The Good and Bad of Resilience

Given enough years, the unlikely tends to happen. A serious illness arrives. A parent slips into decline. A career bends in a direction nobody predicted. Most relationships meet at least one of these, and many meet several. The capacity to keep moving through them, and to stay turned toward each other while doing so, is what most people seem to mean by resilience.

The word has been generously praised in the last two decades. It is taught in schools, recommended by HR departments, woven into relationship advice. Read carefully, the research may suggest something more bounded. Resilience is real and useful, with a domain. Knowing where it applies, and where it does not, is part of using it well.

What is resilience?

Resilience refers to the capacity to adapt to and recover from difficulty. It is not the absence of difficulty, nor the absence of distress. It is, more practically, what lets a person or a couple keep moving when the path gets hard. By most accounts, it is more process than trait. It happens over time, rather than something one is born with.

What does it mean to have resilience?

Resilience is not constant. It varies with circumstance, with sleep, with how much support is available in any given season. A person can have it in one domain, like work setbacks, and less of it in another, like a parent’s slow illness. Couples often discover that their pooled resilience is greater than either partner’s alone. When one is depleted, the other can hold ground until the first recovers.

The positive impact of resilience in relationships

When two people meet a hard season together and stay turned toward each other through it, the relationship often deepens. Couples who weather illness, loss, or a financial setback frequently describe themselves afterward as closer than before. The challenge did not pass without cost. What they built across it tended to remain.

In Gottman’s research, drawn from more than fifty years of work in the Love Lab, couples who thrive through hard seasons tend to share certain learnable principles. Resilience, in this view, is less a trait than a series of small choices, repeated.

Does past trauma affect resilience?

It can. Past trauma, particularly trauma sustained early, may shape how a person experiences stress, how readily they trust, and how easily they ask for support. Both partners often arrive in a relationship carrying some history. Awareness of that history, and the patience to work with it (sometimes alongside a trained therapist), can make the difference between trauma quietly running the present and trauma becoming part of a story the couple is consciously navigating.

Could resilience make you more prone to abuse?

The Gottman Institute’s clinical position on it is unambiguous: abuse and addiction are not challenges that resilience, or any general relationship skill set, is meant to address. They sit in a different category, and they call for specialized professional help: therapists trained in those specific areas, advocates, and sometimes safe physical separation. Resilience may help a person meet many of life’s ordinary upheavals. It is not meant to be a tool for what is harmful or dangerous.

Steps to build relationships positively

The skills that build resilient relationships are not exotic. Gottman’s research has spent more than fifty years documenting them and translating them into resources couples can use directly. The Seven Principles Couples Set bundles the book with workbooks and Love Map card decks for partnered work at home. Seven Principles workshops, led by certified Leaders, run regularly for couples in many communities. And the Art and Science of Love workshop with Drs. John and Julie Gottman, available in person or online, puts the same research into practice across a guided weekend. All rest on the same observation: small, repeatable practice tends to outperform dramatic gestures, especially over time.

What matters most is often not how dramatic any of these practices are, but how often they happen. In Gottman’s research, the couples who weather the unlikely are not those who avoided it. They are those who kept practicing the small things, even, perhaps especially, when those things felt least available.

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