As author of this book, I relied on the research findings of Dr. Emmy Werner, called "the grandmother of resiliency."  She is the co-researcher on the Kauai study, the seminal resiliency research conducted for several decades on the island of Kauai.  Her best book about this research is "Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood."  Dr. Werner states that everyone is born with "an innate self-righting tendency."  That is what I meant when I said in this book, "You were born resilient."  Every person alive *has overcome something.*  Certainly, this capacity can get overwhelmed by heaps of adversity, and we know the stronger the protective factors, the stronger the resiliency, but the capacity is in everyone.  If, as one person above argues, resiliency is like a muscle, then it exists and gets stronger depending on many factors.

I certainly understand the concern that glibly stating "everyone is resilient" can be used as an excuse to ignore or underestimate ACEs, or to underfund protective factor rich programs.  The metaphor I use in my training is that resiliency is in all a small pilot light, that can burn brightly (depending on the protective/resiliency building factors in someone's life) or can dim to near extinction.  But the flicker of the capacity is in all.

(I write this as someone with an ACEs score of 9 in my personal life.)

Thank all of the above for your interest in my book.