Resilience

Resilience is a concept that I found to be interesting while reading chapter 13. According to the book, resilience is the capacity to adapt well to significant adversity and to overcome serious stress. So I wonder how one becomes resilient? Is resilience a genetic benefit that certain people enjoy, or is resilience something that is learned over time? It would be interesting to learn more about resiliency and whether or not someone is equipped with a type of "resilience gene" or not. I'm sure that it has quite a bit to do with genetics; different people are just born with different characteristics. I find resilience to be so interesting because it seems like something that is so difficult to measure. If two children both lost their parents in a car accident, and one handles it better than the other, does this mean that the child who handles it better is more resilient? Perhaps it simply means that they were not as close to their parents as the other child was. Perhaps it means that they have a stronger support system around them to help them cope with the loss of their parents. While I don't doubt that certain children are more resilient than others (in fact, I know this to be the case), I wonder how well resiliency can be measured on a case by case basis.