Unquestioningly striving to adapt to harmful circumstances may be self-harm

0
206

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary resilience comes from the Latin “resileins” and “resilire”. Derived from “re” meaning “back” and “salire” meaning “to jump or leap”.

Together, the act of “springing back”.

In this short piece, I’ll suggest that resilience is an unethical ideal. I’ll do this by outlining a few of the key assumptions underpinning resilience stories, followed by my own critique. 

To be clear, my intention here is not to undermine the ongoing resistance of mad and marginalised folks in surviving difficult experiences. Instead, it’s to problematise the way the imperative to be “resilient” is often used against us. 

If I’m right about this, resilience is an unethical ideal.

What resilience assumes

Common conceptions of resilience circulated by the mental health industrial complex tend to carry a number of assumptions. 

First, that resilience is a good thing. Something we should all desire, strive for, and actively direct our energy towards. 

Second, that resilience is achievable through hard work. That is, if we can just cultivate an awareness of our vulnerabilities and keep learning strategies to overcome them then we’ll experience wellbeing, no matter our circumstances. 

Third, we should try to avoid being changed by difficult experiences, unless that change is in a “positive” direction. By returning to our “usual self” after a tough time, we’re demonstrating our grit in the face of adversity. This, it seems, is something we should all aspire to. 

Now that I’ve outlined some of the main assumptions underpinning resilience as I understand them, I’ll go on to challenge these assumptions. 

The problem of resilience 

Starting with the notion that resilience is a good thing. Here, the idea of resilience takes the character of an ethical ideal. That is, something we should value and pursue, no matter how demanding it might be. Not only does this assume that we all value wellbeing, it also imagines that our environments are universally good for us. However, for many oppressed folks, our social worlds are often a source of harm. As such, unquestioningly striving to adapt to harmful circumstances may be experienced as a form of moral injury, self-sacrifice, or self-harm. 

For example, is it really best for me to try to adapt to my environment by becoming more sanist, racist, ableist, or transphobic…? After all, masking my difference and “adapting” to the oppressive world I’m supposed to fit releases me from the so-called “rigidity” that narratives of resilience pick out as problematic. 

Regrettably, when resilience functions as an ethical ideal, it invites us to ignore how power constructs social hierarchies in our environments. Taking this into account, refusal to adapt can become a generative act of self-preservation; allowing us to actively construct the kinds of worlds we want to live in. This, I think, is one of the advantages of refusing resilience.    

Next, is the idea that resilience is achievable through hard work. Or, to use the construction metaphors of the American Psychological Association, resilience is something we can “build”. And we can do this, we are told, by practicing self-care, connecting with others, staying hopeful, and moving towards our goals. Well, if it’s that easy, what are we waiting for? 

Forgive the sarcasm here but even if we accepted that “working on ourselves” was something worth pursuing, the idea that we all have equal access to the resources required to do so does not cohere with my own lived experience. 

We live at a time where many folks, especially multiply marginalised peoples, encounter everyday life as a struggle. People are living with everyday racism, family violence, experiences of being unhoused, extreme financial hardship, and ongoing threats of psychiatric incarceration (just to name a few). 

No amount of positive thinking or resilience building is going to change the material conditions and social inequities people are facing today. For this reason, rejecting resilience as a personal responsibility amounts to a call for structural care and recognises that we are always already doing our best to survive precarious circumstances. 

Lastly, resilience implies we ought to remain unchanged by difficult experiences, unless that change is in a “positive” direction. Setting aside philosophical questions about the persistence of personal identity across time, I wonder who benefits when we strive to “bounce back”?

Perhaps, one of the most pernicious aspects of resilience is that it insists that we forget. For those of us who have been told to “get over it” or “move on”, this imperative to forget appears as a familiar tactic of power and control. 

By minimising and dismissing the disorienting effects of difficult life experiences on our sense of self and our relation to the world, we are effectively turning away from pain and insisting that the only acceptable story of hardship is one that makes us feel good. 

This fetishises resilience and licences those of us who bear witness to other people’s oppression to refuse discomfort, deny accountability, and take pleasure in survival stories. As such, a refusal to be changed by our own difficulties or the experiences of others, is particularly beneficial for privileged folks.

If this is right, by maintaining our attachment to the promise of wellbeing in contexts of oppression, resilience appears as an unethical ideal. 

Post-resilience  

So, what can we do post-resilience?   

Consistent with my own ethical orientation, creating post-resilient worlds will mean different things for different people in different contexts. 

For me, one possible way forward emerges from a re-reading of the etymology of resilience.   For example, rather than retaining resilience as “resalire”, we could drop the “re” and retain the “salire”. 

What I mean by this is that instead of insisting on “springing back” (resalire) to some impossible imagined self that is prior to or separable from our experiences, we might embrace the notion of the “leap” (salire) by itself. Here, “to leap” means to run the risk of refusing resilience and investing in an ethics of mad living instead. 

My particular approach to mad living involves failing to be a “good resilient subject” and trying to figure out how to live otherwise – with no guarantee of success. In this way, refusing resilience creates the possibility of a mad life worth living.

LEAVE A REPLY