Sybil Wolin and Steven J. Wolin

In 1989, Project Resilience began an informal study designed to explore the nature of resilience in children of hardship. We interviewed 25 adults who had been reared in difficult conditions, under the stress of poverty, racism, violence, family disruption, and/or drug and alcohol abuse, among others. All had improved considerably on the lifestyles they had known as children. We called them successful survivors (Wolin & Wolin, 1993).

In our attempt to understand how children protect themselves against the corrosive effects of hardship, we asked these successful survivors one simple question: "How did you do it?" In the course of answering, they spoke about their childhoods, adolescences, and current adult lives. Those who were parents mused about their relationships with their own children. Their remarks on this topic had an unusual scent that lured us and eventually led us to an important discovery.

"I'm worried about my son or (daughter)," more than one participant in our study told us. We were puzzled because the children mentioned, by most standards we would use, were usually doing well. So we probed, and what we found was something generally along these lines: "Knowing what I went through as a child, I've devoted myself to being a decent parent, and my children have had a good life. But I wonder if they're too soft, if they can withstand pressure or if they'll cave in when things get tough?"

To us, the worry seemed unfounded, but the number of times it came up caught our attention. As we turned it over and over in our own minds, we developed the hypothesis that it was a red herring. We posited that the successful survivors inter- viewed were not so much worried about their children as they were proud of how they themselves had maneuvered around the formidable obstacles life had strewn in their own paths. In a culture where pride is not easily expressed, theirs came out in a backhanded, convoluted form. If cultural taboos and modesty had not stood in the way, they might have said, "I have been tested and I have prevailed. I learned and grew despite the hardship I suffered, and I wonder if my children could do as well." However, our culture being what it is, they couched their intended compliment to themselves in a statement of parental concern.

In the interviews that remained to be done, we confirmed our hunch that the parental concern we were hearing was in actu- ality a thin veneer disguising well-deserved feelings of pride. The next time the "child worry" (as we began to call it) came up, we nosed around. "Why do you have this worry?" we asked. "Your child seems to be doing just fine. What do you mean by 'soft,' and 'soft' compared to whom?"

Our questions easily penetrated what we suspected was a mask. Allowing for variations, "Soft, in comparison to me" was the uniform, if reluctant, reply.

"So you must be pretty proud of yourself," we returned. No objections were offered.

Survivor's Pride Defined

We called the particular brand of pride we were hearing in the 25 successful survivors we interviewed "survivor's pride." We define survivor's pride as the well-deserved feeling of accomplishment that results from withstanding the pressures of hardship and prevailing in ways both large and small. It is a bittersweet mix of pain and triumph that is usually under the surface, but sometimes readily visible, in many children and adults struggling with the troubles in their lives. This pride, developed over time in the course of a struggle, typically goes unnoticed in professional and lay circles that are more apt to document the deficits in children than their strengths. It is not a rare feeling, nor is it limited to those with dazzling successes. Subsequent to our study, our work with youth turned up traces of survivor's pride even in young people whose struggles continued and whose hold on gratifying lives was far from sure.

Take Terry, a young woman whose parents abused alcohol and who had had several bouts of excessive drinking herself. She was the oldest of four children. By her own description, Terry played the role of mother in her family, meeting all the house- hold and childcare obligations that her alcoholic parents neglected.

As a youth and young adult, Terry suffered some of the predictable problems associated with her childhood - depression and her own taste for alcohol. Though the pain of her past remained vivid, she also attached pride to the kindness and decency she had shown to her younger brothers and sister while she was growing up. That pride fueled her will to persist and survive, then and now. However, like many others in her position, her positive feelings about herself were submerged to such a degree that they evaded even her own awareness. Only when a sense of her own accomplishment was violated did her claim to pride finally rise to the surface.

Terry related to us that after an extended time of keeping her distance, she had recently met with her mother. The meeting was a blow to Terry for a reason we would not have predicted. Her mother apologized for the past.

