Resilience or Self-sabotage?
- craigschorn
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 14
Credit: Ana Kova
Reflections on an article by Anne-Laure Le Cunff for Big Think, April 10, 2026
When applied blindly, resilience can do real harm to our health
and our ability to change broken systems.
We often think of resilience as an unquestionable good: the ability to keep going, push through difficulty, and endure adversity. This article challenges that assumption.
Drawing on research into resilience, grit, and stress, Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that resilience becomes problematic when it is reduced to a single strategy: endure at all costs.
The same qualities that help us persist through challenges can also keep us trapped in situations that are no longer working.
Resilience stops being helpful when it encourages us to tolerate what should be changed.
The article distinguishes between challenges and traps. Challenges are difficult but potentially productive. Traps are situations where more effort produces diminishing returns or greater harm.
The key insight is that resilience is not a personality trait or moral virtue. It is a form of flexibility. The most resilient people are not necessarily those who suffer the longest. They are those who remain responsive enough to reality to know when to rest, when to adapt, when to persevere, and when to walk away.
This is closely related to what I call "contactfulness" in Responsive Relational Practices, which view growth not as enduring more, but as responding more effectively. From this perspective, resilience becomes problematic when persistence replaces responsiveness.
The goal is not to tolerate indefinitely, nor to abandon ourselves when things become difficult, but to remain in contact with reality long enough to respond appropriately: notice, pause, recalibrate, and choose the most helpful next step.
Resilience is not blind endurance.
It is the capacity to adjust.
It is the willingness to recalibrate.
It is responsiveness in action.
