It's time to reevaluate resilience

- You're listening to a TVO podcast. (upbeat music) - Hi, Pippa. - Hi, Karina. - Today we're talking about the word resilience. And it's a word that has really been shoved down our throats during the pandemic. - Yeah. - Don't you feel? - Oh yeah. - Like it's everywhere. It's in headlines. It's on social media. It's on like your meditation apps. I'll tell you kind of the same thing, which is to be resilient, to build resilience, to raise resilient children. I'll be honest, if you would ask me a couple of years ago what my favorite word was, I think I would have said resilience. - Really? I think it's a beautiful word. And I love the meaning. But at this point, my God, we've heard it way too much. - Yeah, so it means the active rebounding or recovering quickly from difficulty. And it's a word that comes to us from Latin. It joins the prefix re as in like rebound, recover, redo with the verb saliere, which means to leap. - It's like re-leaping. - Re-leaping, yeah, like this idea of elasticity. And the reason we wanted to do this episode is that the quality of resilience is almost universally seen as a good thing. - Yeah. - Like you've this thing to strive for and cultivate within yourself, like we said. And yeah, being able to function normally in the face of hardship sounds great. But I also started thinking about how it can be kind of a buzz word or a bandaid on a much larger problem with the status quo. - Totally. - I feel like the last couple of years of the pandemic have been a huge lesson in this status quo being disrupted, but also not disrupted at the same time. Like yeah, all of our lives have changed dramatically, but also like mega corporations like Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions of dollars in additional profits. - Billions, yeah. And in the face of that is resilience, like this ability to snap back to normal is that what we really need to be cultivating. - Right. - Or to push back on that idea, like is resilience actually about being elastic enough to like leap into a new reality? - Yeah. So as soon as I got into this line of thinking, the first thing I thought about was this book that I'd read called "Resilience is futile." - Great title. - It is a great title. It's a memoir by Julie Estlallond. She's an educator and women's rights advocate from Ottawa. And in the book, she describes the experience of being stalked by her ex-partner for over a decade. And in the meantime, she was building this quite successful, very public career that was all about educating others on women's rights. And by standard training and stuff like that. So she was basically living this double life. And the stalking finally ended because her ex died suddenly in a car accident, just like a complete freak accident. But the thesis of the book is around the idea of resilience and how it can be a double edged sword in many ways. So I thought Julie was the perfect person to get in touch with for this episode. Here's our interview. It's been condensed for length and we'll come back after listening to it. I was thinking about how a couple of years ago, my mom said to me, it was, I think it was my birthday and she said you're more resilient than I ever could have imagined. And she meant it as a compliment. And I felt it as a compliment, you know? Like it made me proud that she thought of me as a resilient person. Do you think that's like a trap to tie pride, to like resilience as a trait? - No, I think when people call me resilient, I take it as a compliment. I know they mean well. And I know I am a resilient person. Like I'm sure you are as well, right? But the concern I have is that when people read my story, hear my story, hear what I went through and all they focus on is wow, you're so resilient. It's like no, that's not the takeaway. Like that shouldn't be the takeaway because by focusing on my capacity to overcome, you don't have to look at what made me have to overcome in the first place. You don't have to look at how the police failed me. My campus failed me, my family failed me. You don't have to look at those things. Instead you can point at me and say, look, here's an example of someone who made it through, who really bootstrapped their way through. So my issue is the sort of structural pieces where we like to elevate individual survivors, you know, individual, single moms, individual person who came from the child welfare system who's now has a PhD. Like we like to really focus on those things because on the one hand, I think people just like optimism and I'm here for it. Like we really need to focus on positives. But I think we do it to the detriment of addressing the structural issues. - Yeah, I was thinking about this a lot about how it, it's sort of devalues the idea of community or the idea of a like a social compact, a social network and just lifts up the individual instead. - Yeah, and I think in the context of the pandemic in particular, like, whole boy, I mean, I launched my book The Day the Pandemic was declared and the before and after was so interesting, like doing press leading up to the launch, people were very uncomfortable with the title. It just rubbed them the wrong way. And then the pandemic happened and the trim resilience was used a lot and then people started to get tired of it and realizing like, hey, my kid doesn't need to dig deep and find resilience. My kid needs a hepophilter in their classroom and a vaccine. But you know, the speech from the throne last year, the federal budget literally had the words resilient, like building back a resilient Canada building back. And I just think it's just so fascinating to see how the journey of people really looking at structural failure, which is really what COVID has been in Canada at least. Structurally, you know, systemically, we were failed by governments at every level and people realized that, hey, really convenient of those folks to tell us to just dig deep and be resilient because it gets them off the hook for the fact that they screwed up and continued to screw up. And so watching the journey, like the evolution of how people have understood resilience from the day my book launched to now has been so fascinating. I feel like I can write a whole other book about like, see, this is what I mean. - Like how did people react to it before the pandemic versus after