Kerry Reed-Gilbert remembers spending Christmas living in a bus after her family’s house burnt down. Her sister made curtains to help divide the space into two “rooms” to give them more privacy. The dining table was a box with 
a tablecloth over it. She was seven years old, living with seven siblings under the care of her aunt, whom she called “Mummy”.

“I remember when we saw the house had burnt down. Mummy was looking through the ashes for photos, tears running down her face,” Reed-Gilbert says. “I could feel her heart breaking.”

Born in 1956, Reed-Gilbert was three months old when her father killed her mother in a domestic dispute. He was sent to jail, while she and her brothers and sisters went to live with Mummy, a spirited woman who had children of her own.

“It was hard living,” Reed-Gilbert says. “We didn’t have any luxuries, just basic necessities.” The family survived by picking fruit. Any time that Reed-Gilbert wasn’t in school she was out in the paddocks, her small hands plucking produce from the trees. “You name it, I’ve picked it: tomatoes, grapes, cherries, everything.”

Being Wiradjuri people from New South Wales, Reed-Gilbert and her siblings lived in constant fear that welfare would take them from their beloved Mummy. (Until about 1969, the Australian government removed Aboriginal children – the Stolen Generations – from their homes to place them with white families.) “There’s not a bigger fear in the world. We lived with that every day of our lives,” she recalls.

However, she also describes her childhood as a happy one. She loved picking cherries best of all, and her relationships with her siblings and Mummy were strong. “There was a lot of laughing,” she says.

After finishing school, Reed-Gilbert continued to work as a fruit-picker until her early 30s, when she was awarded a traineeship and went to Sydney to study. She now works as a consultant with government agencies and Aboriginal communities, facilitating communication, training and mentoring. She compiled The Strength of Us as Women and is currently working on her autobiography.

Reed-Gilbert succeeded against the odds – a difficult childhood, poverty and entrenched discrimination – to emerge as a woman with a warm and optimistic attitude to life: “Life could have been easier, yes. But my life has made me, and I like me. I like what I stand for. If I had a different life, I might not be able to say that.”

So what enabled Reed-Gilbert to thrive where another person might have stumbled? Clearly, she has inner strength: the ability to endure, overcome and ultimately flourish.

THE SCIENCE OF RESILIENCE

At some point we all need strength. Even if you’ve led a fortunate life, there will inevitably be a time when you’re called to face adversity. Accidents, broken relationships, disease and death are all 
part of life.

Inner strength acts as armour to hardship. While it’s arguably one of life’s most important qualities, we don’t seem to spend much time thinking about what strength is, or how we might foster it in ourselves. In most cases, we simply find ourselves thrown into deep water and, given no other choice, we sink or swim.

Strength is possible in the most difficult circumstances. For example, Helen Keller (1880–1968), who was blind and deaf, graduated from college to become a well-known writer and lecturer. Nelson Mandela overcame the oppression of apartheid to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. However, what these stories of strength don’t tell us is where that strength came from. Is it something we’re born with? Is it something we learn? How do we find and foster our own strength? These are questions that social researchers have been asking.

Strength is basically the capacity to cope with hard times. Known as “resilience” in psychological terms, it’s considered an important field of study. 
If researchers can help vulnerable people learn to be more resilient, it benefits the entire community as a type of shield against social problems such as crime, substance abuse, violence and suicide.

The problem with strength is it’s very subjective: each person experiences it differently. It’s an elusive characteristic. You can watch someone go through a difficult series of events, but only they are able to know exactly where their strength lies. Strength is invisible to the naked eye, felt only on an individual, emotional level almost beyond words.

The good news is researchers have identified some key aspects of strength and have acknowledged that you can learn to be strong from the ground up, whatever your circumstances.

POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH

There are few greater shocks than getting hit by a car. Everything in your life could be progressing as planned, and then a car comes out from nowhere and hits you 
so fast that you don’t feel anything except the fleeting sense that your life is now changed for ever.

Dr Louise Harms, a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Melbourne, studied how people developed strength and resilience after serious car accidents. “They all had long-term damage to both their bodies and their worlds,” she says. “I wanted to see how people recover emotionally and what helps them to do that. With car accidents, people often focus on the broken bones but not on the other ways in which their life is broken.”

Dr Harms discovered that the road to emotional recovery was difficult for most of them. “If people are expected to be getting on with things, it can be very isolating. People need to grieve and to work out what’s happened before they can grow from the experience,” she says. “There’s been a loss of some kind – a job, a relationship or a part of themselves. They have to let go of the old idea about what they were going to do with their life and start again with a new plan. That takes time. They also need support to allow growth to happen.”

