Resilience is the strength to resist situations of deep suffering, the ability to face them and turn them into experiences that help to grow. I have already spoken about it in this magazine a few years ago. I briefly recall this theme because a book of mine has just come out: Resilience: the strength to walk upwind.

How to become resilient? This is the question that parents, teachers, educators and professionals working in the social and health field ask after they have heard about it and understand its importance. The promotion of resilience cannot be limited to offering techniques and tools. It develops in relation to specific contexts and particular situations, through relationships, and within people’s life journey. There are actions that facilitate the development of skills that can help the process of resilience, before the problem is felt and there are strategies that can favor it in the moment in which a particular traumatic situation is experienced.

To be resilient we need relationships, but above all, “warm” affective relationships that help us live and grow well. Harry Harlow proved this quite clearly a few years ago. He separated little monkeys from their mothers and raised them in a cage in which a “mother made only of wire” was placed, which could dispense milk through a bottle placed on the breast, and a “mother made of soft tissue”, which offered a comfortable contact. The monkeys preferred to stay in touch with the mother made of fabric and moved from time to time to the other mother, just to suck the milk. In stressful situations, the little monkeys took refuge in the mother of soft tissue, to draw warmth and comfort.

We are not monkeys. But experience tells us that our children also seek warmth and tenderness. And this also applies to us who are grown-ups.

Resilient is born or one becomes? To this question one must answer: “resilient is born and one becomes”. Genetic features and relational environment play together and influence each other in forming resilient people. Affective warm relationships are very important. There are those who speak of relational resilience as an empathic bridge that helps overcome adversity, difficult moments and traumas. We can all find ways to reinforce our ability to build healthy connections with others, in the family and in the community, and to develop relational resilience. Particularly important is the “affective attachment” that we set up as children with the significant figures of our environment, especially the mother, and that we relive with the people we meet in the course of life. Infantile relational experiences leave their mark on the minds of people (positive or negative), in their way of relating with those they meet on the journey of life and in how they live the various experiences of love, friendship, separation and pain. Positive change is always possible through meeting new people, with new way of looking and experiencing important relationships. That’s what happened to Tim Guènard. He says frankly: “I am not afraid to say that I have lived a life that is nothing short of bizarre. Abandoned by my mother and beaten-up by my father, I spent three years in hospital, where I became a “twisted” child”.  He was thought to be an unrecoverable child and grew up with three big dreams: becoming the leader of a gang, running away from a house of correction and taking revenge by killing his father. In his book Stronger than hatred,  he tells how he had the good fortune to meet a priest, Father Thomas Philippe, who changed his life, staring at him with a different look and telling him a simple but important «I trust you». And Tim Guènard has passed from hatred to love, even in relation to his father. He lived new attachments that gave him affection and trust, to build a new life and his family. The success in dealing with particularly difficult situations depends on our strength, but also on knowing how to reach out for help and find someone (and Someone) who takes our hand. When our fragility is inhabited by the power of God, we can once again “re-rise” (it is the verb from which the word resilience derives), raise our gaze and “bounce” from the ground, get back on our feet and walk again, also upwind. And discover us stronger than before and transformed. Luciano Sandrin