Resilience
A resource sheet for artists navigating crisis, transition, and the slow return of strength
What Does Resilience Really Mean?
The word resilience comes from the Latin resilere — to jump back, to recoil. It was first used to describe materials that could absorb stress or distortion and return to their original shape. The term later migrated into psychology, where it was defined as the capacity to “bounce back from adversity.”
But the human psyche doesn’t work like a rubber band. Artists aren’t static objects. And most of us don’t return to a perfect original form after life’s impact. We shift. We’re marked. And we carry what happened forward — sometimes in ways that deepen us.
Resilience is often compared to a living twig. Twist it, and it bends. But it doesn’t break — because of the soft, green core inside.
Fixed Trait, or Living Process?
Some researchers once described resilience as a personality trait — a kind of inborn strength or psychological robustness. A resilient person, in that view, was naturally stress-resistant or innately optimistic.
But more recent research suggests something different: that resilience is relational, situational, and uneven across time. It fluctuates. It responds to context. And it’s often built in interaction with other people, places, and systems.
We might better speak of resilient adaptation or resilient processes — not resilient people. Because no one is always strong, and no one survives alone.
How Resilience Develops
Some key contributors to resilient adaptation include:
The ability to access flow, absorption, or presence
Relational support: friends, mentors, family or chosen family
A sense of meaning or belonging
Emotional flexibility
Coherent personal narratives — the ability to make sense of experience
A flexible self-concept (especially when change or loss occurs)
Long-term studies have shown that caring adults — teachers, relatives, mentors — play a decisive role in the development of resilience. So do cultural spaces that offer safety, dignity, and expressive freedom.
What Artists Say
“I had to adjust my expectations of how I defined success. Throughout my studies, success was a very narrow and concrete concept. When I got out into the real world, I had to come up with other definitions. Otherwise, I’d go insane.”
“I’ve gotten good at compartmentalizing rejections and just accepting them as part of the practice, part of the life.”
“When I am feeling sad or anxious or angry, I usually am able to step back from the emotion a little bit and observe it… and accept it.”
What Helps
There’s no formula, but these conditions often support resilient adaptation:
Naming what’s happening, without shame or speed
Creating pause, especially after overload
Letting go of rigid ideas about success, worth, or timelines
Staying connected, even if just to one person
Reconnecting with joy, in small and surprising places
Allowing meaning to emerge, even slowly, even uncertainly
Resilience isn’t linear. It’s recursive. Some days you spiral. Some days you rest. Some days you return.
Practice: RAIN
Adapted from the work of psychologist Tara Brach, the RAIN practice offers a way to meet difficult feelings without getting swallowed by them:
Recognize what you’re feeling
Allow the experience to be there
Investigate gently, with curiosity
Nurture yourself with compassion
This practice creates space to be with what is.
At The Green Room
At The Green Room, we accompany artists through burnout, grief, creative block, and renewal. Our work invites a different view of resilience — not as a goal to chase, but as something that can surface quietly, often in places we don’t expect.
Our counseling sessions offer:
a place to tell the truth
space to pause and rebuild
company through the long, uncertain middle
Sessions are available in English or German, online or in Köln.
Final Reflection
Resilience doesn’t always look strong.
It doesn’t always feel brave.
It might look like staying in bed one day, and returning to your practice the next.
It might feel like numbness first, and meaning much later.
No one is resilient at every moment.
But most of us carry a thread — small, tough, and living — that allows us to begin again.
Thesis on Musicians’ Resilience: here
Author: Heather O’Donnell - psychologist, artistic-systemic therapist and founding director of TGR The Green Room