The Resilience Cure

For the past decade or so the most compelling new concept in therapy has been-- resilience. Take two people who suffer trauma. It might be traumatic abuse; it might be familial dislocation; it might be an accidental injury. 

Psychologists have discovered that some people who suffer trauma get over it without there being any therapeutic intervention. The mind, you might say, heals itself. And some people do not get over it. They require treatment, and even then….

Around ten years ago, the New York Times was pooh-poohing the concept. Parul Sehgal explained that it was just the same old same old formula for character building and dealing with adversity:

But where ‘‘resilience’’ can suggest new avenues for civic infrastructure — admitting that disaster can’t always be diverted and shifting the focus to survival strategies — it is indistinguishable from classic American bootstrap logic when it is applied to individuals, placing all the burden of success and failure on a person’s character. ‘‘It’s pretty much the same message that’s drummed into us by Aesop’s fables,Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, Christian denunciations of sloth and the 19th-­century chant invented to make children do their homework: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ ’’ the social scientist Alfie Kohn argued in an op-ed article in The Washington Post. ‘‘The more we focus on whether people have or lack persistence (or self-­discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies.’’

Sehgal wants us to question larger policies. She fails to see that the character building exercises that form part of our culture, persisted because they helped people. 

A lot of these are associated with religion, and, for scientists, we cannot allow that to go unchallenged. For Sehgal the problem is racism and if we do not cure racism we will be wasting our time.

But then the problem might be more obvious. Perhaps the basis for resilience is social cohesion, the sense that one belongs to a coherent and functioning social group. Also a group which provides a sense of pride in participating in the group’s achievements.

Thus, it is not the racism, or the bad thoughts that are the problem. The problem is multicultural communities, communities where people do not and cannot get along, where they do not feel like they belong.

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam studied social interactions in multicultural communities and discovered that people within them tended to hunker down. They did not even bother to try to get along with each other.

Similarly with trauma. The psychological pain of trauma is sociological. Trauma makes you feel ostracized, like a pariah. 

We can hypothesize thusly. If you belong to a coherent and cohesive community, trauma will feel like an aberration, something to process and discard. That is to say, if you belong to such a community you will have more resilience. 

If you do not belong to a cohesive community, if you are living in a multicultural hodge podge, you will feel that the trauma is exposing your truth. Try forgetting it then. Under those circumstances you will lack resilience because you lack social support.

This implies that resilience depends on community membership and on community cohesion. One likes to imagine, as psychologists are trying to do, that we can improve people’s resilience. In truth, the way to do so involves enhancing community, even family.

Consider this, from a New Yorker article by Maria Konnikova. 

She offers a synopsis of the work of Norman Garmezy, a pioneer in the field.

From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

I would agree that the resilient group had a strong and positive social connection, whether to a cohesive family unity or to a larger community. And yet, this does not produce independence and autonomy. It offers security, and a group of people who do not see you as a victim.

Another researcher, George Bonano, of Columbia University, posited that different people process trauma differently. Some people see trauma as crippling. Others see trauma as an opportunity to grow. I would suggest that this marks the difference in community values. 

If you belong to a community where trauma is defined as a nightmare that will damage you for life, you are less likely to be resilient. In today’s America we tend to see all adversity as traumatic and seem to believe that we will have the greatest difficulty, with the most therapy, discarding it.

If you belong to a community where trauma is defined as part of life, even as an opportunity to learn and grow, you will probably be more resilient. But, note well, we are not talking about a state of mind. We are talking about community attitudes and community cohesion.

There are two sides to trauma. What happened is one side. The other is, who knows. If large numbers of people see you as a trauma victim, it will be more difficult to process the trauma, to overcome it, to understand that it does not define you. Then the chances are, the trauma will become your truth. Try overcoming it then.

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