- and what they can teach us about societal resilience
Goats are considered stubborn. They stop when you try to pull them. They refuse to cooperate just because it’s expected of them. What is quickly dismissed in everyday life as being “difficult” or “moody” has, in other contexts, a very real value: goats are highly sensitive to changes in their environment. Researchers tracking goats on Mount Etna found they became restless hours before larger eruptions.
What if we applied this perspective to people, families, and societies?
Resilience Psychology: Strength or Silent Endurance?
Resilience describes the ability to cope with psychological and physical stress without becoming permanently ill. It includes adaptability, self-regulation, regeneration, and the capacity to reorient oneself after strain. Promoting resilience is sensible, necessary, and healthy.
Problems arise when resilience is reduced to the ability to endure everything. When it becomes a silent mandate to pull yourself together, keep functioning, and carry on - regardless of how unfavorable, overwhelming, or unjust the conditions are.
Adaptation is often the easier option in the short term. It conserves energy, avoids conflict, and secures belonging. In the long run, however, this very adaptation can become costly
- psychologically, physically, and socially.
Those who continuously adjust to circumstances that are harmful often pay the price with depression, burnout, anxiety disorders, or psychosomatic symptoms.
At that point, resilience no longer functions as a protective resource but turns into an imperative to adapt.
Sensitivity: An Evolutionary Gift or an Individual Risk?
Psychological research shows that people with pronounced sensitivity to injustice have a higher risk of burnout.
This correlation is often individualized - interpreted as poor boundaries, insufficient toughness, or a lack of resilience. But it can also be read differently: as an indicator that some people perceive tensions, contradictions, and systemic dysfunctions earlier than others.
Not every depression is an individual problem. Burnout is not a personal failure. Some symptoms are expressions of systems that have become dysfunctional in certain places.
The Black Sheep and the Family Scapegoat: The Identified Patient of a System
In psychology, particularly in systemic therapy, so-called “black sheep” are often described as identified patients. This does not refer to the weakest or most deficient person, but to the one who carries the most symptoms - visibly, audibly, as something that can no longer be compensated.
The English word for this role is even older than psychology: scapegoat. It goes back to an ancient ritual described in the Book of Leviticus. On the Day of Atonement, the sins of the whole community were symbolically laid on a goat, which was then sent out into the wilderness. The people stayed behind - unburdened, ready for a fresh start.
(The word itself was coined by William Tyndale in 1530: the goat that “escapes.”)
The family scapegoat of today has it harder. The goat of old was sent away once, and that was the end of it. The modern scapegoat often stays - and keeps being blamed: for the tension, the conflicts, the mood at the dinner table. Sent away again and again, and kicked while already down.
In many families, the scapegoat has a counterpart: the golden child, who can do no wrong.
Both roles say more about the family than about the person carrying them.
Identified patients express what has not been sufficiently processed, named, or regulated within the system as a whole. They often carry a heavy transgenerational burden: unresolved trauma, rigid norms, loyalty conflicts, as well as themes of guilt and shame passed down across generations.
Notably, these are often the very people - the children, teenagers, aunts, or uncles who provide the neighborhood with the most gossip - who show the strongest resistance to rigid structures. They stop adapting, rebel, and are labeled “difficult,” “problematic,” or “conspicuous.”
From a psychological perspective, this behavior is less an expression of individual pathology and more a final attempt by an overloaded system to regulate itself.
Transgenerational Adaptation - A Look at Nature and Biology
Transgenerational adaptation is not uniquely human. Plants and animals exhibit similar mechanisms.
Studies suggest that trees which experience extreme drought alter the growth of their offspring. Saplings grow more slowly, remain smaller, and invest more in survival than in growth. From an epigenetic perspective, this is highly functional: it increases the likelihood of survival under harsh conditions.
Some bird populations avoid areas where they were once hunted - sometimes for generations.
In the short term, this is profoundly resilience-promoting - not getting shot is a clear advantage.
If this strategy remains unexamined, however, it becomes resilience-threatening in the long run: unnecessary energy expenditure weakens the system.
