Resilience: the road to bouncing back

The dictionary definition of resilience is: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. It's a subject of great interest at the moment because many of us are having our ability to "bounce back" tested by the coronavirus. 

A model that comes up a lot is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief theory, which was published in the late 1960's. Her experience with terminally ill patients led her to observe a pattern of thinking that people go through when facing death either themselves or in a loved one. This theory was later found to apply to all kinds of personal loss including disability, redundancy, divorce and financial problems. It's not a linear process: people can go through it at any pace, in any order and often experience cycles of it. 

These are the phases:

1. Denial – This phase tends to pass quite quickly. The individual may appear not to even acknowledge the situation or appear to be surprisingly upbeat. 
2. Anger – When they grasp more of an understanding of the situation, people can become resentful or angry about why they have been "selected"to experience this loss. 
3. Bargaining – This is where tradeoffs are considered, where a person offers to reform or exchange in order to stave off a bad outcome. 
4. Depression – At this point, the person begins to despair. They feel sad, often withdraw into themselves and feel totally unmotivated. 
5. Acceptance – Finally, the person begins to accept the inevitable and starts to explore what is possible in the new reality. They don't celebrate the change, they accept that there is no going back to how things were.