Don’t Talk About Resiliency Unless You Want to Talk About Trauma

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

I’ve seen a lot of talk about the power of resiliency. It’s often discussed in a way that sounds heroic. It’s romanticized as a skill or quality that feels magical. We might imagine someone who has lost it all and then, in a moment, they find the will to move forward despite challenging circumstances.

The Problem with the Resilience Narrative

I don’t think rising out of difficulty is a bad thing. But I do think resiliency is often spoken of out of context. If fails to acknowledge the conditions that required the individual to become resilient in the first place. Being poor, not white, disabled, queer, and gender nonconforming are all identities, alone and combined, that place individuals in positions requiring them to “bounce back.” And if they don’t, they likely won’t survive.

The dictionary defined “resilience” as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change.” Adversity, in the world of marginalized individuals, is a given. Resilience almost feels like a test to prove if those who have it the hardest can rise up against all odds instead of it being a test for how the playing field is not, nor has ever been, level. It’s a Hunger Games where we root for the underdog. And who doesn’t like to root for the underdog?

The problem is that when the media praises resilience, it is often used as a success story instead of highlighting the trauma, typically generational trauma, that led a person or community to be the underdog.

A tweet by @OnaagoshinAnang that says “I no longer want to be commended on my resiliency. I want to see the systems redesigned so that there’s not a need for me to be resilient”. This tweet is on a multicolored spotted background with purple, yellow-green, black, and aqua colors.

No matter how equitable the world is, there will always be hardship. But, for now, that equity is a long ways away. So it’s important to be conscious of who we are calling resilient and why they needed to be resilient (read: the trauma they’ve been through and the ways they are re-traumatized throughout life). Resilience is often a survival mechanism. And it is a shame that someone who doesn’t win at being resilient (someone who doesn’t survive) is chalked up to not being able to handle the hardship rather than being mourned as someone society has failed.