Humans adopt similar strategies. After war experiences - whether consciously passed along through stories or unconsciously through lived models - inner guidelines often emerge, such as:
Better to endure than to lose.
Better to stay than to be alone.
Safety above all else.
These strategies are highly functional in situations of existential threat. Viewed through the lens of joy, relationships, and mental health, however, they are often deeply problematic.
Joy - An Underestimated Resource for Resilience
From a neurological standpoint, the brain is not neutral. Stimuli that trigger fear are systematically prioritized over those that generate joy. Evolutionarily, this makes sense: better to run away once too often from a rustling bush than once too late from a saber-toothed tiger. Threat took precedence - joy did not.
This negativity bias is deeply embedded in the limbic system. Fear activates faster, stronger, and more persistently than positive emotions. Joy, by contrast, requires attention, repetition, and conscious cultivation to become neurologically effective.
This bias is mirrored socially. Fear, anger, and grief are considered “serious” emotions. Joy, on the other hand, is often framed as a luxury. From a psychoneuroimmunological perspective, this is a dangerous oversimplification.
Research links joy and other positive emotions to:
better immune function (Pressman & Cohen, 2005)
faster recovery after stress
more flexible thinking and behavior
Positive emotions broaden the nervous system’s range of action and stabilize stress regulation
- what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls the “broaden-and-build” effect. Joy is therefore not a reward after successful resilience - it is an active component of it.
After generations of burden, joy often feels unfamiliar or even threatening. Many people know the experience of becoming restless when things finally relax, or quickly sabotaging moments of happiness. The nervous system has learned to expect danger - not ease.
Joy is not a luxury. It is a biological protective factor - and a resource that requires conscious practice.
What the Crayfish Knows Before the Carp
Crayfish react sensitively to water pollution and disappear early when ecosystems deteriorate. Carp, by contrast, can survive in murky, oxygen-poor water.
The carp is not the “better” fish. The crayfish signals a problem - earlier, more clearly, and more uncomfortably – for everyone, including the carp.
Applied to societies, this means: those who suffer first are not automatically the weakest. Often, they are the most sensitive measuring instruments for structural dysfunctions.
The Function of the “Disturbing” Ones
People who are homeless, addicted, mentally ill, or chronically exhausted are often perceived as disruptive. They interrupt routines, do not fit the picture, and make visible what many would rather not see.
From a sociological perspective, they function as markers of societal fractures: poverty, exclusion, performance pressure, inadequate care, and social coldness. Psychologically, they often carry the burden of what is not collectively regulated.
Societies tend to individualize these symptoms instead of questioning - and changing - the conditions under which they systematically arise and persist.
Resilience Is a Process - Not a State
Resilience is not something you achieve once and then possess. It is a dynamic process that needs regular reassessment.
A central question is: Does this behavior still help me today - or does it mainly “protect” me from change?
Is “putting on a brave face” truly resilience-promoting right now? Or would it be healthier in the long run to invest more energy in the short term - to change habits, roles, and structures?
Sometimes rebellion is more exhausting than adaptation. But it can be the beginning of a system that is actually worth adapting to.
Societal Resilience - An Invitation
Individual resilience is necessary to survive situations that cannot be changed. Societal resilience emerges where warning signals are taken seriously - where identified patients are heard, symptoms are understood as messages, and structures are examined.
Not every “difficult” person is a stubborn goat. Some are warning us - sometimes clumsily, often inconveniently, but in a deeply protective function.
Practical Take-Away Questions
You might want to ask yourself - honestly, and without self-optimization pressure:
Where am I still enduring something today that once helped me but now costs more energy than it gives?
Which adaptations protect me - and which ones keep an unhealthy system running?
Where in my life would a small, conscious act of resistance be healthier than continued functioning?
Resilience does not mean enduring everything. Resilience also means knowing when to stop.
And sometimes collective change begins exactly where someone says: This far - and no further.
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And if you recognize yourself in the role of the black sheep: that’s what therapy or mental support is for.
Elena Tinkloh (aka Tink) is a licensed psychotherapist in Germany, specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy, and works with people on the patterns families and systems pass down.