Terry explained, "I feel pride, but I get a lot of the opposite from my mom. She's always apologizing now that she's in recovery. She feels that she made me responsible for so many ' things. It's hard to be proud when she says this was such a horrible thing. So it's kind of a dilemma for me, because I am proud. I did the right thing, and I feel like I did a good job sometimes, the best I could, more than would be expected of a child. Then to have her tell me that she is so sorry, and it was horrible, and that's not the way it should have been. She's right, but how about a pat on the back?" (Wolin & Wolin, 1994).

The apology Terry so movingly described had the likely effect of relieving her mother's guilt. For Terry, however, it hurt more than it helped, running afoul of her view of herself as a responsible, caring, and competent person. It was not an apology she wanted, but a "pat on the back," an affirmation of how well she had done in the highly unfavorable circumstances that had been handed to her in childhood.

The Potential Power of Uncovering Survivor's Pride

Just as we had first seen survivor's pride hidden in a convoluted statement made to keep up the appearance of modesty, we first detected the potential power of uncovering and identifying it through Terry's analysis of the effects of her mother's apology. Her response to this apology helped us realize that the "pat on the back" she wanted was the equivalent of what we were calling the acknowledgement of survivor's pride. Her remark gave us the opportunity to flesh out the concept. What exactly would she get from "a pat on the back" beyond momentary satisfaction?

Talking to Terry further, we identified four dimensions to her statement. She wanted:

1. Her struggle to be recognized and honored, not pitied
2. A reason to persist in her struggle, not to relive the horrors of the past
3. To form a new bond with her mother, not bear the burden of her mother's guilt
4. To see herself as someone with strength, not as a victim

From our perspective, Terry had packed into a common colloquialism the best possible prescription for the help she needed. It is a prescription that adults working with youth could easily write and offer, if only they were aware of its benefits. Below are some suggestions for taking advantage of this powerful medicine in working with young survivors.

Honoring the Struggle

Honoring the struggle is the opposite of lamenting the fate of a child who is trying to survive. It requires recognizing the child's dignity and seeing his or her behavior and choices in the context of the difficult life he or she has led. It means being respectful.

For example, honoring Terry's struggle requires that we understand the bind she was in as a child and credit the morality that shaped her decisions. It does not require focusing on the problems those decisions may have caused, as her mother did. Rather, a teacher, family member, or mentor who honored her struggle might say something like this to her:

You had alcoholic parents, and you suffered at their hands. But in the midst of your own suffering you made a dignified and moral choice by responding to the needs of your younger brothers and sister who had no one else but you. Walking away and taking care of yourself was not possible for you because you are a person of conscience. So you stayed, and you did a good job.

Such a statement does not deny the reality of what Terry lost; but neither does it demean the efforts she made. Rather, it acknowledges her reality, affirms her dignity, and serves as an effective antidote to the lasting pain that resulted from standing in for her mother at a time in life when she should have been mothered herself.

A Reason to Persist

The term "reason to persist" can denote a guiding purpose in life or the reward at the end of a trying experience. Both meanings are, of course, accurate. However, in the context of a discussion about survivor's pride, we limit the meaning to the motivation needed to keep up a struggle and to undertake the hard work of changing one's life course.

When Terry met to reconcile with her mom, her own trials were far from over. She was still fighting the urge to drink, and she was trying hard to change the pattern, ingrained from the past, of taking care of others to her own detriment. The "pat on the back" she wanted was some reference to her capacity to face the challenge in front of her. Some variation on a statement such as this might have strengthened her reason to persist:

When life at home was falling apart because your mother and father were drinking, you could easily have been overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and given up. But you weren't. You dug in, and you met the challenge. If you could do that then, you have what it takes to meet the challenges you are facing now. Such a statement is empowering because it reminds Terry of her competence to act. It is full of hope and assurance that she is capable of succeeding in her current struggles. Most of all, because the affirmation is based on the specifics of Terry's life, it can be internalized more readily than the generic kind of praise that has characterized so many failed self-esteem programs in the past.

