What if resilience isn't something we have to build? What if it's something we were born with, and the real question is what teaches us to stop believing in it?
I've spent a good portion of my life trying to understand resilience.
Not because I wanted to become resilient. Apparently, I already was. I just couldn't figure out how the fuck I'd managed it.
I grew up in a chaotic environment. I experienced homelessness, instability, and circumstances that no child should have to navigate. I ran with a carnival, joined the military, went to war, and experienced more than a few moments that, looking back, seem almost impossible to have survived.
And somehow, I kept getting back up.
I wasn't immune to pain. I had triggers. I struggled with self-esteem. There were periods when I didn't particularly like myself, and moments when I genuinely didn't want to be alive anymore.
And yet, through all of it, there was this strange, persistent belief that I could figure things out.
I didn't necessarily believe I was worthy.
I believed I was capable.
And those are two very different things.
The Question I Couldn't Answer
Years ago, while working on my master's degree in the administration of justice, I became fascinated with resilience in juvenile delinquency populations.
I wanted to understand why some children could experience extraordinary adversity and continue moving forward while others appeared to become overwhelmed by their circumstances.
And underneath that academic question was a much more personal one.
How the fuck did I make it?
For my thesis, I obtained a massive dataset collected from young people involved in the juvenile justice system. It contained hundreds of questions and measurable characteristics collected over years.
I thought perhaps I could identify the variables that contributed to resilience.
There was just one problem.
I had to narrow that enormous dataset down to approximately 25 variables.
Twenty-five, out of hundreds.
And the more I worked through that process, the more I realized how easily I could select variables that supported what I already believed.
I wasn't necessarily discovering what created resilience.
I risked defining resilience according to my own assumptions and then finding evidence that supported my definition.
That experience taught me something about research and the danger of starting with the answer you want to find.
I never found the answer I was looking for.
And decades later, I'm beginning to wonder whether I was asking the wrong question in the first place.
What If Resilience Is the Default?
Think about human evolution for a moment.
There was a time when we didn't have air conditioning, modern medicine, grocery stores, or climate-controlled houses.
Our ancestors navigated hunger, disease, injury, predators, environmental disasters, and uncertainty as ordinary parts of existence.
Human beings developed nervous systems capable of responding to threats, adapting to changing environments, and recovering from difficult experiences.
Fear is a survival mechanism.
Vigilance is a survival mechanism.
Avoidance can be a survival mechanism.
Even anxiety, as uncomfortable as it can be, has protective functions.
So why do we talk about resilience as though it's some extraordinary psychological achievement?
Why do we assume it's something people must acquire?
What if resilience is an ordinary feature of being human?
I'm not suggesting every human being possesses identical abilities or responds to adversity in the same way.
I'm asking whether we've confused the development of resilience with the preservation of a capacity that already exists.
And if that's possible, then perhaps the question isn't what creates resilience.
Perhaps the question is what destroys it.
Or, more precisely, what interferes with our ability to recognize and use it?
Watching My Son
I see something in my son that reminds me of myself.
He's experienced difficult emotional situations, as every child eventually does, although his childhood has been very different from mine.
And when something challenging happens, I watch him.
He feels it.
Sometimes he's upset. Sometimes he's angry. Sometimes he's afraid the same thing will happen again.
He holds that emotion for a while.
And then, remarkably, he lets it go.
He goes back to being a kid.
I don't see that as evidence that he doesn't care or that the experience didn't affect him.
I see a child who can experience a difficult emotion without allowing it to consume his entire identity.
And when he fails at something, I don't sit there harping on the failure.
Okay. That didn't work. What did we learn, and what are we going to try next?
That's it. We continue moving forward.
I don't want him believing that an unsuccessful attempt makes him an unsuccessful person.
Failure is information. It tells us something about what didn't work.
And sometimes that's exactly the information we need to figure out what will.
I'm not trying to manufacture resilience in my son.
I'm trying to give him the opportunity to experience life without teaching him that every obstacle is evidence of his inadequacy.
And that raises another question.
What if children don't need us to teach them how to be resilient nearly as much as they need us to stop teaching them that they aren't?
The Most Damaging Voice You'll Ever Hear
I've said for years that the most damaging voice you'll ever hear is your own.
