By Hendrika de Vries
Resilience, that quiet yet unyielding thread woven through human existence, often reveals itself most fully in times of upheaval. It is a quality that transforms hardship into growth, allowing us to rise each time we are knocked down by circumstances beyond our control. In my own life and in the lives of those I have known, resilience has not been a static trait, but a dynamic process—nurtured by imagination, determination, hope and the support of those around us.
The Hidden Power of Darkness
Reflecting on my personal history I am struck by how resilience often flourishes in darkness, drawing its energy from the smallest sparks: a parent’s imagination or courage, a moment of mastery, or the flash of hope or spiritual insight that dares to envision a better tomorrow. It is the alchemy that turns despair into determination and possibility.
My own story is a testament to the profound power of resilience. As a traumatized little girl who suffered brutality and deprivation in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, as a displaced teenage immigrant who jumped into the swimming pool time and again for strength, identity, and a sense of belonging in post-war Australia, and as a family therapist in the U.S. for over thirty years, I witnessed firsthand how sparks of resilience shape healing and foster transformation in the most challenging times.
A skill that can be learned and developed
Psychology defines resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences. In my work as a therapist, I certainly saw that clients with a higher degree of resilience recovered and adapted more quickly when confronted with the consequences of natural disasters, deaths of loved ones, disabling medical diagnoses or other catastrophic events.
While resilience depends on many factors such as reframing challenges as opportunities, imagination, maintaining hope and a positive outlook, setting intentional goals, physical activity, nurturing supportive relationships, spiritual practices and coping strategies among others; the core of resilience lies in the belief that we can learn and develop this skill.
Imagination
I learned early in my life that the power of imagination, the capacity to envision positive outcomes, plays a pivotal role. As if preparing us for life’s inevitable challenges, thinking outside of the box comes naturally to little children.
In my new memoir ‘Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian’, I tell the story of eight-year-old Mike, a young survivor of the dreaded polio that swept the world in the 1950s. Mike, whose legs were paralyzed by the disease, was part of an experimental aquatic treatment in Australia. It involved taking young survivors of polio into the swimming pool in the hope that exercise in the water might restore some mobility and help them regain strength and confidence.
I had been assigned to assist Mike in a saltwater pool, where he immediately responded with helpless anger at the inability to feel his legs. But with a little nudging from his imagination, he proceeded to think of himself as a fish. After all, “fish don’t need legs,” we agreed. With my hands under his lifeless legs, propelled by his own arms and shoulders he began to feel the strength of his upper body.
In that moment he decided that he was not just any old fish, but “a shark.” His body powered by his small arms and big imagination, he swam across the pool by himself. To this day I remember the look of victory on his beautiful little face.
I was fortunate to be a child of parents who nurtured imagination. When I was 5, before my father was taken away to a POW camp in Germany, he and I had a bedtime storytelling ritual that often involved visualizing shapeshifting creatures and animals with magical powers.
His support of my imagination created a sense of unending possibilities in my young mind that sustained me during the traumatic years he was absent and helped me recognize him in the stranger he had become who returned after the war was over.
My mother’s imagination took the form of a belief in miracles and the dreams she believed to be of divine origin that helped us survive the unspeakable horrors of that dark time. Those early childhood experiences sparked the title of my first memoir ‘When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew’.
Hope and the Resilience of Immigrants
In difficult times our capacity to imagine, helps create the hope for a better life that fuels the energy for action. In the post-war years of lingering trauma, my parents’ hope for a better life for their daughters helped develop and sustain the strength they needed to leave our Dutch homeland and emigrate to an unknown country and culture on the other side of the world.
In the years immediately following WWII, many Dutch families were struggling with traumatic war memories, a sluggish economy and severe housing shortages. The Australian government needed immigrants to sustain their post-war booming economy and sent representatives to attract young families to immigrate to Australia.
Their stories of the “Land of Tomorrow,” where the sky was always blue, no-one ever went hungry, opportunities were aplenty and cute little koalas hung out in every suburban tree, stimulated a war-wearied population’s imagination and hope, and fortified the resilience they would need to navigate the challenges ahead.
Immigration lawyer Susan J. Cohen observes in her book ‘Journeys from There to Here’ that resilience is at the core of the migrant experience. And recently friends and colleagues have shared with me that revisiting their own ancestral migrant stories has strengthened their hope and resilience in dealing with the challenges we face in our Nation of Immigrants today.
Intention, Mastery and Connections
I was raised to face life like an athlete in training. It included intention, determination, commitment and discipline, and the flexibility to deal with disappointments. Both my parents were athletes. My mother was a champion speed walker as a young woman in Holland, my father a strong swimmer.