UNCOVERING SURVIVOR'S PRIDE When speaking with youth, you can uncover survivor's pride by following these do's and don'ts.

1. Do believe in youth and their future: "I can see that you're struggling hard to break out of your family's tendency to abuse drugs. You've told me some ways that you're different from the rest of your family. Let's work toward making this different too."

Don't accept predictions of gloom or at-risk formulations as fact: "There's a pattern of substance abuse in your family. You need to know that you're at risk, that you're more likely to repeat the past than escape it. What are you pre- pared to do about that?"

2. Do be curious and respectful: "So how did you manage to find food for your little sister and brothers when your mother was gone all the time?" OR "Tell me about being in a gang. Is it a good experience or a bad experience?"

Don't leap to judgment: "Life at home must be terrible, having your mother gone all the time and all the responsibility for the little ones on your shoulders." OR "Being in a gang is a sure path to destruction."

3. Do use a vocabulary of strengths: "You can read people's faces and understand the way they feel. That's a strength of yours. I call it insight."

Don't use negatively laden diagnostic terms: "You're al- ways watching people's faces, and you obsess about their feelings more than you think of your own. That's a problem you have because you had to be on guard the whole time you were growing up. It's called hypervigilance. We need to work on getting rid of that and building your ability to trust and to take care of your own needs."

4. Do pay attention to details and the exceptions in a story of pain and psychological damage. "You tell me that sometimes you doubt your friends' actions and that once or twice you've pulled out and refused to go along with the crowd. I'm interested in hearing about that."

Don't generalize or try to fit your observations into a schema of pathology. "That incident is another example of going along with the crowd even when you have doubts about what they're doing. Why can't you follow your own conscience rather than letting others tell you what to do all the time?"

For more information on the language of resilience, see The Resilient Self by Sybil and Steven Wolin (1993).

Forming a Bond

By "forming a bond," we mean touching and being touched by another in a way that is nurturing and sustaining - opening the door to growing intimacy and to learning about oneself by relating to another. Forming a bond is the first requirement of a helping relationship.

The apology made by Terry's mother was off-putting because it was for her own sake, not for Terry's. Its repetitious quality ("My mother was always apologizing") made it a burden that activated Terry's urge to flee. To form a bond with youth based upon survivor's pride, the following kind of words are more appropriate:

I'd like to know what it was like to be you as a child.

These words do not imply that Terry is deficient in some way because of her experience. Nor do they pigeonhole her in the diagnostic category of "damaged child of alcoholic parents." They do not obscure her heroism and aspirations for herself. Rather they allow her humanity with its full complement of strengths and weaknesses to emerge and, by so doing, invite her closeness rather than pushing away.

The Self-Image of One Who Prevails

As badly as some youth have been treated, regarding them as victims (as Terry's mother regarded her) rarely helps. More often, it hurts by encouraging survivors to solidify an image of themselves as helpless in the past. This image then becomes the basis for fault finding and continued helplessness in the present. Often it serves as a diversion from the hard work of changing or steering one's life course in a positive direction.

By contrast, identifying all the resources a child drew on in the past in order to survive can help him or her shape a self-image of one who prevails. In turn, that self-image can become the basis for constructive action in the present and future. A re- mark such as this could lift Terry out of the victim's status, avoiding the affront that an apology was:

When you were scared and worried, you took action. You took the initiative to care for your younger sister and brothers. That kind of initiative is still part of you today.

Conclusion

In many quarters, educators, preventionists, clinicians, and policymakers are decrying the drawbacks of an "at risk" label for talking about and categorizing youth. However, one source of resistance to dropping the label and all the other negative terminology associated with it is that a useful and widely accepted vocabulary of strengths has not been developed to take its place. We submit survivor's pride as one contribution to an effort in that direction.