313. The Resilience Myth

Soraya Chemaly heard her entire life that being resilient is a positive trait. But lately, she’s been questioning the toll resiliency actually takes on us.

Soraya Chemaly is the author of The Resilience Myth: New thinking on grit, strength, and growth after trauma. You can hear more about her thoughts on resilience in her episode of Terrible, Thanks For Asking. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Soraya Chemaly: What is resilience anyway? This was the question I asked myself one day in the summer of 2019 while waiting for my father and my husband to both come out of respective surgeries, 500 miles and an ocean apart. At the time, I had three teenagers, a stressful job, and for good measure, a hurricane, Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful ever recorded, was headed toward my home country, the Bahamas.

where my parents and siblings and their families lived. No matter where I turned, there was heightened uncertainty. I sat waiting, feeling exhausted, scared, depleted by worry, sleeplessness, and stress. What’s wrong with me, I thought. Where’s my fortitude and grit, my optimism? How, I wondered, could I do better?

I had bought hook, line, and sinker, our culture’s most central resilience myth, that adapting to hardship was all on me as an individual. In this narrative, our ability to cope and adapt positively to stress and hardship is understood almost entirely as an internal quality, a personal trait, or a mindset skill that with hard work and discipline anyone can cultivate.

Resilience in this mode means being mentally tough and self sufficient, upbeat, positive, and grateful. It means not having need, not wanting, and not expecting care. from anyone or from society. And yet, as I sat waiting that day, I realized that this claim flew in the face of what I had learned as a journalist, a researcher, an activist, and throughout my own life experience.

We have a script for resilience, and it looks like this. A person’s life is normal, then a terrible event happens, causing that person’s sadness, grief, and pain. After a period of shock, however, That person adopts a positive outlook, overcomes fear, and is grateful for whatever good fortune they enjoy. They persist.

This person is usually depicted as gritty and optimistic, willing to turn obstacles into challenges. They don’t complain when doing the hard work necessary to roll with the punches, stay busy and productive, and get back to normal as quickly as possible. Often portrayed as exceptional or Illustrated by celebrity, the script provides role models who overcame tragedy to be happy and prosperous.

Think Oprah, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga. It’s bootstrapping tale that has less to do with resilience than it does with maintaining a certain worldview and a status quo. In our culture, dependence and interdependence are often portrayed as weaknesses and failures. But we humans evolved to be interdependent. to work collectively, not competitively.

In quote unquote normal times, it’s easy to feel, however, that independence is the rule, that self sufficiency is the metric that matters most, and that independence and self sufficiency, their achievement, is a personal one. It isn’t always clear that we’re always connected to each other in invisible, dependent, and incontrovertible and consequential ways.

Take, for example, how obvious our entwinements became as COVID 19 reshaped every aspect of our lives. My health and your health affect the health and well being of the people around us. We aren’t sharing environments. We are each other’s environments. The pandemic also revealed how adversity, grief, excuse me.

The pandemic also revealed how adversity, grief, trauma, and resilience are shaped by our identities, status, social norms, and political decisions. By our relationships to people we haven’t even met and will never know. The sacrifices of essential workers made it possible for others to adapt more safely, made the resilience of millions, many of whom would claim invulnerability and individual strength, even possible at all.

Our carers, parents, teachers, health care workers, most of whom are still women, are unacknowledged resilience resources for each of us as individuals, for the economy. as paid and unpaid workers, and for our society broadly. They do the undervalued and unappreciated work of nurturing, tending, and healing, of building identities and buffering their loved ones and charges from the worst blows of life.

When they themselves have enough care and support, they can do this over time. Working through duration and even generations to create the kind of safety and sustenance required for individuals to begin to develop habits of mind that give them a resilience advantage. Even one caring person in a child’s life, for example, makes it possible for that child to transcend a childhood of adversity.

And yet, We don’t consider care or carers an essential part of our achieving positive outcomes over our lifetimes in terms of resilience. The four key components of resilience that we rarely hear about are belonging, meaning making, social trust, and connections. Connections to our own selves, to other people, and to our social, political, and physical environments.

All of these are facilitated by kin building and caring. These communal attributes help us as individuals to be open to change, to develop cognitive flexibility, to take risks, and to retain, through it all, a sense of continuity, safety, and well being, no matter what may come. Resilience is a complex relational process that emerges from our interdependence.

Thank you. Sorry. Resilience is a complex relational process that emerges not from our independence from each other, but from our deep interdependence. Its opposite isn’t vulnerability or weakness, but loneliness and distrust. We take turns being resilient for each other.