Realism and Resilience: An Inquiry Into the Helpfulness of Adopting an Existential Outlook

The form of sense making referred to as cognitive reappraisal has been shown to support resilience. This study, however, goes beyond replacing negative thoughts with more positive ones and investigates how some people are able to make sense of life events over time that are so significant they have the potential to cast a permanently negative shadow over the way a person feels and thinks about their life as a whole. Previous research has identified the supportive role that a religious or spiritual outlook can play, but we focus on whether and how the nonreligious outlook of Existentialism could support resilience. We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews over three months with nine informants, meeting with each informant five times, and present two illustrative narrative-based examples to demonstrate how it is possible to find support in an Existential outlook. Two key findings are highlighted as helpful Existential strategies: paying attention to what the totality of our moments add up to and constructing personal identities that are informed by authentic temporalizing. We also discovered, however, that our avowedly nonreligious informants were borrowing and repurposing some notions from spirituality, demonstrating a strong need to feel that things had turned out right in the end.