ABSTRACT
Resilience is generally understood as a feature of our response to adversity, the ability to recover from the ups and downs that life presents and to be able to have increased hope, reduced stress, greater spirituality, plus more positivity in the face of the challenges of life. Resilience can be seen to arise in situations characterized by people being called upon to face financial crises, job loss, aging, losing their home in a fire or natural disaster, war and thousands of other such testing scenarios. Key to understanding resilience is vulnerability. Indeed, resilience can be understood as largely a question of how we manage our experiences of vulnerability. It is a part of the existential challenge of coping with what Sartre (2003) calls the “contingency of being,” by which he means the relative lack of guarantees and the constant exposure to a range of risks as a core element of human experience.