And I mean that.
People can tell you you're worthless.
They can tell you you're stupid, incapable, weak, or destined to fail.
Those words can come from parents, teachers, friends, romantic partners, entire communities, or society itself.
And eventually, if you hear them often enough, you may begin repeating them.
That's when the message becomes particularly destructive.
Because now the person who told you that you couldn't accomplish something doesn't even need to be present.
You're doing their work for them.
I've seen this in disadvantaged communities, in poor neighborhoods, in trailer parks, and across different racial and cultural environments.
People become surrounded by messages about what they supposedly cannot achieve.
Sometimes those messages reflect real obstacles. Poverty, discrimination, instability, and lack of opportunity aren't imaginary.
And there's a difference between recognizing an obstacle and deciding that the obstacle defines your potential.
The danger is when a person begins to believe that their circumstances are evidence of their worth.
When they stop asking how to move forward because they've already convinced themselves there's nowhere to go.
And this is where I think resilience becomes particularly interesting.
What if someone can be resilient and still believe they're incapable?
What if they're navigating adversity every single day, demonstrating extraordinary persistence, and never recognizing what they're doing?
We might be looking at people who possess resilience while simultaneously believing they have none.
And if someone can learn to disregard their own resilience, perhaps they can learn to recognize it again.
The Woman Who Believed I Could Do Anything
One of the most influential people in my life was my best friend's mom.
My best friend, Joe, died when we were young. He was 23, and I was 22.
His mother and I had known each other since I was around 14 or 15, and when Joe passed, we essentially adopted each other.
My son is named after Joe.
And his mother gave me something that had been missing from much of my childhood.
Unconditional encouragement.
I could come up with the dumbest, wildest, most ridiculous idea imaginable, and she would look at me and tell me I could do it.
I could have announced that I was going to build a mountain of shit all the way to the sky.
And she would have told me, "Bobby, that is going to be the most beautiful mountain of shit anybody has ever built."
That's who she was.
She believed in me.
And more importantly, she made sure I knew it.
And here's the interesting part.
She didn't enter my life until I had already survived years of adversity.
She didn't create whatever capacity had allowed me to navigate those earlier experiences.
That was already there.
What she did was help me recognize my own value at a time when I was finally old enough to begin understanding what that meant.
I had spent much of my childhood believing I could accomplish things while simultaneously struggling to believe I was worth much of anything.
She helped bridge that gap.
And I wonder how many people spend their entire lives without someone who helps them make that connection.
Open Your Eyes. You're Not There Anymore.
When I was facilitating lotus flower tea ceremonies, I would incorporate breathwork and guided meditation.
After participants had settled into the experience and become grounded, I would sometimes guide them through an exercise.
I would ask them to visualize one of the lowest moments of their lives.
To remember what it felt like.
To recognize how difficult that moment had been.
And I could often see their bodies respond.
Their muscles would tighten. Their expressions would change.
The emotional memory was still powerful.
And then I would say:
"Now open your eyes. You're not there anymore."
For some people, that was an extraordinarily powerful realization.
They had spent so much time measuring themselves against their present struggles that they had forgotten how far they'd already traveled.
They remembered the pain.
They remembered the fear.
They remembered believing they might never get through it.
And yet, here they were.
Not necessarily completely healed.
Not necessarily free from the consequences.
And certainly not immune to future adversity.
And STILL no longer in that moment.
They had moved forward, sometimes with zero intellectual recognition of just how far they'd come.
They had survived something they once believed might destroy them.
And sometimes, recognizing that distance was enough to change the way they looked at themselves.
I don't believe everyone needs to revisit their lowest memories to recognize their progress. For some people, that kind of exercise can be overwhelming, and it requires care.
The important part isn't reliving the trauma.
It's recognizing the evidence of recovery.
You Didn't Just Survive. You Won.
There's something I tell people about trauma that I believe deeply.
You didn't just survive.
You won.
If an experience was so devastating that you genuinely believed it might destroy you, and you're still here, then your continued existence wasn't simply survival.
That doesn't mean the experience was good.
It doesn't mean you should be grateful for what happened.