Dr Harms also found that surviving an accident had given some of them new insight: “Most of the people in the study experienced post-traumatic growth. They appreciate life; it’s clearer to them what is important in their life. They gain a sense of self from the accident as well as a sense of loss. They don’t want the trauma to have happened, but given that it has happened, they try to find positive things that have come from it.”

Another finding that emerged from 
Dr Harms’ research was “survivor pride”. “It was a big theme,” she says. “What helped people get through was a sense that they had survived, and they had been the only one to go through that. Their experience was unique and they coped with it, and they felt a sense of pride from that.”

STRENGTH: THE SEVEN TRAITS

If you’ve experienced setbacks or failures in your life, it doesn’t mean you’re inevitably going to crash and burn. Even if you had a traumatic childhood, you can still overcome it, as psychologist Emmy Werner’s seminal work on resilience suggested.

Werner conducted a 30-year study of the children born in 1955 on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. The children grew up in very poor households where unemployment, alcoholism and abuse were part of life. While two-thirds of the group exhibited self-destructive behaviours during their teenage years, by the time they were 30 years old the vast majority had become responsible adults with stable jobs and families.

Werner studied the traits of the children who grew up to lead stable lives. “The individuals in our study who overcame the odds and grew into competent and caring adults had a special need for detachment. In some ways, they had learned to keep the memories of their childhood adversities at bay by being in the world but not of it. When they told their life stories, however, it was usually without rancour, but with a sense of compassion and, above all, with optimism and hopefulness,” she wrote.

In their book The Resilient Self, Steven and Sybil Wolin identify seven key traits of strength and resilience. The first trait is insight, which means asking yourself questions and challenging your assumptions about adversity. The second is independence, which means creating as much distance as you can between yourself and trauma. The third is relationships and having supportive people you can talk to. Then there’s initiative, or being able to take control of problems. Creativity is also important. So is the ability to laugh. Finally, they list morality as the seventh trait of resilience, which means developing your conscience and spirituality and having compassion for others.

They write, “The inner life of the typical survivor is a battleground where the forces of discouragement and the forces of determination constantly clash. For many, determination wins out.”

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

As the Wolins see it, the problem for some people is they get stuck in a victim/blame mentality when things go wrong; they feel that life has dealt them a bad hand and, instead of trying to overcome that, they become bitter about it. It’s natural to have thoughts that life is unfair, that you didn’t deserve this trouble or that problem, however, it’s important to move past such thoughts. The Wolins say we need to acknowledge that the trauma has left 
its mark; we can’t change it but we can learn from it.

At 33, Stuart Taylor had it made with his well-paid corporate job and luxurious lifestyle. Then he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was devastated, but he found the diagnosis also allowed him to look at life in a completely new light: “It started me on a spiritual journey that had been totally absent before. Part of that was keeping things in perspective about what’s really important in life rather than just driving for a particular career result. Suddenly I started seeing the bigger picture.”

Taylor survived the cancer and quit his job. He discovered the Resilience Institute in New Zealand and decided to set up a branch in Australia. He now works as a consultant, teaching organisations and individuals how to be more resilient. “Adversity is one of our best teachers, there’s no doubt about that,” he says. “We don’t come pre-assembled – we get assembled by life.”

One of the most powerful outcomes of trauma is how it can allow us to grow as individuals. Writing in Psychiatric Times, researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun noted that after people experienced trauma, most reported changes such as “improved relationships, new possibilities for one’s life, a greater appreciation for life, a greater sense of personal strength and spiritual development”. “There appears to be a basic paradox of survivors…their losses have provided valuable gains,” they added.

In Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses, an old woman tells a young cowboy, “Those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart, but it is just that misfortune which is their gift.”

Hard times can potentially be a great teacher. When you’re in the midst of adversity it can be difficult to see any beauty. It can be difficult to see through the fog and identify what there is to learn. However, as time passes, you realise that the event has changed you at the deepest level because you’ve had to learn through experience. That kind of learning is unforgettable. You might not remember something you’ve been told by a friend or read in a book, but once you’ve been through something yourself, it becomes part of you, and you know it intimately.

Of course, you don’t have to go through bad times in order to learn; nor does adversity automatically teach. Strength isn’t born of trauma itself; it comes from the struggle, from learning to cope. We are all potentially strong because we all have the capacity to cope with trauma by choosing how we deal with it; by choosing the extent to which we let life’s setbacks damage our spirit and whether or not we carry on with a sense of hope.

Reed-Gilbert says: “All of us have strength; some people just don’t realise it. People need to listen to their inner self 
– that’s where your strength comes from.”