There is something deeply unfair about coping well.
It sounds absurd to complain about. After all, resilience is one of the qualities we spend our lives trying to build. We admire people who keep going. We celebrate the friend who carries on working through heartbreak, the parent who somehow manages everything, the colleague who never seems to buckle under pressure and never takes a ‘sick day’ (we need to be calling those ‘wellbeing days’, by the way).
But resilience comes with a fairly shitty pay off.
The better you become at juggling difficult circumstances and coping with adversity, the less other people notice that you’re carrying them at all. Consequently, not only do you not get any credit for all the stuff you’re dealing with, you stop getting the social support.
I’ve thought about this a lot recently. Most people who know me would probably describe me as very resilient. I’ve dealt with a fair amount over the years. Professionally, personally, legally, health-wise, financially, emotionally. I’ve had periods where several of those things arrived at once. I generally keep functioning. I go to work. I see clients. I record podcasts. I answer emails. I still make stupid jokes. I’m not going for a ‘woe is me’ thing here, or asking for anything - it’s just easier to make a point when I use my own experience. Plus, if any of you rascals reach out to ask me if I’m OK now - it’s TOO LATE ;-)
From the outside, it might looks as though I’m doing OK. In reality, there have been days where I’ve been in enormous pain. Those two things can exist together far more routinely than we imagine.
Psychologists have spent decades looking at resilience. Despite some decent research, we’ve become rather fond of treating it as a personality trait, as though some people are simply born with more of it. The research offers more nuance. Resilience is better understood as adaptation. It is the ability to keep functioning despite adversity.
Notice the definition. Functioning. It says remarkably little about suffering.
Someone can continue functioning while experiencing profound grief, anxiety, or emotional exhaustion. They can still turn up and smile and be competent. Their nervous system doesn’t send out an alert to people, declaring what is happening internally. Human beings are rather bad at judging distress unless it is made visible. I’ve thought a lot about this. My mum has suffered enormously in her life - an abusive marriage, cancer, lymphedema (a rare and often debilitating condition causing severe swelling and pain), another series of medical problems, poverty (not to mention the poor lass has had to deal with raising me!)… but you’d never know any of it. She just has a heroic (look at me - valourising coping again) ability to ‘get on with it’. I have so often thought - how does she do it? Surely she may as well moan and complain and scream about it all because then she’d get the recognition… and support?
Social psychologists have long recognised that we rely heavily on observable behaviour when making judgements about other people. If someone appears composed, we often infer that they feel composed. If someone is laughing, we assume they’re happy. If someone keeps showing up and performing well, we conclude that whatever they’re dealing with can’t be affecting them all that much.
We mistake competence and performance for internal experience.
Erving Goffman (I know I’m a broken record with that guy) wrote that much of social life resembles a performance. We present versions of ourselves that allow interaction to continue smoothly. Usually that’s a perfectly healthy thing to do. Nobody wants the cashier at the supermarket collapsing into an existential crisis halfway through scanning your shopping (I kinda do - could do with the clients tbh).
The difficulty comes when the performance becomes so convincing that everybody, including the audience, forgets there is anything happening backstage.
And, there’s another psychological principle that sits behind all this. People tend to respond to perceived need rather than actual need. If one friend is crying every day after a breakup while another casually gets on with life after losing a parent, most of us instinctively direct our support towards the person displaying the greater distress. We aren’t necessarily being unkind. We’re responding to the information available to us. In this way, visibility shapes compassion. But pain and visibility are only loosely correlated. Some people externalise distress. Others internalise it. Neither response tells you very much about the intensity of what they’re experiencing.
There is another irony here - the people who cope well often become the people everyone else leans on. It makes perfect sense. They’re dependable. Calm. They give good advice. They answer the phone. They seem emotionally solid. Over time, an identity develops around that competence. They become “the resilient one”.
Identity has a pretty mischievous habit of trapping us inside the expectations attached to it. Once other people decide that you’re the strong one, they unconsciously stop checking whether you still need someone to be strong for you.
Psychologists sometimes talk about role entrapment. We begin occupying social roles that become increasingly difficult to leave. The funny friend always has to be funny. The responsible sibling always has to be responsible. The therapist always has to have it together. Eventually, asking for help can start to feel like breaking character.
I wonder how many resilient people spend years wishing someone would simply ask, “How are you really doing? You never seem to buckle under pressure or challenge - but how is that? You seem to cope so well - does anyone recognise it?”.
There is another reason this happens - people like predictability. When somebody has always coped well, our brains assume they always will. Previous resilience becomes evidence for future resilience. We underestimate how cumulative stress works. We overlook the fact that every person has a threshold. Nobody has infinite psychological bandwidth.
Perhaps this is why so many people describe finally ‘breaking down’ over something completely trivial. ‘The final straw’ etc. The tears flood after a dropped coffee or a missing parcel or an email written in the wrong tone. Everyone around them thinks the reaction is ridiculous, but of course it’s just the last domino to fall.
Obviously, I don’t think the solution is to start performing distress more convincingly in order to receive compassion, but I do think we could become much better at separating visible distress from actual suffering.
When somebody in your life seems to be managing a shit ton of stuff, it might be worth remembering that you’re observing behaviour, not experience. Competence tells you almost nothing about the weight on someone’s shoulders. So - check in with them. ‘I’ve noticed you’re dealing with so much, and appear to be managing it all so well, but how’s that going internally? How are you experiencing it all?’.
The paradox of coping well is that the better you become at surviving difficult periods, the easier it is for everyone else to believe there isn’t a difficult period at all. Sometimes the ‘strongest person’ in the room is simply the person who has become very good at making sure nobody else notices they’re struggling. It’s for the rest of us to provide the space for them to reveal the internal battle, if there is one.
