Elise Craig in Vox:
When Luana Marques was growing up in Brazil, life was not easy. Her parents had her when they were very young, and they didn’t know how to take care of themselves, much less their children. Drugs and alcohol were also a problem. “Between the many instances of domestic violence, I often felt scared, wondering when something bad would happen next,” she says. She lived in poverty with a single mother and experienced a lot of trauma and adversity. Eventually, she moved in with her grandmother, who taught her how to approach her fears without avoiding them, and to tolerate discomfort. “My grandmother would call that being the water, not the rock,” she says. “When change happens, some of us become stuck, like the rock. The opposite is being the water. You flow around the change.”
Years later, when Marques, now an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, was studying cognitive behavioral therapy, she realized that her grandmother had been giving her lessons in resilience. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility,” but Marques puts it more simply: “The way I think about it is the ability to build mental strength in such a way that your brain has what’s known as ‘cognitive flexibility,’” she says. “It means that when life throws you curveballs or adversity, you are able to make decisions that are aligned with your values.”
More here.