds us that, faced with a reality we cannot remove, someone's presence can change the eyes through which it is lived.

None of this, of course, produces cinematic scenes with a soundtrack swelling in the background. And yet these encounters can alter the course of a life — and may even inspire any of us to act differently in the face of someone else's suffering. Even when we judge ourselves clumsy and ill-equipped for it, we may surprise ourselves by being the only hand extended to someone who is symbolically drowning. And through that we may come to understand that, in a way, resilience can also be found in the one who isn't suffering, but who feels compassion.

But what about those who weren't lucky enough to be held by someone during the hard times? Can they never find resilience within themselves?

What happens to those who never found a trustworthy adult, a protective family, or anyone able to stay by their side through the difficult experience? That absence makes the crossing heavier, but it doesn't seal the outcome forever. Inner resources can also be discovered in a moment of psychological emergency, even if outside help arrives only later.

At times, the movement possible will be very small: getting out of bed, sending a message, recognizing on one's own the need for treatment, or allowing oneself to search for meaning even when there seems to be no meaning left to search for. A person can also begin to rebuild a less hostile relationship with themselves, gently gathering up, from among the shards, some capacity for self-care. We don't need to idealize solitude or turn self-sufficiency into a virtue. Caring for yourself when no one else ever did can demand enormous effort — and recognizing that we need other people can prove to be a form of strength, not weakness.

A person who, in the end, turns out to have become resilient may have felt fear, rage, despair, sadness, abandonment, and helplessness along the way. Even with no one but themselves, they may manage to stop and observe — and observe themselves — to accept suffering as part of a life that is still worth living, to treat themselves with compassion and, ideally, to climb out of the hole on their own, or to scale its walls from within until their voice can be heard by someone passing by.

What resilience is not

Some tools can help. But no breathing technique eliminates racism; no gratitude journal is a substitute for food security; no mindfulness session fully erases an abusive workload; and no amount of positive thinking turns domestic violence into a safe home.

What defines resilience is not the absence of suffering but the possibility of finding paths of adaptation in the midst of it ("adaptation" not as conformism or submission, but as rupture and transformation). It's also important not to confuse resilience with post-traumatic growth. Some people report that, after a crisis, they came to value their relationships more, changed their priorities, or discovered capacities they never knew they had. That can happen — but it is not a requirement. Resilience refers to adaptation in the face of adversity, giving rise to new learning; post-traumatic growth involves tangible positive transformations perceived through the struggle with the experience. The two phenomena are related, but they are not identical.

As I see it, no one has to be grateful for having suffered. No one has to say that cancer, grief, violence, or abandonment was "the best thing that ever happened" to them. Some pain teaches; some pain just hurts. And much of it does both, at different moments. Sometimes the extraordinary outcome isn't emerging from tragedy stronger, wiser, and brimming with gratitude. It's simply staying alive. Sleeping again. Managing to take a shower. Allowing yourself to love again. It may not look like it, but that, too, is resilience.

Here it's worth returning to Viktor Frankl, and carefully. It would be tempting to turn his story into a kind of motivational parable: a man lost nearly everything, found meaning, and became one of the most influential thinkers of his time. Therefore, all anyone needs to do is discover their purpose in order to overcome any adversity.

Real life doesn't work that way. Frankl didn't survive because he was morally superior to those who died. He didn't possess some inner strength that would make the other prisoners responsible for their own fate. We cannot know how many equally brave, loving, meaning-filled people were murdered in those camps.

Nor does his story entitle us to ask why someone else "couldn't respond the same way." Survival in extreme situations depends on countless circumstances, many of them entirely beyond individual control. Turning resilience into merit can mean, by extension, turning illness or death into failure — a conclusion that is not only mistaken but cruel. Nor were the concentration camps the spark that produced his theory, though they gave him the chance to test his ideas against an extreme reality and profoundly shaped the way he would communicate them to the world. What his story offers us is not a formula but a question:

So can resilience be developed?

