Exploring the Evolution of Resilience: From Bouncing Back to Thriving Beyond Challenges

Resilience is a complex journey that intertwines the ability to bounce back from adversity, experience personal growth, and foster a sense of community and purpose. This episode illuminates the evolving understanding of resilience and its vital role in overcoming trauma, rooted in psychological research and biblical principles. 

• Evolution of resilience as a concept over decades 
• Importance of personal experiences in understanding resilience 
• Introductory definitions of resilience, resistance, and post-traumatic growth 
• Role of community and shared purpose in recovery 
• Connection to biblical examples of resilience 
• The potential for growth and healing after trauma

Links to Resources:

Link to blog - How to Expasnd Your Resilience in 2025

Link to "High Hopes" by Frank Sinatra

First, a Dose of Hope by Dr. W. Lee Warren

Dr. Marty Seligman's three books bundle: Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, and Flourish - Amazon Special.

Be sure to check out my website

Facebook Link

Tactical Prayer Guide Link!

Transcript

John Thurman 0:11

Thank you.

John Thurman 1:00

Resilience it's a word that's been around for a long, long, long time. Matter of fact, the root word goes back to the Latin resire, but in the past 30 years there's been a renewed interest in resilience and in recent history, the research from Marty Seligman, dr George Everly and others have really opened the door to looking at resilience. What makes people resilient? What is resilience? How does it work? A little over 30 years ago, we saw a reemergence of the study of resilience, even though it had been studied for years. And then, after 9-11, there was a really a big boom in research on resilience and what helps people get through tough times, and over the past 30 years that word has morphed. In 2006, I wrote one of the first articles on resilience in marriage. It was actually published by a Christianity Today subsidiary called Today's Christian Marriage. It's been republished with Christian Women, which is another CT publication. I entitled that article Bounce Back the Secrets of Resilience in your Marriage, and that was in 2006. Wow, has time flown. In that time we've seen a tremendous evolution of the word resilience, but also, with additional clinical studies and research, we've actually expanded that meaning, which to me is very exciting, and today I want to introduce you to some of these changes. There are two or three reasons for that. Number one I'm working on my third book, and right now it's going to be called. The working title is Enduring Faith how to Build a Faith that Withstands the Storms of Life, and it'll be a book on how to develop a resilient faith. And so the next several podcasts, and over the next several podcasts, we'll be looking at resilience, resistance, post-traumatic growth and a bunch of exciting things that I'll be covering in this upcoming book. Let's jump right in Back in 2006, when I wrote that first article, there was already an evolution of the word resilience.

John Thurman 2:57

It was a beginning. We were looking at post-9-11. We had the wars going on and we were beginning to look at how do people bounce back, how do people get through stuff, and we discovered so many exciting things. Early on, resilience just meant the ability to bounce back, and many times it meant not just the ability to bounce back, but to bounce back and move beyond where you were when whatever adversity, trauma or challenge hit you. The word's actually really, really old. It goes back to the Latin word from resere, which means to bounce back. It's an enduring concept which is survived and adapted over time and really it's a testament to the human spirit to overcome adversity and to meet challenges. Now, while this word does not exist in the Bible, the concept of resilience is in the Bible and we see it through two primary characteristics, and that is through steadfastness and endurance. And one of the things I absolutely love about some of the research in positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, is that what they're discovering about the human spirit we see in scripture, sometimes right there in our face and other times through illustrations and stories. And the Bible is a story filled with stories about resilience, steadfastness and faithfulness and people getting the victory, people doing face plants and having massive failures and then God restoring them. So I hope you'll hang in there with me today as we learn more about resilience.

Resilience Primer - Captain Kangaroo

John Thurman 4:28

There are basically three parts to resilience. First of all, the baseline is the ability to bounce back, and you hear resiliency talked about all across our culture in business, in playgrounds. It's just a really hot topic and a really popular word. However, over the past 20, 30 years, it's gotten somewhat watered down. We tend to make it oversimplified and, as we look at the research, there's been two or three developments as the concept of resilience has evolved over the years. Let me step back a little bit.

John Thurman 5:02

First of all, my introduction to the concept of resilience and many of you may not be aware of this in your own life came through Captain Kangaroo. I know I know some of you folks are going John, you're really old. Well, I'm going to be 73 this month. It's really kind of exciting to realize I've been around that long. But yes, I first remember hearing this on Captain Kangaroo and I learned through some research. It was done by Frank Sinatra in a movie, but then in 1959, he reintroduced it and later on President John Kennedy used that song as one of his ways to motivate America to move forward. I'll have a link in the show notes for it. You should listen to it. It's a real hopeful, upbeat song. So that was my first exposure to the concept of resilience, even though I didn't know what it was at the time. I was just a kid. But I love singing along with that song because it had a lot of great truth and meaning in it and really take a trip down memory lane. If you're of a certain age and you've never heard it, click the link and listen to it. It's a very hopeful, fun song, my second exposure to the concept of resilience came when my parents afforded me the opportunity to attend the North Carolina Outward Bound School back in 1968.

