Resilience Understood:

and the Critical Role of the Church

As an older adult myself, I feel the impact of family, friends and acquaintances for whom life has gone very wrong;  falls, cancer, heavy care-giving responsibilities, depression, loneliness, and memory declines seem all to frequent.  Sure those things happen among people of all ages, but for us older adults, our resilience can be compromised for physiological, social, emotional and physical reasons.  Sustaining our well-being in the face of “distress” may be more difficult for us older adults. 

I think that a part of the problem is a misunderstanding of the full-story for how to help those who are experiencing difficulties.  Reaching out to older adults to express sympathy, to offer food, and to ask how it’s going, are certainly important and helpful responses.  But the research is clear on the limits of such one-way supportive actions.  For a person to be a receiver of help over time without opportunities to “give back” in some meaningful ways can add to a downward spiral of gloom. 

Empathetic messages from family, friends and acquaintances are of course important, but resilience is also a product of a distressed person’s experience of cognitive and behavioral adaptations that meet adversity with at least some degree of emotional “positivity”*  --  that stimulates a hope for building on one’s strengths over time.  

                          * In her extensive research on the critical role of positive emotions for our health
                          and well being, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina
                          has identified the importance of what she calls “positivity” in our life in order 
                          to counter negative forces that we might be experiencing.  “Positivity”, she 
                          maintains, is the active ingredient in rebounds (resilience) from trying times.

But here is the difficult part.  That important positive-contribution side of my resilience will surface only as others understand their key role of (1) noticing what I do that is helpful for them or others, and (2) then expressing appreciation and gratitude for whatever ways I have contributed to life and the happiness of others.  In other words, resilience is, over time, a two way street.  It needs both givers and receivers. 

If I am the distressed person, my family members are in the best position to serve in the critically important “receiving-my-gifts” role because they can draw on and identify emotionally positive experiences from my history -- as well as being physically able to notice small behavioral or emotional “gifts-I-give” over the course of a day. 

But too often family members are symbiotically immersed in the their family member’s dilemma and also become needy – for positive reinforcement.  So, the community of the church is in the next best position to seed the life of the distressed person (and family members) with opportunities for meaningful contributions and positive emotions.  Drawing on the array of possible spiritual, social, organizational, musical, liturgical and relational sources of positive interactions, a thoughtful church congregation can create numerous ways for enabling distressed older adults to see themselves as meaningful participants and contributors to others and to the life of the church. 

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Long before I was able to articulate this critical giving-back dimension of resilience, my wife and I experienced it.  Our then five-year old son was run over by a school bus on his way home from kindergarten.   His next four months were spent in the hospital, and the drain on our family of five was severe.  The arms of our friends and of our church community were around us in many ways, all appreciated, all important. 

But there were two events that stand out in relief from the rest of our chaos of despair.  I can, with certainty, link those two events of what Dr. Fredrickson calls “positivity”,  to significant jumps in our own emotional rebound.  

The first was a month or so into our son’s hospital stay.  My wife and I were by that time becoming one of the “oldtimers” in our son’s hospital station (for hospitalized children).  We knew our way around by then and we began to realize that we could help the parents of newly admitted children understand the hospital culture and learn how to make their life a little bit better while living as a receiver-of-help in that environment.   Although our son’s recovery process may have proceeded at the same pace, even if we had not become “the sages of Station 10”, it certainly added a bit of positive emotions to our daily 40 mile commute to the hospital.  We suspect, though we certainly cannot prove, that our somewhat improved emotional attitude affected what our son picked up about himself from us and speeded his own recovery to some extent.

The second, event that stands out was more definitive, and directly related to our church.  Within a few weeks from the time of our son’s release from the hospital, the members of our church, who had been so comforting to us during those dark months, asked my wife and I to give a talk about our experience at an adult forum.   We did so jointly, one Sunday between services.  We found that in the eyes and words of our audience, we had moved from being persons to feel sorry for and receive their empathy, to become people who had an important story of resilience to tell.  It changed our own sense of who we were.  Expressed comments of appreciation by the audience suddenly enabled us to see ourselves as positive contributors to life, even as a result of distress. 

This understanding for who can be the important role-models in life has come full circle for us.  Now in our older age, we try as we can to enable our friends (and the church) to find meaningful “positivity” in their lives even in the face of difficulties.  Since both my wife and I had cancer at the same time a year and a half ago, we felt this story play out once again in our lives as some of our friends did what they could to sustain our feelings of being appreciated for who we are as well as what we contributed.  And our church added significantly to our continuing rebound as it asked me to write a series of comments about the ingredients of well-being for older adults as we continue to age.

Bruce