This may be the most important part of our conversation today. To sum up what we've covered so far: resilience is not a quantity of strength issued at birth and destined to remain the same for life. It is dynamic; it can vary with the moment, the kind of adversity, one's state of health, the relationships at hand, and the conditions of the environment.

A person may show great adaptability at work and feel completely undone by a breakup. They may move through a serious illness with surprising steadiness and, years later, be plunged into intense suffering by a seemingly smaller loss. That isn't inconsistency. It's the human condition.

And the promising answer is yes: the processes associated with fostering resilience can be developed. We can learn to recognize and regulate our emotions better instead of suppressing them until they explode; to grow flexible enough to abandon a strategy that has stopped working; and to build skills in problem-solving, communication, and asking for help.

Today, psychological resilience is understood less as the simple capacity to "get over" an experience and more as a dynamic process of adaptation in the face of significant adversity. It may show itself in whatever preservation of mental health and functioning is possible during the crisis, in gradual recovery after a period of disarray, or in the construction of a new way of living when a return to the previous state is no longer possible. That adaptation draws on both internal and external resources and doesn't necessarily require personal growth: some people mature or discover new meanings after suffering, while others simply regain enough balance to go on living — and that alone can be a profoundly valuable outcome.

We can also, as I mentioned earlier, develop self-compassion — which is not letting ourselves off the hook, but abandoning the fantasy that harshness toward ourselves makes us stronger. Other interventions I've cited here can be valuable too; they may help some people and not others. But the science does allow us to say that resilience can be fostered. Not by promising a training program that makes anyone immune to suffering or manufactures emotional superheroes — but by widening possibilities.

What a beautiful word, "possibilities." Behind it I see movement, dynamism, renewal, creation, choices, hope, life. Think of "possibilities" whenever you find yourself rigid, horizonless, out of options. I don't mean to become the word's cheerleader, but honestly, I find it applicable even to life's hardest situations.

And developing resilience doesn't always mean learning to endure even more. On the contrary, it may simply mean learning when to pause what you've been doing and how you've been doing it; to say no; to ask for help before the collapse; to walk away from a destructive relationship; to stop being the person we've decided not to become; to care well for someone because we know what it was like not to be cared for; to end, in ourselves, some form of violence that has run through generations; to accept that a certain loss still hurts, and that this is a human condition we ought to accept in ourselves rather than fight against.

In the end, meaning doesn't have to be grand

Frankl placed the search for meaning at the center of his work. But "meaning" need not be understood as an extraordinary mission, a great spiritual revelation, or a definitive answer to existence.

Keeping this blog, for example, is a small, simple way I've chosen to give my life a little more meaning. It may well be that no one ever really reads it or takes it to heart, but its main purpose is to record things I set out to think through alongside my patients, with no commitment to arriving at any absolute truth. If, however, it should have the good fortune of touching someone's heart at just the moment they needed it, then its meaning will become great (to me).

In the same way, great meaning can be found in equally small things: finishing a piece of work, caring for someone, allowing yourself to be cared for, coming up with a solution to a problem, managing to keep a promise, watching a child grow, looking once more with a child's enchanted wonder at the marvels the world offers us for free — the sight of the sea, a resplendent sky, the plant on our patio carrying the mystery of life in its sap. Or simply staying alive long enough for today's pain not to be the only version of life you ever know.

And finally, even when nothing more can seemingly be done in those last minutes at a hospital bedside, there is still meaning to be made: in forgiving, or asking someone's forgiveness; in saying "I love you" to someone who never heard those words from your lips; in wishing happiness to those around you — and then departing, knowing that your final acts gave those who remain an entirely new sense of who you were, while filling the gaps of meaning that still needed filling, by you and for you, before the lights went out for good.

Better than gold

As we've seen, the word "resilience" migrated from materials science and engineering into psychology. Now, in more technical terms, the resilience of a material refers to its capacity to absorb energy during elastic deformation and to recover its shape once the pressure stops. Gold, it turns out, may not be the best example of resilience: when hammered, stretched, or melted, it transforms and doesn't return to its previous shape on its own — though it remains gold. Its best-known property is malleability.

