Rethinking Resilience: Why I Still Use a Word Many People Dislike

“Resilience” has become one of those words that often makes people roll their eyes.
And I understand why.

In recent years, it’s been used in ways that put the responsibility back on the individual:
You adapt. You get stronger. You bounce back.
Meanwhile, the systems and structures that create chronic stress or hardship often remain untouched.
It can feel like being told to “just cope better” instead of asking why we need to cope so much in the first place.

That critique is completely valid. I share it.
I’m not interested in resilience as a badge of honour for enduring what should never have been tolerated in the first place.
I don’t believe it’s your job to twist yourself into painful shapes just to survive in an unchanged environment.

For me, resilience is not about blind endurance. It’s about restoring access to your inner resources so you can meet life’s challenges without burning out or shutting down. It’s not a moral duty to “be strong.” It’s the lived experience of having enough capacity in your body and mind to respond instead of react, to recover after a shock, and to move from survival mode back into connection.

In a somatic context, resilience is less about toughness and more about flexibility. It’s the nervous system’s ability to shift states — from stress to calm, from collapse to mobilization — without getting stuck. It’s not about liking what’s happening or pretending it’s fine. It’s about staying present enough to choose your next step.

And here’s the key: resilience is not something we artificially “build” from scratch — it is something already built into us.
The human organism evolved to survive life on this planet. Just as the heart knows how to beat and the lungs know how to breathe, our nervous system knows how to regulate itself.

One example is shaking — a natural way the body releases stored tension. In many cultures, we view shaking as a sign of weakness or fear. But young children shake instinctively when they’re frightened, and it helps their bodies reset. As adults, we’ve been “trained” out of it — instead of letting the body regulate itself, we suppress the tremors or try to “calm down” with alcohol or other numbing methods. Over time, we lose touch with this ancient self-regulating mechanism.

So resilience, in my view, is not about learning to tolerate the intolerable. It’s about remembering and allowing these in-built mechanisms to work again.

Because yes — we should absolutely work to change the harmful conditions around us. And while we do, it’s worth having the tools that help us stay grounded, connected, and able to act. To me, that is the kind of resilience worth cultivating: not the art of enduring, but the ability to return — again and again — to the inner balance that has always been there.