What emotional resilience really means
There’s a hawthorn near the coast path that grows almost sideways, every branch streaming inland as if the wind were still blowing on a dead calm day. The hawthorns round here all do it. The south-westerlies come in off the Atlantic year after year, and the trees grow into the shape of the wind rather than standing up to it. People look at a tree like that and call it resilient. It survived. But it didn’t survive by holding itself straight and refusing to move. It survived by giving. That’s a different picture of emotional resilience than the one we’re often handed.
The version of resilience we’re sold
Most of what we hear about resilience is really about endurance. Toughing it out, bouncing back, getting over it and carrying on as if nothing happened. It puts the whole weight on the person, as though the measure of someone is how much they can take without it showing. There’s a cruelty tucked inside that. If you’re worn down by something hard, the same idea tells you you haven’t been strong enough. So on top of whatever you’re actually dealing with, you also get the message that you’re failing at coping too.
I don’t think that’s resilience. I think it’s a way of making people comply and conform or put up with unjust circumstances by locating the problem in the individual.
Emotional resilience is about what bends, not what stays rigid
The hawthorn tells a different story. It isn’t standing because it’s rigid; a rigid tree in that wind snaps in the first real storm. It’s standing because it gives in some places and holds in others. It let the wind reshape it instead of fighting it, and it’s still here, still flowering in May. Emotional resilience looks more like that to me. Not going unmarked by what happens to you, but being changed by it and carrying on anyway. The bend isn’t the damage; it’s how the tree survived.
Looking at it this way matters, because it takes the shame out of being affected. Being marked by a hard year, a loss, a stretch of real strain doesn’t mean you’ve done resilience wrong. Often it means resilience is happening.
The part nobody mentions: roots
There’s a part of the tree you can’t see from the path, and it’s the part that holds everything up. A hawthorn on an exposed clifftop puts down roots that go deeper and spread wider than a tree in a sheltered garden ever needs to. It can lean that far into the wind precisely because of what’s underneath it. On its own, shallow-rooted, it would be over in a season.
We talk about resilience as if it’s something you generate inside yourself, alone, by force of will. Most of what actually keeps people standing is out of view: the people who know them, the relationships they can lean into, the sense of being held by something bigger than the day they’re currently having. I see this in the room all the time. People arrive believing they should be able to manage everything by themselves, and that needing anyone at all is a kind of failure. It’s almost always the other way round. The ones who come through the hardest things are rarely the ones doing it alone.
What this means when you’re worn down
So if you’re bent right over at the moment, leaning hard, not sure how much more wind there is to come, that isn’t proof you’ve run out of resilience. The shape you’re in says something about what you’ve been standing in, not about whether you’re strong enough.
What helps isn’t gritting your teeth harder. It’s having somewhere to put your weight. For a lot of people that’s a friend, a partner, a walk with someone who understands. Sometimes it helps to have a space that’s yours, where you can look at what’s been blowing at you and what it’s cost you, alongside someone whose job is to stay with you while you do. That’s a lot of what therapy is for.
If you’re carrying something heavy at the moment and you’d like to talk it through, I offer a free phone call to begin with, no pressure in either direction.
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