like, is there any specific story you remember about how people felt about that title or that word? - Yeah, I had got more than one person in my sector. So I work on the front lines to end men's violence and women in Canada. So, you know, shelter movement, sexual assault centers, more than one of them who said, Julie, like, you know, I really support you and I really support your work. But like, I can't put this book on the shelves of the shelter. Like, we gotta give women hope. Like, isn't hope all we have? But again, I think it's because we look at every issue at the micro level and we need to do more macro. Like, we need to pull back and say, okay, but what does it mean when I set someone up like Julie as an example of who you could be and who you should be as a survivor without ignoring the fact that, you know, Julie's white and Julie speaks more than one language and Julie has a post-secondary education and Julie has all of these things that make her capacity for resilience a heck of a lot more that if she was a single parent or, you know, a drug user or, you know, like all of these things that complicate people's capacity to be resilient, frankly, and to access the supports that make us survive. - Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. Do you think it's become a buzz word? Do you think it's becoming meaningless? - I do think resilience is a buzz word and it bums me out because I think there's so much to it and I think there's so many interesting elements to it and there is, for example, like cognitive science around resilience and the neurobiology of trauma and how you can build a more, like literally, you know, shape your brain to be able to handle adversity, like there's so much to unpack there, but it's been rendered meaningless and it's now a term that means anything and everything but really, truly to me, feels like a band-aid over a bullet wound that we just keep telling people, it's up to you to dig deep. - It's weird to me that we talk about being resilient when we're in the middle of trauma instead of after it, like isn't resilience supposed to mean your ability to bounce back from something that occurred in the past, right? Like how can we be resilient during the pandemic, you know? - Absolutely, and I liken it to when, so I was stocked for over a decade and ended because he died suddenly and when he died, everyone around me was like, oh my God, girl, breathe for the first time, live your best life and I was in the worst condition I had ever been in my entire life, like the year after he died, I was suicidal, I was physically ill, I couldn't function and people could not understand why, and it was only when I was on the other side of it that I was like, hey people, the pee and PTSD stands for post, with your body's capacity to handle it in the moment, literally your body would go offline, like it's just your mind cannot wrap its head around what's going on, it's only when you're safely out of it. that you're able to address what happened to you and that's when the physiological responses come in, hypervigilance, all those things. That's what we're going to see with the pandemic. Like there are people who I'm sure are really good right now at just like putting one foot in front of the other and I know there are many people who are in fact tapping into those really healthy coping skills. But we're going to really see the impact of this in 2023, 24, 25. Like we're going to see this when we're out of it and people have exhaled and looked back and thought, okay, where am I at? What coping mechanisms did I use? What weird ticks did I take on as a means of trying to survive that might have been helpful at the time but are not helpful to me anymore? And we're going to erase all of that by instead focusing on where you resilient when it happened. Yeah. So we talked about how people tend to think of it as just like trait to aspire to. What's the antidote to resilience? Like what should we be doing instead? Rage? I really feel like anger is a really really positive motivator. Anger is a fuel and the thing about anger is it's a feeling of injustice and when I feel angry, it's because I feel wronged and so that propels me to want to write that wrong. Sadness is an internal feeling. It's a self, you're angry towards yourself, you blaming yourself. And so I think the way for us to address, to really motivate people to take care of themselves, but also the way to really actually create a resilient society is by letting people tap into their anger. Just on a practical level, for example, if you're being attacked, if you're a woman who's being attacked and you're in a freeze response, which is quite common for women because we're socialized to be passive and so we internalize that. But if you actually take a deep breath and you scream from your stomach, like you scream from your diaphragm, it actually puts oxygen in your blood, which turns your panic into rage. And then in doing so, you actually thaw from your freeze response. So you quite literally like physiologically rage and anger when you're being attacked will change from you being frozen in place to you physically fighting back and running away from that situation. And that to me is a microcosm of what we need to be doing is like once we actually tap into our feelings of injustice, then that's when people mobilize, that's when people come together, that's when people start to get active about injustice. I just love this idea of having permission to get angry. I love being angry. Me too. I don't know what I was expecting when I asked that question, but rage wasn't it. Like I wasn't expecting her to say that. But it makes perfect sense, right? I think a lot of people in the face of things like the pandemic are too exhausted or burnt out to be angry and to mobilize effectively. 