People With These 7 Personality Traits Have No Idea What Resilience Means
People who lack resilience find every day of their lives to be a struggle.
Pexels via Canva Resilience is so important, but what does it truly mean? What personality traits are associated with people who are resilient?
It’s the ability to learn from your mistakes, get back up in life, and find hope and a purpose again, even after something terrible has happened. But not everyone possesses the necessary traits for this ability. In fact, people with a lack of resilience find it difficult to navigate life's ups and downs.
What is a lack of resilience?
Lacking resilience means you don't possess the necessary skills to power through things when life gets tough. Not having resilience means you can't utilize resources, strengths, and skills to overcome challenges and work through setbacks.
Those who lack resilience may actually be more likely to feel overwhelmed or helpless when things get rough. Instead of figuring things out, non-resilient people will rely on unhealthy coping strategies like isolation and even self-medication.
What does it mean to be a non-resilient person?
If you're a non-resilient person, you crumble easily when life gets tough. You dwell on problems, feel victimized, are overwhelmed easily, and turn to unhealthy coping strategies.
You may experience irritability, anger issues, mood swings, and even difficulty sleeping when faced with stressful situations. Others may say you overreact often, are antisocial, and/or are depressed.
There are plenty of reasons why someone can lack resilience, ranging from your health to your outlook on life. But whatever the cause, people with these 7 personality traits may not fully understand what resilience truly means.
7 Personality Characteristics Of People with Low Resilience
1. Non-resilient people have a victim mentality.
My mother had borderline personality disorder, and she was the poster child for the victim mentality. She had no capacity to feel self-worth. It's sad to say, but some of this is neurologic in people with this disorder.
Also, if you've suffered severe childhood abuse as my mom did, it’s very hard to find a sense of self-worth. And because she couldn't find a way to feel self-worth on her own, she was absolutely addicted to getting it from other people. And the way she did this was by portraying herself as a victim.
And always, the goal is the same: She's looking for the other person to say, "Oh, you poor thing." If people feel sorry for her, she can feel better for a bit. She needs a constant drip-drip-drip of these hits of sympathy.
People like this are never going to be able to pick themselves up and dust themselves off. They’d lose the sympathy they want!
2. Non-resilient people have an inability to admit mistakes.
Four years ago, I was dumped. Horribly dumped. My heart was stomped so badly, I didn’t think I’d live.
But I see now that after four years of diligent research about relationships, I did a few things wrong and I needed to go back and see that I was way too controlling.
I needed to see why I was so controlling. I had to think about what in my childhood made me that way, so I wouldn’t repeat that mistake again. That's kind of hard to do, unless you can actually admit you make mistakes. And for non-resilient people, they truly can't do so.
3. Non-resilient people have fragile egos and low self-worth.
Some people really do see themselves as two steps below everyone else. Everyone they know is better, in some respect, than they are.
They're constantly putting themselves down for something. You cannot give them a compliment without having it deflected: "Oh, no, not really. The truth is..." What comes after that is always something self-deprecating.
If a person is doing this, it’s called low self-esteem. It can be a feature of codependency and a lot of other issues, especially if they felt this way a lot growing up.
4. Non-resilient people have a pessimistic view of life.
Some folks have had a lot of bad things happen to them — a real, Titanic-sized boatload of awful life events. When that happens, they can start thinking of themselves as unlucky people, branded with some sort of celestial mark that will keep good things from happening to them forever and ever.
We're all vulnerable to this. And, boy, have I ever been there. If a person can’t fight this tendency, this outlook takes over and paralyzes them.
That’s why encouragement from others — and perhaps a good therapist — is important during those times when life has hit you so hard, you’re on your back on the cold floor, feeling like you can’t even turn over, let alone drag yourself to your knees again.
5. Non-resilient people are unwilling to search for meaning in difficult things that happen.
One thing that saves so many is the intense drive to understand.
People with the hunger to learn and an obsessive desire to know why — even if they're scared the truth might mean something terrible about them — are going to search for information, and they’re going to use what they find.
So many helpful books are out there, as well as good therapists, philosophers, and religious teachers. But individuals who are afraid to pick it up will never learn precious nuggets that turn lives around. Some people even dump on themselves for not knowing these nuggets already.
6. Non-resilient people have sky-high, unrealistic standards for who they should be.
These are the people who believe that their figures should be perfect, their grades should be perfect, their hair should be perfect, their gardens should be perfect, among other things. It’s totally unrealistic.
Such individuals criticize themselves as soon as it becomes clear they need help with something. For example, tutoring for school or therapy for codependency or drug addiction.
It’s okay if their friend has this problem and they’re there to support that friend all the way, but themselves? If they have any problem or need any help at all, for anything, they react with shame about it, as if they are the scum of the Earth.
These folks are never going to find resilience in themselves because they have no patience, understanding, gentleness, or compassion for themselves. You need those if you’re going to pick yourself up from tough times and go on.
People like this can be difficult to support when things go wrong in their lives. If the problem is really bad, you can get so worn out trying to help them that you have to disengage. (Think carefully before making a lifelong commitment if this is your boyfriend or girlfriend.)
7. Non-resilient people suffer from major mood swings.
If you don't have resilience, your emotions can run rampant. One moment you can be cool as a cucumber and then something goes wrong and you blow up with anger.
When you lack resilience, the body goes through some changes that involve hormones that regulate your mood. This causes non-resilient people to have major highs and lows, sometimes several times a day.
They can be quick to anger and become incredibly irritable, even if the slightest thing gets in their way or doesn't go as planned.
Resilience is an important quality. We all need a little dose of it to help us when life gets rough because, as we all know, pain and sorrow come to everyone.
P.D. Reader is a level one student in the NCGR School of Astrology, but her work focuses on spirituality, lifestyle, and relationship topics. She runs Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship on Medium.