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.