And it certainly doesn't mean you're finished healing.
It means the experience did not get the final word.
Is Healing the Final Boss?
I don't believe we're ever permanently, completely healed.
We've healed from the last thing.
And now, perhaps, we're better equipped to heal from the next thing.
That's how I understand resilience.
Not as some permanent state of invincibility.
Not as becoming so emotionally detached that nothing can hurt you.
And not as developing so much confidence that you make every decision without fear or hesitation.
Trust me, I've had enough confidence to make some spectacularly stupid decisions in my life.
I rode bulls at 32 years old. A city boy from inner Chicago. I am 5'10" and was 240 pounds back then.
For those familiar with bull riding, I had NO BUSINESS on the back of a bull. 🤣
I never even made it eight seconds.
Sometimes confidence and good judgment are two entirely different fucking things.
Resilience isn't the absence of pain, fear, or failure.
It's the capacity to encounter those experiences and continue finding a way forward.
And the more often we recognize that we've done it, the more evidence we have that we may be able to do it again.
Maybe We're Selling People the Wrong Identity
I recently came across a YouTube channel promoting the idea of an unshakable mind.
The message was interesting.
You've survived adversity. You've recovered from things you thought would destroy you. You have evidence that you're capable of navigating difficult experiences.
I agree with that principle.
What interests me is how easily that message can become an identity.
You're the unshakable one.
You're the chosen one.
You're the person who's different from everybody else because you've endured things other people supposedly couldn't.
And suddenly, instead of helping people recognize an ordinary human capacity, we're selling them a special category of person they can aspire to become.
I see similar patterns in some of the content built around Carl Jung, Alan Watts, shadow work, dark empaths, and spiritual awakening.
A legitimate psychological or philosophical concept becomes the foundation for an emotionally appealing identity.
And that identity becomes something people need to keep reinforcing.
I find that fascinating.
Because if the purpose of teaching resilience is to help someone become more confident in their ability to navigate life, shouldn't successful teaching eventually make the teacher less necessary?
Why would I want someone to become dependent on being reminded how resilient they are?
I'd rather help them recognize it for themselves.
Then they can go live their fucking life.
So What Is the Real Question?
I spent years asking what made me resilient.
I studied adversity. I examined juvenile justice data. I explored psychological theories. I looked back through my own life, trying to identify the characteristics that explained how I'd survived so many extraordinary circumstances.
And I still don't have a definitive answer.
Maybe there isn't one.
Maybe resilience isn't a single characteristic.
Maybe it's a combination of biological capacities, learned behaviors, emotional processes, relationships, beliefs, and experiences.
And maybe some of those capacities are far more ordinary than we've been taught to believe.
I'm not claiming I've proven that resilience is innate or that everyone begins life with an equal capacity to recover.
I'm proposing that we examine the assumption underneath the question.
Because if we begin by assuming resilience is something people lack, we may spend our time trying to give them something they already possess.
What happens if we start somewhere else?
What if we ask what interferes with resilience?
What teaches people to stop believing they can recover?
What happens when repeated criticism, shame, fear, helplessness, or trauma changes the way someone interprets their own abilities?
And most importantly:
If someone can be taught to ignore their resilience, can they be taught to find it again?
I think they can.
And I think one of the most powerful places to begin is with the evidence of their own lives.
Not with a motivational slogan.
Not with a personality label.
Not with someone telling them they're special.
With a simple question:
What's something you thought you'd never get through?
And then another:
How did you get through it?
Maybe they had help. Maybe they made mistakes. Maybe they barely managed to keep going. Maybe they're still dealing with the consequences.
All of that matters.
And so does the fact that they've made it this far.
Perhaps the goal isn't to create a generation of unshakable people.
Perhaps it's to help people understand that being shaken doesn't mean they're incapable of recovering.
Maybe resilience isn't something we need to give people.
Maybe it's something we need to help them recognize.
And maybe, just maybe, we've actually been asking the wrong question all along.
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Thank you for showing up at 15, Mom. You'll never truly understand the impact you've had on my survival and growth. At almost 55, I still need you, and Joseph and Rodrigo too.. 🙏🙏🙏
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Not The Shaman — You don't need another identity to become who you already are.