What Resilience Actually Means — and Why It Has Nothing to Do With Being Strong

A reflection on returning to yourself, again and again — from a therapist in Winnipeg

I love the rhythm of my own feet.
The way I can be euphoric one hour —
feel the most alive and wonderful —
and completely miserable the next.

— from my poem, "I Don't Love Many Things"

We've got resilience wrong

If you've ever been told you're resilient and felt vaguely unsettled by it — like the compliment was also a quiet instruction to keep it together — you're not alone. As a therapist in Winnipeg, I hear this almost every week.

Somewhere along the way — and who knows exactly when — the word resilience became synonymous with being tough. Not just tough, but untouched. Unaffected. Able to move through legitimately difficult experiences without showing too much of it.

To be called resilient, in the way we commonly use the word, means to keep it together. To never break. To never fall apart.

We admire the person who doesn't show their stress. Who doesn't cry. Who keeps going without complaint. We might even aspire to be that person — not just because we want to be strong, but because we want to be seen as strong. Resilient. Okay.

I want to invite us to pause and think critically about this definition. Because not only is it wrong — I see the suffering and damage it causes every week, sitting with my clients at Empower Counselling Services in Winnipeg.

What resilience actually means

The actual definition of resilience is the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or significant stress. Organizations like the American Psychological Association describe resilience this way — not as never struggling, but as adapting, recovering, and finding your footing again over time.

Resilience is not the absence of struggle. It is the capacity to return — to a more regulated state, to yourself, to something that feels like ground — after struggle has moved through you. This is also why understanding The Power of Your Nervous System: Why It Matters for Your Health can be such an important part of making sense of resilience.

In short: resilience is the ability to find your way back.

Not how quickly you shove your feelings down and reassure everyone you're fine. Not whether you cried, or felt despair, or had thoughts that weren't grateful or positive. Not whether you needed help, or rest, or time. Just — did you find your way back? Are you still here?

The hiking trail has taught me this in a way nothing else quite has. You can feel euphoric and completely miserable on the same hike. Sometimes within the same hour. The trail doesn't ask you to feel only the good parts. It doesn't reward you for pretending the hard parts aren't hard. It doesn't punish you for needing to adjust. It just keeps going — and without pressure or judgment, invites you to do the same.

That is resilience. Not the absence of the miserable hour. The willingness to keep walking through it.

What we lose when resilience means toughness

When we define resilience as toughness, we are effectively saying that being affected by life means you failed.

We send a message — to ourselves, to our children, our friends, our colleagues — that normal human experiences of struggle and pain mean something is wrong with you. That needing help is weakness. That the goal is to feel less. That being stressed or hurting is a you problem.

For people who have already carried more than their share of hard things — and really, for all of us — this definition lands like one more thing to carry. One more way of not being good enough. One more way to fail. It takes the very thing they've been doing — surviving, returning, getting back up — and tells them it doesn't count. Because it wasn't graceful enough. Invisible enough. Comfortable enough for the people around them.

And that message, as unintended as it often is, causes pain that does not need to exist.

It causes people to suffer in silence. To reach for substances. To cope in ways that aren't ultimately supportive — because now they're not only carrying the original hard thing, they're carrying it alone. Without support. Without permission to struggle.

Defining resilience as toughness isolates people. It dismantles the very supports that make true resilience possible. And it does so quietly, in the name of strength.

I am passionate about this because it is a kind of suffering that does not need to be.

Resilience is a practice — not a personality trait

Resilience is not something you either have or don't. It is something you can nurture and strengthen over time. It is a repeated, imperfect, deeply human act of returning to yourself — and I'll be writing more about how to do that in a future post.

Some days that looks like getting out of bed. Some days it looks like a hard hike. Some days it looks like sitting with someone you trust and saying — this has been really hard. Some days it looks like all three.

What matters is not the form. What matters is the returning. And often, that returning is connected to How to Build Emotional Capacity and Why You Should Care — not because you should be able to handle everything, but because your capacity can grow with care, support, and practice.

Here is what I've noticed, both on the trail and in the work I do at Empower Counselling Services in Winnipeg: the returning gets easier. Not because the hard things stop coming. But because you begin to trust — slowly, sometimes reluctantly — that you can find your way back. That you have done it before. That you will do it again.

That trust is resilience. Built not in the easy hours, but in the miserable ones.

A different question to carry

Instead of asking why can't I just be stronger — what if you asked something gentler?

Where do I find my way back to myself? And am I giving myself enough of that?

It doesn't have to be a trail. It just has to be yours.

If you're exploring what resilience looks like for you — not the toughness version, but the real one — that's exactly the kind of work we do through Therapy for Adult Individuals at Empower Counselling Services. For people whose resilience has been shaped by trauma, chronic stress, PTSD, or CPTSD, our Trauma Therapy for PTSD and CPTSD page may also be a helpful place to begin. 

Reach out if you'd like to connect.