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The Viciousness of Psychological Resilience

This week's blogpost is from Adam Blehm (Biblical Worldview Director at Rejoice Christian School) on his recent publication The Viciousness of Psychological Resilience (Phenomenology of Cognitive Sciences, 2025). 

Adam Blehm

Generally speaking, psychological resilience seems to be a good thing. By psychological resilience I mean something like a psychological disposition that enables us to cope with difficult things in life. Resilience is thus a good thing because it helps us live our lives without being upended with debilitating psychological distress.

Positive psychologists have identified several traits that appear to make one more resilient. One of the key characteristics of resilient people is that they tend to exemplify what psychologists Southwick and Charney call “acceptance.” Essentially “acceptance” refers to the disposition to accept the “reality of our situation, even if that situation is frightening or painful.” If we are disposed to accept the world as it is, we are less likely to avoid reality by with maladaptive coping mechanisms like dissociation. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus provides a helpful example here. In Enchiridion (XXVI), Epictetus notes we experience a certain detached acceptance when we hear of another person losing a child. We think, “that is just the way the world is.” Yet, when we lose our own child we are emotionally distraught. Epictetus advises us to emulate our response on hearing about the loss of someone else’s child. According to Epictetus, we should accept our own loss like when hearing of a stranger’s loss because this is just the way
of nature and beyond our control.

If acceptance helps us avoid painful psychological distress, shouldn’t we cultivate it to the highest degree possible? In my paper, “The viciousness of psychological resilience” I answer in the negative. This is because acceptance conflicts with some virtuous emotions, namely indignation.

To show why this is the case, let’s consider our experience of indignation. Simply put, indignation is a form of anger that includes surprise or shock. If I witness footage of terrorists attacking and torturing civilians, I might feel indignation. I am angry at the terrorists for their actions, but the actions are so heinous that I can’t quite believe they really happened. Thus, indignation results in a kind of paradox. On the one hand, I believe that an event has happened, but on the other hand I have difficulty accepting that it happened. This tension motivates me to change the world in such a way as to ameliorate or prevent further injustice. In this way, I believe an atrocity occurred, but I do not accept that it occurred. If I increase my psychological acceptance, I diminish my indignation because indignation requires me not to accept the world as it is.

Yet, it doesn’t seem like I should minimize indignation as much as possible because it can be part of the virtuous person’s motivation for acting well. Virtuous indignation, which I describe in the paper, motivates me to address injustice. Thus, we shouldn’t seek to be maximally resilient. Rather, we should think of resilience as an Aristotelian virtue laying somewhere between deficiency and excess. Moreover, in at least some cases, the virtuous person is more prone to psychological distress like trauma, than the non-virtuous person.

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