Resilience
entry by Julie M. Marx, Global Family Expert at Expat Valley
The capacity to adapt positively in the face of adversity, stress, or significant challenge. In internationally mobile contexts, resilience is both a resource drawn upon during repeated transitions and a characteristic often developed through them, though it should not be used to normalize or minimize genuine distress.
Comparable terms
Psychological resilience (clinical, research — emphasizes mental health dimension) · Adaptive capacity (HR/mobility — functional, organizational framing) · Bouncebackability (informal — contested; trivializes the complexity of the construct) · Hardiness (psychology — related construct; Kobasa, 1979; emphasizes control, commitment, challenge) · Grit (popular psychology — Duckworth; contested overlap)
Why this matters
Resilience is often strengthened by global life but should not be used as an excuse to ignore real pain. It is supported by relationships, routines, and meaning, not by “toughing it out” alone. Understanding this helps families build resilience intentionally.
Cross-references
Family Resilience (Family Dynamics); Post-Traumatic Growth (Wellbeing & Mental Health); Emotional Regulation (Wellbeing & Mental Health); Sense of Agency (Wellbeing & Mental Health); Flourishing (Wellbeing & Mental Health). Family resilience is the systemic equivalent of individual resilience — residing in the family’s relationships and communication patterns rather than in any individual member. Post-traumatic growth describes what can follow when resilience has been tested to its limits and the individual has grown through rather than merely recovered from adversity. Emotional regulation is a foundational psychological competency underpinning resilience; sense of agency is the belief in one’s own capacity to navigate difficulty that makes resilient behavior possible. Flourishing is the wellbeing outcome that sustained resilience aims toward.
Sources
Boss, P. (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. W.W. Norton. Positions resilience as the therapeutic goal in contexts of unresolvable loss, directly applicable to repeated mobility.
The foundational resilience research is: Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227–238. For the internationally mobile children specifically, see: Schaetti, B.F. (2000). Global nomad identity: Hypothesizing a developmental model. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Union Institute.
« Back