John Thurman 6:17

I wasn't doing so good in school. I was kind of wandering along the highway of life as a young kid, as a lot of us were. I was like a 10th grader. But I saw a program they did at our school and I thought, man, that looks like fun. Well, by the time I got to the front they'd given out all their brochures. So I wrote them a postcard and they sent me some material and stayed in touch with me and that summer I was the only guy from my school that went to that. Looking back, that experience had a life-changing impact on me. Didn't realize at the time as a 15-year-old. But the motto for the Outward Bound school system back in those days was basically from Tennyson's work on Ulysses and the motto they took was to serve, to strive and not to yield. Did you hear that? To serve to strive and not to yield? Pretty powerful imprint. And as I went through my growth cycle over the years being a teenager, a young adult, a married man, ministry, the military that motto really stuck with me.

John Thurman 7:28

In the late 90s I began to read some of Marty Seligman, who is a great researcher on learned helplessness, learned optimism, did some great studies on what causes people to be able to deal with bad situations and not just survive them but thrive through them. He wrote several books. You can look him up. I'll have a link to his books in the show notes. But he also wrote a book several years after he began writing that really really struck a chord in me and a bunch of other folks In 2011,. He published a book called Flourish and for me that was really a mile marker. Now in my own professional training as a critical event specialist and crisis responder, I had studied under Dr George Everly and others on resilience when it comes to crisis and trauma and things like that, and those people spoke into my life both in personal seminars but also through the reading. But Dr Everly and Dr Seligman really are the ones that pull the research together to talk about resilience and it's fascinating as you look at cultures and as you look at over centuries.

John Thurman 8:31

Humans have been resilient. We've dealt with trauma, drama, all sorts of catastrophic issues for millennia and people have gotten through it. In today's modern world, in some circles of therapy, we've kind of made an idol of trauma and it's almost gotten to the point sometimes where it's oh, you think you had it bad. Let me tell you how bad I had it. I'll probably get some pushback from this, but trauma has been going on forever and people have been dealing with it. I don't know that we always need therapy to get through it, although as a therapist, I can help you if you had issues with that. Let me move forward a little bit, because I really want to talk a little bit about the three different, if you will, phases and phases really isn't a fair thing to say. It's more like three concepts that I believe all blend together to be resilience, first of all, is resilience, and that, initially, is the ability to bounce back from adversity, traumatic events and crises and challenges, and not just to bounce back, but to bounce back to a place where you were and move forward through it to a better space. Now, as people research resilience, they begin to notice some other components of it.

Building Resilience Through Adversity

John Thurman 9:45

Dr George Bonanno, who's a Columbia professor and wrote the Other Side of Sadness a great read if you've ever dealt with grief and loss and things like that he really talked about how most cultures across history have dealt with traumatic events without going to therapy. He had a team that went into the 9-11 area a few months after the tragedy hit and found out that about 96% of the respondents had post-traumatic stress not the disorder, but they had post-traumatic stress. Now in my world, therapists were saying, oh, there'll be millions of people impacted. People will be in therapy forever. The truth was, he went back 10 years later and discovered that only 7% to 18% of those people exposed to that tragic, horrific terrorist attack had developed PTSD. And PTSD, we found out, is pretty much according to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders, 5. You have to meet certain criteria for that to take place. And he found out that, like the national average, only about 7 to 18 percent of the people develop PTSD, which he began to realize OK, what's going on here? He began to realize, okay, what's going on here. What he found out was that community, a sense of purpose, a sense of believing that something's bigger in your life than what you can see, taste, smell and touch, and hope were the things that got people through it.

John Thurman 11:20

Then we began to look at the concept of stress inoculation. Dr George Everly did some work in this, as well as Dr George Bonanno and many of you have a scar on your arm. Your left arm is from a smallpox vaccine and when you were a little kid they exposed you to dead smallpox germs and your body completely freaked out and it made this really nasty scar. But you will never get smallpox. For all intents and purposes, smallpox in the United States does not exist, and the whole idea of old vaccine studies I won't say much about the COVID mess is that when we expose the body to certain germs that are alive, the body reacts and builds antibodies to it and makes you actually stronger and helps you be immune.

