Building Resilience: Helping Young People Grow and Thrive through Adversity

Research shows that after significant adversity, despite coping with substantial distress, people often experience higher levels of wellbeing than they experienced before the hardship. There are healthier and less healthy ways to respond to difficult situations, conflicts, or setbacks, and there are key factors that can make us more resilient before we face a challenge. It turns out, a lot of those same factors help us grow and change in positive ways when life gets off track.

During my last semester of law school, my first love and the woman I hoped to spend my life with planned a birthday party for me in Baltimore. I made the terrible decision to drive us home after drinking at the bars, and I caused a drunk driving collision that resulted in her death. The pain of grief and the guilt of knowing what I’d done made me wish I’d been the one who’d died in the crash, but I also knew that honoring Laura’s memory meant doing something meaningful with my life.

After serving a short term in jail, I returned home committed to making some big changes. I devoted more energy to the people I cared about. I returned to a faith I’d previously abandoned. And I embarked on a career dedicated to helping others avoid and overcome the worst life could throw their way. The pain of loss and the shame of knowing what I did never went away, but I am happier with the person I’ve become because of that struggle.

I returned to school at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, where I now serve as an assistant instructor, to study posttraumatic growth and learn how to harness the power of pain to propel us to become better versions of ourselves.

Drawing on my personal experience learning to accept and give back to others after causing a tragedy, as well as a background in substance use, positive psychology, resilience, and posttraumatic growth, I offer young people honest insights about risky behaviors and compelling and engaging programs to help them understand and explore their personal strengths and the resources they can call on when times get tough.

• Healthy coping strategies and emotional awareness;
• Using personal strengths and seeing the good in others;
• Maintaining optimism and hope, even when things aren’t going well;
• Slowing down to challenge unhelpful thinking patterns and see things more accurately;
• Connecting with others and building resilient and positive communities;
• Maintaining perspective through meaning, purpose, and gratitude.

A Bounce Back Book is a book about resilience and how students and youth can bounce back when life gets hard. It contains info and exercises to help students understand what resilience looks like in everyday life, and it provides tools for students to build resilience in themselves and their communities. I tailor and co-brand the Bounce Back Book to fit your community’s needs and match a program structure we design together.

The Resilience Roadmap is a one-page worksheet for students to reflect on and document the best strategies for responding to adversity by examining what has worked for them in the past and what may work best for them in the future.