And yet perhaps that is precisely where it offers us another metaphor. Gold can be put through fire, take on marks, and assume new shapes without ever ceasing to be gold. It's probably for these qualities that psychological resilience has been compared to it. Gold isn't precious because it's rigid.

Something similar happens with us: experiences leave marks — some visible, some not. We may come out of them changed, sometimes profoundly, but we can go further. We can learn from the road we've traveled, discover we carry resources within us we never imagined, and find ourselves readier for the steps ahead. Resilience isn't born ready-made. It can be cultivated, supported, learned, and strengthened.

People don't necessarily return to the state they were in before adversity; they can reorganize, transform, and preserve some continuity between who they were and who they may yet become. And that makes us even better than gold.

***

After liberation, Viktor Frankl, as we've seen, returned to Vienna and learned of the deaths of his wife, his mother, and his brother. With the support of friends, he took up again the manuscript of a theoretical work that had been confiscated at Auschwitz and, in 1946, published Ärztliche Seelsorge (The Doctor and the Soul). In that same period, over just a few days, he dictated the account of his experience in the camps, first published as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager and later known around the world as Man's Search for Meaning. He would go on to remarry, have a daughter, and direct the Vienna Neurological Polyclinic for twenty-five years.

None of it undid what had happened. His new family did not replace the one he had lost. The books did not bring back the dead. International recognition did not turn horror into something good.

One of his best-known formulations, rendered with small variations depending on the translation, holds that when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

The rebuilding did not erase the ruins. What it showed, however, is that the ruins were not the whole world. He was — as any of us can be — far more than prisoner No. 119104.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References and further reading

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Resilience. In APA dictionary of psychology. Retrieved July 11, 2026, from https://dictionary.apa.org/resilience

Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20

Connor, K. M., & Davidson, J. R. T. (2003). Development of a new resilience scale: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Depression and Anxiety, 18(2), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.10113

Frankl, V. E. (1985). Man's search for meaning (Rev. ed.). Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1946)

Frankl, V. E. (1986). The doctor and the soul: From psychotherapy to logotherapy (Rev. ed.). Vintage Books.

Frankl, V. E. (2000). Recollections: An autobiography (Rev. ed.). Basic Books.

Joyce, S., Shand, F., Tighe, J., Laurent, S. J., Bryant, R. A., & Harvey, S. B. (2018). Road to resilience: A systematic review and meta-analysis of resilience training programmes and interventions. BMJ Open, 8(6), Article e017858. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017858

Luthar, S. S., Cicchetti, D., & Becker, B. (2000). The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development, 71(3), 543–562. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00164

Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.227

Masten, A. S., Lucke, C. M., Nelson, K. M., & Stallworthy, I. C. (2021). Resilience in development and psychopathology: Multisystem perspectives. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 17, 521–549. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-081219-120307

Pennsylvania State University. (n.d.). Resiliency and toughness. MATSE 81: Materials in Today's World. https://courses.ems.psu.edu/matse81/node/2105

Royal Society of Chemistry. (n.d.). Gold: Element information, properties and uses. Periodic Table. https://periodic-table.rsc.org/element/79/gold

Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57(3), 316–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1987.tb03541.x

Southwick, S. M., Bonanno, G. A., Masten, A. S., Panter-Brick, C., & Yehuda, R. (2014). Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: Interdisciplinary perspectives. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5(1), Article 25338. https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338

Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2012). Resilience: The science of mastering life's greatest challenges. Cambridge University Press.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1501_01

Werner, E. E., & Smith, R. S. (1982). Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. McGraw-Hill.

Windle, G. (2011). What is resilience? A review and concept analysis. Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, 21(2), 152–169. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959259810000420

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Viktor Frankl, 1965. Photo: Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely / Viktor Frankl Archive. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.