When it concerns human behavior, resilience is the capacity to endure challenging or even horrifying situations, and to emerge relatively unscathed.  Resilience depends upon personal, interpersonal, and communal factors; for example a positive, can-do sense of self, family ties, and a connection to a community or social group.  Resilience entails the willingness to process a traumatic event or situation, and the willingness to embark on a journey of finding meaning within the crucible of suffering.  Good problem-solving skills help. So does the ability to be mindful of, or even to embrace the anguish, while paradoxically not being swept away by it.  Resilience is enabled by another person who is truly present, who in effect bears witness to the trauma and to the pain and dysregulation which results.  An area of resilience which is less understood is the existence of resilient children in abusive families.  A child in an abusive household has not yet had the opportunity to develop individual coping strategies, clearly cannot rely on his family, and is generally too young to participate in a community.  Research on resilient children remains inconclusive, which leaves us free to celebrate the miracle that is personified by each such child.

Empathic reversal is a phenomenon that occurs in children who are abused by a parent or another person close to them. If not addressed, it persists into adulthood.  Children instinctively know they need their parents to survive.  They do not know there is substitute care, such as foster care, available, and even so to be separated from their parents is a child’s worst nightmare. Therefore, even in the midst of horrific abuse or neglect, a child will maintain her conviction that her parent is protective and nurturing.  To do otherwise would leave the child with the knowledge that she is unsafe and unprotected, basically alone in the world, a thought that is developmentally unbearable.  A child’s only option is to protect, defend, and even nurture a parent no matter what.  This reversal not only of roles but of caring then becomes virtually wired into the child’s physiology.  Even when grown up she may experience a excess of empathy for other abusive or narcissistic individuals, and a simultaneous lack of empathy for herself. It is not that she “likes” mean people, nor is she “attracted” to them.  It is that the necessary childhood window of opportunity for her to learn to protect herself was closed.  It is only with support, empathy, and gentleness that she will be able to learn that she matters too.

Peer pressure is the influence exerted by peers or other social groups to ensure conformity to group norms, beliefs, dress codes, and behaviors.  We associate it most often with adolescents and children, but it can be found among all age groups.  It can lead to a strictly stratified society in high school, or a rigid pecking order in an organization.  It rewards conformity and penalizes individuality.  Acceptance into the favored group is dependent upon conforming to their rules and values, even if the rules change on a regular basis.  Original thinking, dress, or even taste in music results in expulsion from the group.  While adolescents are developing a secure identity, identification with a group can be a healthy part of development.  Problems arise when the “popular group” becomes synonymous with the powerful group, and exerts control way beyond its individual members.  The in-group then not only creates and defines itself but also creates and defines the out-group. Exclusion, rejection, and ridicule are the only way to do this.  So not only do members of the in-group learn to demean others, but those in the out-group learn they are deficient in some way.  Marginalization is awful to experience, but can be undone by support, insight, and, simply, graduation.  However, members of the popular group leave school genuinely handicapped:  they now make themselves feel better by making others feel worse.