Linking Interpersonal Relationships with Resilience

As resilience is a fairly interdisciplinary topic, I often look at how other fields define and explain resilience.

Today, I read an article on psychosocial resilience by Dr. Buckwalter titled “My Definition of Resilience” worth sharing. He explains the physiological processes that occur between trauma/ stress to recovery, which sheds light on how we think about developing resilience in other disciplines, specifically in the emergency management.

In biological terms, a process called allostatis restores the body from stress response to a steady state of operation, or “normal.” How and when this happens, however, depends on three characteristics:

1. Strength — the capacity to handle daily life and difficult moments where you need to “dig deeper” as he says
2. Meaning / Sense of Purpose — the feeling like you’re contributing to the world in way that parallels what’s important to you
3. Pleasure — experiencing that which you find deeply enjoyable
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The part I find interesting, is the role of interpersonal relationships in fostering these characteristics. Our individualistic society today teaches us we need to learn to be self-reliant, independent… we need to look inwards and work on ourselves. Yet as Dr. Buckwalter explains, it is possible to develop these characteristics on our own but we require meaningful interpersonal relationships to build these characteristics most effectively. “Relationships” he explained “provide both emotional and cognitive opportunities for us to develop strength, meaning, and pleasure.”

As we think about the development of resilience in the larger context, this claim tells us that beyond the individual we must consider the associated systems, or networks, that surround them. These connections must be able to provide the capacity to develop the three characteristics identified.

From an emergency management perspective, I’m looking at how we can build organizational resilience to crisis using a distributed or “networked approach” versus a centralized. Beyond standard factors associated with the development of organizational resilience, this article demonstrates that perhaps resilience in networks starts simply through affiliation with a network. And perhaps it’s the nature of that network that fosters the development of the three characteristics: strength, meaning and pleasure.

This raises the question, if the development of individual resilience can be received through affiliation with this type of network, what must individuals give back to create this network in the first place? What does this type of network look like? Interesting questions for further thought and study.