Resilience is a person’s ability to recover from the psychological assaults that comprise a workplace bullying campaign against them. It’s an admirable trait. And it’s a herculean task to recover.

Because we all have different coping mechanisms to deal with distress, some people will be more effective at rebuffing assaults (rendering them bullying-resistant), others will be wounded but only until they learn what happened to them and mobilize others to help with a counter-attack, and sadly others will remain wounded for months or years.

Taking this notion of individual differences into account, I want to warn against outsiders demanding that bullied targets “be resilient.” Resilience can be weaponized. If the target’s coping is overwhelmed, they are traumatized. Trauma is not based on an invitation to be harmed or a weakness or willfulness. Victim blamers use resilience to goad a person to recover quickly without knowing the extent of the emotional wound inflicted.

Employers and unknowing families condemn targets for not recovering from trauma fast enough. “When are you going to get over this?” they ask, suggesting that they are tired of waiting for your resilience to kick in. But the nature of trauma is clear — its onset is delayed and it last long past the removal of the source of the original distress.

The time to “recover” varies by person, if, in fact, recovery is possible. Once traumatized, people are subject to re-traumatization. Better that we adopt the 12-step notion of “recovering” as a life-long process rather than a final absolute outcome. It’s more forgiving to the person healing.

So, resilience is good if it happens and useless as a concept if it does not. And resilience implies a restoral of past normalcy, another goal that can cause much despair when it doesn’t result. Recovering bullied targets know too well that their post-bullying selves often turn out to be much different, often better, than their pre-bullying selves.

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For individuals bullied at work, learn the predictable stages of the workplace bullying experience.

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