100%. Something I see a lot as this idea of like the goal of post pandemic life shouldn't be to go back to normal. Normal wasn't too hot to begin with, right? Yeah. And now we can really see the cracks that have been exposed in so many systems since 2020. Yeah. And if we all focus just on individual resilience, like that elastic band snapping right back to where it was in the first place, where's the room for real large scale systemic change? Yes. Like Julie said, it feels like such a trap to offload resilience onto the individual rather than the system. That is so true. Like it is so much about putting resilience and this responsibility to be resilient on the individual. Yeah. Like if you picture a resilient person, it's someone who's sort of self-reliant who can bounce back quietly without making a big scene or breaking down or like asking for help. Yeah. If you picture a resilient community, I picture a community with really strong social safety nets with one where people work together to not leave people behind. There is no such thing as like a bootstrapping community, only like a bootstrapping individual. So you mentioned at the top of that interview that your mom called you resilient. What do you think now? Do you still think of yourself as resilient? Do you think that's a good thing? Like I said to Julie, I was flattered when she said that. But God, I think the last couple of years has seriously made me doubt it. Like what? Like what? I don't know. I just feel like like the pandemic has been very shitty and it kind of challenged a lot of coping mechanisms that I thought were solid with me, you know? And they sort of broke down at several points and I was like, why can't I just snap out of this? Like why can't I just? Yeah. And that kind of like shook my my faith and my own resilience. What about you? I would definitely describe myself as resilient. But maybe in like a more like in the past in like breakups or in situations like that, I've been accused of speed grieving by close friends because I'm a processing so quickly that it's frightening from the outside. Which is its own it, its own kind of resilience, but there must be some steps of processing that are missing. I wish I speed grieved. That sounds excellent. Something's gotta be broken though. Something deep, something deep inside you may be broken, but I mean, isn't something deep inside all of us broken in a way? No. At this point? I think so. In this economy? But like when I think back about like how I coped over the last couple of years or whatever, I had a lot of supports. Yeah. Maybe that was what made me more down on myself than otherwise is that I felt like I had so much help and even then I just like felt rather crumbly sometimes. Something Julian I talked about is how that term resilience often does get pushed on people who are vulnerable or marginalized. Who don't have those systems? Yeah. Who don't have that support system? Like think about this focus on resilient children or like resilient survivors of abuse. Yeah. I was actually listening to a podcast from the conversation called don't call me resilient. And it's about how instead of celebrating people of color for being resilient and succeeding in the face of systemic racism, we should be asking ourselves why they had to be resilient to the first place. We'll link to that show in the notes because it's a good one to check out. Definitely. Something else that peaked my interest in that interview is when Julie talked about how it's a shame that resilience has become a buzzword because there's actually a lot to unpack behind the concept. Like she mentioned the cognitive science around resilience and like the neurobiology of trauma. Yeah. Like there are neurobiologists researching what makes a brain more resilient. Like trying to sort of identify what it is that allows some people to bounce back consistently from extreme stress or trauma. Like physiologically what are the markers of resilience in your brain, which is really interesting. And it's like this whole network of molecular and hormonal changes and neurotransmitters and all sorts of things that I would need at PhD to understand. But yeah. I was reading about how the brain is said to be our most resilient organ. Like in the process of aging, the brain can thrive and keep its plasticity in state, like amazingly functional for much longer than our other organs. Like your kidney or your heart can be shutting down at 95. But in the absence of something like dementia, there's a decent chance that your brain is working almost as well as it was 10 or 20 years earlier. Right. And think about it. Like it's pretty common place to hear someone talk about their grandma who is still sharp at whatever age. Totally. Yeah. But it is amazing when you think about it. It is. Yeah. The brain is all kinds of creepy in my opinion in many ways. Another thing that came up a lot when I was researching resilience was the climate crisis actually. I knew you were going to bring this up. I am so sorry. But like disaster analysis around the climate crisis, the word resilience gets brought up a lot. Like it's an entire field to study and plan what a resilient community looks like in the face of like x degrees of temperature change or x natural disaster or like an economic recession or depression. And it's the field is called disaster studies. That is so cool. And I was so glad that smart people are thinking hard about this. Yeah. Me too. When I was reading about that field, the words that came up linked again and again were resilience, vulnerability, and capacity capacity, which is great considering we have an episode on capacity from earlier this season. Exactly. They're all distinct ideas, but they're all really related. Yeah. Capacity is all the tools and resources available in a community to cope with a disaster and vulnerability is the opposite of capacity, meaning like all the weaknesses that might like hinder the ability to cope and measuring your coping capacity against your vulnerabilities is a great way to predict whether that community will be resilient. That is like survive or even thrive following a disaster. And you can't measure just one thing, right, they all need to be combined to get a really accurate picture. Like, I don't know, this sounds all common sense how I'm saying it, but in disaster studies, it forms this really logical, sort of almost reassuring framework. - Really drives home how we have all these emotions like guilt or pride, as you mentioned, tied up in our personal individual ability to be resilient, but really we should be looking, frankly, at the vulnerabilities and the capacities of the system on the whole. Like, are we being set up to fail? And that's something we should be asking ourselves for blaming ourselves for not being resilient? - Yeah, I think that's actually a good note to end on. - Same. - Yeah, thanks for listening. (upbeat music)