Post-Traumatic Growth

John Thurman 12:01

So one of the components of dealing with resilience and being strong and being through adversity is having a sense of stress. Inoculation, resistance is another word for it. Do you know? We can actually train people how to resist stress Now, if it's unmitigated and unrelenting, stress will ultimately win, but you don't have to let yourself get there. There are tools and tips and things that we know to help you build stress resistance, and so resistance is. The second component is that you and I can learn to resist crashing and burning when we experience trauma. Learn to resist crashing and burning when we experience trauma, adversity and challenges. It's true, it's so validated in the research and day-to-day living and I'll be sharing some of this in my upcoming book.

John Thurman 12:48

The third thing about resilience so we've got resilience and resistance and the third component of resilience and resistance is post-traumatic growth. That's right. It is so exciting to be in this field and studying this field. I can remember the commercial back in the 70s and 80s this is your brain, the hot frying pan, no-transcript. And we used to think that if you had brain damage too bad, so sad, you're out of luck, chuck. But what we've learned is the brain has this amazing capacity to regenerate. You can have significant trauma, even brain injuries, and through purposeful, skilled focus you can rebuild. The brain has this great capacity I believe the Lord gave it to us to rewire itself. We have post-traumatic growth where we actually see the brain rework. It's so exciting because some people in our culture they feel like, oh, I'm so traumatized, I'll never change, I'm forever damaged, I'm no good, I'm useless, I'm bad, sad and it's just a hot mess. Well, the truth is, the research tells us that you can lean into that pain and that adversity and that trauma and those challenges and you can grow through it. One of the exciting things to me is, if you look at scripture, you see this time and time and time and time again. When I deal with Iraqi and Afghani veterans and some of my Vietnam-era veteran friends and other people who've been traumatized, I see what God has done in their life, I see the work they put in and it gives me hope to realize that you don't have to be a slave to your past. You don't have to be a slave to old trauma, challenges and adversity. I do believe, as Christians and as people who have a will and a choice and a brain, that we can grow, that we can choose to stay put and be stuck in a rut or we can choose to step forward.

Moving On

John Thurman 14:42

I remember one of the stories from the New Testament where Jesus and the disciples had come into Jerusalem and they were at the Pool of Bethesda and you can actually go to this site if you ever go to Jerusalem. It's right next to a church called St Anne's which, by the way, has some of the best acoustics you can imagine. But Jesus walked up to this man and he said do you want to be healed? And the man sounded like a contemporary American. Well, lord, I've been here 38 years and every time the angel stirs the water I can't get in. Everybody else beats me into it and he was kind of playing this. Woe is me. I'm so broken. I'm unrepairable, I'm unfixable, I'm hopeless, I'm helpless. Who cares? And Jesus did not show any great Rogerian reflective listening. Jesus really didn't listen to the story. Jesus just asked him. Matter of fact. He didn't ask him. He told him get up and the man got up. Now. Matter of fact. He didn't ask him. He told him get up and the man got up.

John Thurman 15:38

Now I don't want to minimize anybody's trauma. I've had to deal with some of mine. Thank God I was able to get some good help and work through it. I've fortunately had the privilege of helping other people do that, but you don't need to be stuck in your pain. Matter of fact, dr W Lee Warren, a Christian neuroscientist who's written some great books. His most recent one is called First A Dope of Hope, went through some significant trauma as a brain surgeon in Iraq and then his son was senselessly murdered. And he talks about his own journey to recovery and hope. And when you look at his story it's about as bad as you could get. But he made a choice to change. He made a choice to move forward. He got the help he needed. He began to really trust Jesus and do the work to get better. So I want to tell you that, even though the word resilience has been around, it goes back to biblical times. We live in such exciting times today where we realize that anybody has the possibility to move out of that trauma, to be a stronger person, to be a person who's not just a victim but an overcomer, and not just an overcomer but someone who can point the way for others, if you will, a hope dealer. I hope that you can be a hope dealer in your life. Thank you for listening today.

John Thurman 16:58

My name is John Thurman. I'm an author, a therapist and a speaker. You can learn more about me at my website, johnthurmannet. That's wwwjohnthurmannet. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. John at covertmercycom. John at covertmercycom. Hey, I'm John Thurman. You've been listening to my podcast, john Thurman's Resilient Solution Shortcast, where I help you become more resilient in your personal life, your relationships and in your faith. And remember this is the day that the Lord has made and I'll make a choice to rejoice and be glad in it. God bless, be strong and move forward.