How to be resilient

“Resilience isn’t about being bulletproof. Resilient people do experience pain and suffer, but they eventually recover and grow.”
Here is my piece on resilience published in Psyche Magazine.
Leah’s eight-year-old son, Tom, comes home from school in tears. Most of his class has been invited on a weekend trip—except him. Leah does what many of us instinctively try first: “It’s not a big deal; we can do something fun,” she says, offering distraction, a bright tone, reassurance. But nothing shifts. Tom withdraws even more. Then she tries something else.
Think of your romantic partner, if you have one. Why do you love them? I mean, what are your reasons for loving this particular person? Why do they love you?
As odd as these questions might seem, you might be surprised by how often they come up. But many of us have difficulty explaining the reasons why we love someone.
I regularly speak with parents who are simply trying to prepare their children for a world that can be overwhelming, confusing, and, at times, frightening. They're doing their best to equip them with every possible skill — from mindfulness to assertiveness — often in an effort to manage their own anxieties or to protect their children from the struggles they themselves once faced.
There’s a reason skilled psychotherapists pay attention to every voice a client brings into the room and make sure they’re not favouring one over the other. It’s not enough to focus only on the hopeful, forward-looking part—the side that wants to change and move on—while ignoring the parts that feel stuck, ashamed, hesitant, or afraid. And the reverse is just as unhelpful.
These days, emotional maturity is one of the most talked-about qualities in relationships. Scroll through dating profiles or listen to conversations about dating, and you’ll hear people saying they’re looking for someone emotionally mature, or wishing their partners would learn to be.
Now that I can’t seem to escape social media posts about “AI therapy,” it feels like the right time to write about a few of the problematic aspects of this trend, and to clear up some of the misinformation floating around. This isn’t another negative take on AI, nor is it a contribution to the fear-driven debates that tend to dominate the AI conversation.
Why does heartbreak still feel so intense, even months after the relationship is over? Why does it leave you feeling like the ground has shifted beneath you?
A lot of people find themselves wondering, “It’s not like someone died, so why does it hurt this much?”
Trigger warnings are everywhere. University lectures, Netflix dramas, social media captions: “The following content may trigger emotional distress.”
And research reflects this growing presence. A study with German university students found 40% had seen peers demand trigger warnings, and 58% had encountered them in lectures.
In 2015, author and educator Parker Palmer delivered a powerful commencement address at Naropa University—a speech I highly recommend watching if you haven’t already.
Among his six pieces of advice to the graduates, his final point stood out for me:
There's rarely a simple explanation for human behaviour. Yet we live in a time when psychological ideas are offered up as neatly packaged truths and tidy answers to layered experiences. Theories, frameworks, and insights are everywhere, promising to unlock the "real" reason behind how we think, feel, and act.