ABSTRACT
Psychological resilience, the capacity for self-stabilization, is essential in adaptively responding to the violent death of a loved one. It has been widely assumed in the bereavement literature that relatively mild or minimal reactions to loss are rare and usually indicative of either the lack of a meaningful relationship with the person who had died or a sort of pathological inability to grieve. One of the misconceptions about resilience that has plagued research and theory in studies of both children and adults is the idea that resilience is more or less found exclusively within the person. C. B. Wortman and D. R. Silver were among the first to note the somewhat startling fact that there was no empirical basis for the assumption that the absence of distress during bereavement is necessarily pathological. The heterogeneity of resilience is illustrated by a subset of the bereaved participants from the Changing Lives of Older Couples study.
