The resilience paradox

WHO IS THE RESILIENT ONE HERE?

Resilience is, broadly speaking, about how we deal with adversity. Most of us probably have a gut-level sense of what resilience looks like or feels like. But when we try to pin it down, we might find it’s more slippery than we thought.

When we think of resilience, we might think of extraordinary feats of endurance by athletes, explorers or warriors throughout history.

Or we might think of the everyday work of humble and unflappable members of generations gone by - the immigrants, farmers, freed slaves, pioneers and soldiers, stiff-upper-lipping it through circumstances that would make us choke into our lattes.

But those stiff upper lips hid a lot of pain and sadness, and sometimes cruelty as well.

And if you’ve ever been the object of a parent or a partner’s need to vent their frustration or their terror, then the call to suck it up and “be more resilient” can feel like a whole lot of hypocrisy.

How dare you deny me an outlet to let off steam, when I am that outlet for you?

So, in the wake of all that wisdom and all that trauma, all mixed together, and with the benefit of time not spent dodging bullets or fording rivers, we can now talk about resilience as emotional maturity.

We can talk about strategies for managing our feelings instead of squashing them. We can talk about ways of becoming more aware, more mindful, better able to respond to the pain of others and to our own pain.

And all of those are good things, but sometimes it feels like we’ve boomeranged too far in the other direction.

When we get wrapped up in diagnosing and correcting every little hurt, meditating on every possible source of pain in our lives, we reinforce trauma instead of moving through it. And so we might very much benefit from a healthy dose of that unflappable perspective.

But is it an either/or?

What is the relationship between empathy, perspective and resilience?

This question has been hard at work in my life over the last year. I've been writing around it for a long minute, so stay tuned for my answer... and in the meantime, let me know what you think in the comments!