The problem with resilience
Resilience, for me, is a difficult concept to apply to trauma, stress, loss, or adversity. I don’t deny its importance—we all want to “bounce back” from our challenges—however, I do exercise caution when speaking about resilience in my work with clients. I want to invite others to think about the implications of holding up resilience as a gold standard or a goal to achieve after we go through something difficult.
This post is an invitation for you to gently consider your own ideas around resilience. It is not an attempt to dismiss the importance of resilience. There are some reflection questions at the end. My thinking here (and in other writings I have done on this topic) is the result of years of thought, research, interrogation, and unlearning on my part.
It’s OK not to feel the same as you did before your trauma.
I was glad to be a guest on the podcast Rise Resilient, hosted by Agnes Chen. You can listen to our conversation below, where we discussed how resilience can be reimagined.
Resilience as the gold standard
Resilience is often thought of as the “gold standard” for overcoming adversity. We see stories of resilience in popular media, and we love to see someone make it through challenging times and be stronger than ever. Do these stories give us the whole picture? Is resilience that simple?
In the context of trauma, hardly anything is simple. The distressing symptoms of traumatic stress are intrusive and debilitating by nature, meaning that no matter how strong we are, our attempts at living our daily lives can be severely disrupted by triggers, nightmares, severe anxiety, overwhelming shame, difficulty concentrating, pervasive exhaustion, and more. We don’t always see the side of resilience that involves coping with debilitating symptoms.
So, while a traumatized person is absolutely resilient (we aren’t called survivors for no reason), their resilience might not look like the Hollywood version. It is likely going to be punctuated by hardship, growth, change, and setbacks. Is it fair to expect resilience, the simplified version of it, when someone is coping with traumatic stress or other significant mental health challenges?
Resilience is complex
The common view is that resilience is a resource or trait that exists solely within us as individuals, a view that ignores its complexity and upholds it as a kind of panacea. In the West, we love individualism. So, traits like resilience are often thought of as coming from within the individual alone. They are talked about as if they are things we either have or don’t have, either can access or can’t access. This is simply not true, and this misconception, I believe, can have a negative impact on survivors of trauma. It sends the message that resilience is a single dimension, when in truth, it’s multifaceted and connected with other concepts.
We actually require access to some resources outside of ourselves to build resilience—resources that many of us are often isolated from due to marginalization, ongoing trauma, emotionally unstable caregivers, or unsafe living environments.
So, resilience is not just a mindset we can cultivate or build. It’s more about accessing our inner resources, and this is often done in connection with others in our community who we are in relationship with.
It’s easier to access and utilize our own resilience when we have others on our team.
Instead, let’s truly value the process of healing
We need to value healing, truly value it, within ourselves and within our relationships and within our communities. If we value healing, it means we understand that it takes time, it is complex, and it is difficult. We understand that it is a process, it is not linear, and it is often slow. We understand that it is OK to have bad days or experience setbacks while on our way to feeling better. This is the antithesis of popular resilience stories which depict resilience as something we have or do not have.
Healing as a valued process is the antithesis of popular resilience stories which depict it as something we have or something we do not have—healing is something we can all engage in, even if we are not always at our best, and there is resilience in that. Bravery, too.
We must understand that adversity cannot simply be overcome, its effects not simply willed away, the norms that perpetuate it not simply dissolved.
All of this necessitates a shifting worldview—one in which resilience will no longer be used to keep traumatic systems in place. One in which resilience can be built collectively and preemptively so that there is less need to heal. Most of all, this new worldview will not justify pain or trauma by pointing to simplified stories of resilience.
When we rethink big ideas like resilience, we can discover new pathways for understanding the complexities of being human.
Final note & reflection questions
Thank you for considering all of this with me. Resilience is, of course, a vital part of our humanity. We need to find our way back from the darkness, and there needs to be vitality, freedom, and joy after trauma. However, resilience cannot justify traumatic environments, relationships, or events. It is not the trauma itself that leads to resilience, it is the actions and processes we engage in to find our way back to ourselves. We need to build safety and dignity from the outside in, as well as the inside out, so we can experience these processes.
I invite you to try out a few journal prompts to think about your own ideas around resilience:
Has anyone ever called you resilient? Why did they call you that, and what were the circumstances? Did you believe them? Was it hard or easy to hear?
Have you ever called someone else resilient? Why do you think you chose that word to describe their experience? What did they do to make you think that about them?
Who comes to mind when you think of someone resilient? How does their story compare to your own story of resilience? What accounts for these differences?
How have you tried to take a stand against common ideas around resilience? How have you prioritized your unique healing process in the face of popular resilience narratives?
If you were to expand your idea of resilience, which concepts would you like to include? Do failure, mistakes, sadness (or other “negative” emotions), setbacks, triggers, or hard days fit into this expanded idea? How about rest, play, or leisure?
