Resilience and Positive Psychology

This is a return to a series of interviews with expert psychologists on how resilience—a major theme of my book, A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me About Faith and Resilience—connects to their area of study.

Source: Don Davis, used with permission

Today’s interview with Don Davis, an associate professor with the Department of Counseling and Psychological Services at Georgia State University, is on the subject of positive psychology and resilience. Davis is also an HDI contributing scholar who frequently collaborates with me and our HDI colleagues on a wide range of research projects. His research primarily focuses on positive psychology, and specifically the virtues of humility, forgiveness, and gratitude. In our conversation, he was able to offer insight into how the positive virtues of humility, forgiveness, and gratitude relate to resilience.

JA: How do you personally define positive psychology?

DD: Positive psychology is mostly an umbrella term that captures the many theories (i.e., plausible stories) about this process of seeking to become a good person. Positive psychology is about more than just being happy. I think of Steve Sandage, whose book on spiritual transformation was the first I read as a doctoral student. The main idea is that we grow through crucibles of life. Life naturally heats up, which causes the release of a lot of energy—a lot of anxiety builds up. Who we become depends on how we handle the chaos and intensity of that heating-up process. Sandage believes in maturity, not just feeling good. Maturity has to do with being able to stay engaged with the intensity of life and all the feelings that happen inside us when we come into contact with other people.

Many research programs focus on problems and pathology. The motivation for the research is so often focused on the harm caused by certain problems; however, understanding how to help someone move from depression to languishing is only part of the story. To fully understand something, we need to study people who are flourishing as well. This is a pretty powerful heuristic for evaluating a research program.

JA: What are some ways positive psychology can help us live more resiliently?

DD: Virtues have a lot to do with resilience. They have to do with doing the right thing even in situations that put the most pressure on a person to take a moral shortcut.

We will all encounter some extremely difficult situations. It may be health problems of children, death of loved ones, losing a job, or a harrowing chronic illness. Spiritual disciplines are part of a training process of shaping what comes naturally to us when we are exposed to these pressures of life. Every day we are shaping ourselves into a certain kind of person—and the pressure of life will reveal character.

There are some major limitations to what the discipline of psychology can say about the nature of this process, but I find it important to explore these limits, and at times I ask questions that my discipline or even humans cannot answer.

Here are a few things we know from work on humility: Growing in the face of adversity requires a willingness to accept our limitations. We make a mess when we distort our view of life to cover our limitations.

One limitation is the need for rest. Building character requires a dose of both work and rest—discipline and grace. I learned this training as an athlete. In high school, we used to run wind sprints until half our team fell to the ground in exhaustion. I still remember my coaches yelling, “Your body can go much further than your mind thinks it can.” They were right about how to grow mental toughness. The mind is much stronger than we think it is.

But sometimes we probably worked too hard. When I got to college, the coaches had a much better understanding of the role of rest in training. Even though I was doing less, I was growing much stronger. Proper rest was the key.

There is a variety of literature that would reiterate a similar theme. Resilience comes from a combination of mental toughness and work balanced with rest. We have to prepare to live a good life in the face of the surprises we will face. We have to tell ourselves, “Self, it is time to build again.” Hope is born. Being good at life is becoming good at this process of letting go and finding hope.

JA: Any advice for how we might use positive psychology to support a friend or loved one struggling with a difficult life situation?

DD: There seem to be a few things we can always do for a friend. We can always bear witness. We can try to create space within ourselves to hear their suffering and allow feelings to arise within us without trying to fix or change them right away.

It is hard to do this while also resisting the urge to do more. We may want to do something, anything. But many of our intuitions can lead us astray. The desire to fix or problem-solve can make it hard to be patient and responsive to what the person may really need. We may become too analytical. We may become too anxious and seek greater intimacy than the other person wants from us. Or we might be afraid of making a mistake. Research on virtues such as patience, humility, wisdom, or compassion has a lot to say about the emotional skills needed to sit with people in pain.

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JA: What are you working on now?

DD: All things humility. This year I’m trying to complete a meta-analysis of all the empirical work. In just this past year, there are over 500 studies. I got interested in humility because of the measurement puzzle—the fear that we might not be able to trust someone who declared themselves to be an exemplar of humility. We’ve made a lot of progress on that puzzle, and now there are thriving programs of work on this elusive virtue.

Lately, I am also working on the puzzle of promoting humility. Here the problem is that we may not even know where to start. The people who need humility the most may want it the least. People who are extremely arrogant are unlikely to seek help for anything, much less a humility intervention. This is just the beginning of the challenges. Needless to say, this should keep our team busy for a while.