Maria Konnikova wrote a fascinating piece in The New Yorker on resilience. Resilience is hard to study because "[i]f you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges." These threats can be anywhere from environmental to psychological threats.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University's Teachers College, says that one of the central elements of resilience is perception. "Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow?" Bonanno has coined the term "potentially traumatic event" because he believes "[e]very frightening event … has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it." Konnikova explains that "living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing." As she says, "Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Or as the Bible says, "Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials … " That's the ultimate way to reframe trials.

Source:

Maria Konnikova, “How People Learn to Become Resilient,” The New Yorker (2-11-16)