My mother believed that intentions were like prayers; you sent them out into the universe and if you paid attention they would return as destiny. The message I received was that my destiny was not a given beyond our control but depended in part on taking a role in how I wanted it shaped.
I was a strong swimmer. Swimming provided a place and time where these qualities were strengthened and led to being a state champion in Australia. In a sports-loving country, it gave me an identity as an immigrant and helped me belong. The pool was a safe place where differences melted away.
Mastering a skill aligns us with a strength or confidence that we can return to again and again for resilience, even when life threatens to trip us up. I have seen it in elder swimmers who return to the pool to deal with the challenges of life and age, in walkers taking determined strides even with canes, musician friends who find a respite in solitary moments at the piano or on the patio with a guitar.
A client faced with loss of husband and child turned to the knitting that once gave her pleasure and found purpose again. A creative friend uses her photographic skills to support an ecological movement. Our skills can be inward and quietly our own, a prayer, a meditation, a poem or a kind word or gesture, but they have the power to change destiny.
Community
While resilience is often an individual endeavor, support networks play a vital role. From community organizations, faith meetings or other supportive gatherings, to friends and therapeutic communities, our connections reinforce resilience. They remind us that we are not alone––that even in our darkest hours, we can find strength in our shared humanity and caring relationships.
I will always remember the small group of people that gathered in our home in Amsterdam during the darkest days of the Nazi-oppression. They were members of the Resistance Movement that my mother had joined.
Risking their lives in a communal fight against oppression, prejudice and brutality, they met in secret to listen to the BBC radio broadcasts by the Dutch queen exiled in London. The communal resilience and mutual respect I witnessed in their presence as a six-year-old would inspire my own strength and intentions on how to face oppression and Gestapo-like bullies later in life.
An Interconnected Universe
Resilience fundamentally relies on our ability to recognize, appreciate and find meaning in the interconnectedness we share.
My mother when asked what made her risk her life and that of her child to hide a Jewish girl in WWII, answered that she would hope someone would do the same if the situation were reversed and her own daughter’s life was threatened.
Stephen Cohen, a Rabbi and dear friend, says that for him “faith to a large extent boils down to a belief in our connectedness to each other.”
I learned from my father to view the cosmos as a grand mystery that for him both hid and revealed a purposeful, interconnected universe. When I was a teenager struggling to adapt in Australia, he took me for a walk under the stars, helped me feel connected to something greater––an ancient land and a universe alive with silent voices and hidden meanings. The experience would many years later lead me to study Indigenous rituals and the works of the Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl Jung.
Rejecting Victim Identification
Though traumatized by war and the hardships of emigration, my parents never allowed me to identify ourselves as victims. Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist who worked with survivors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have approved of their parenting. In his book ‘Surviving Our Catastrophes’, Lifton suggests that to be a survivor “one must overcome the sense of being an incapacitated victim.”
To build resilience takes discipline, imagination, hope and fortitude. It flourishes when we contemplate our interconnectedness with one another and all living things; when we allow awe and curiosity to open us up to possibilities that lie beyond our limited understanding, when we nurture imagination that envisions a tiny toy dog becoming a wolf to protect a child’s daddy or that empowers a little boy with lifeless legs to swim like a “shark” in the pool, when we foster an awareness that enables a young displaced girl to “hear” the voice of an ancient land in the deep silence of a dark night, or helps an ordinary woman in WWII Amsterdam lean into her dreams and miracles and decide she can have an impact on the evil of oppression.
Resilience shows that we can acknowledge pain and suffering without falling into the despair of helplessness or hopelessness. When we practice it, we are the same and yet different. We emerge with a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us––more aware, more compassionate, and more capable of navigating life’s inevitable challenges. We find power and purpose in difficult times.
Hendrika de Vries is a retired family therapist and teacher. She is the author of ‘When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf And The Moon Broke Curfew’, an award-winning memoir about her childhood in WWII Amsterdam, and currently ‘Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian’, a coming-of-age memoir about being a champion swimmer and immigrant in 1950s Australia. She lives in Santa Barbara, California. Find out more at www.agirlfromamsterdam.com. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter(X).
ABOUT THE BOOK: Hendrika “Henny” de Vries was just a little girl when she experienced brutal violence and hunger in WWII Amsterdam. Now a teenage immigrant swimmer in 1950s Australia, she must learn to turn challenges into success. She is smart, she swims fast, and she has definite opinions about the kind of woman she intends to be. Faced with memories, fears, fame, championship victories and dashed dreams, time and again Henny dives into the pool to find her own strength and truth — until finally, she begins to see more clearly her unique path ahead. In this moving and heartfelt memoir, de Vries expertly dissects her complex experiences and provides a much needed look into what it means to be a fiercely alive young woman in a world that requires women to minimize themselves.
