As a Psychotherapist who specialises in trauma, I speak a lot about resilience and how trauma and stress are stored in our bodies and how this impacts our lives as a natural consequence of not allowing ourselves to heal. Resilience is one of those ‘things’ that we are all expected to have an unlimited supply of. It appears many people do not understand it and assume that whatever it is, it will be there when they need it. What is this ‘resilience’ that people speak of?
Recently, it has been referenced everywhere, and in particular when related to how people handle natural disasters, we are told by the media and society that we can get through it, we know how to struggle, and we have been through it before. I call BS! — I believe this minimises our experience and makes us push these uncomfortable feelings down into our psyche. This can shame us, particularly when we aren’t coping very well!
I have been disappointed that the narrative about the floods in 2022 in Australia and now recently Cyclone Alfred relates to people’s historical experience and how they have likely survived the floods and fires and know how to get through this one and that we are all resilient because we know how handle life’s tough situations. Again, I ask what that means and how do we know that is the case. What is it like for those people who are told they are resilient but do not know if they are? I think this is dangerous to our sense of self. We set each other up to fail if this is our expectation of each other.
I wonder if it is what people say when they feel uncomfortable with suffering. Because people either cannot relate to the feeling or cannot bear to think what that suffering might be like. It is like a band-aid for the unaffected. It is used to make bad news more palatable.
Material has resilience. We can define the resilience of the material to be the amount of energy the material can absorb and still return to its original state. So therefore, resilience in the context of emotional reflex is nonsense. Because we grow through our experience, we never return to our original state, and that is a good thing.
I was affected by the previous floods and the Cyclone. Not because my house was flooded, although it was close, not because my newly landscaped garden was destroyed in the process. I was affected emotionally, spiritually and existentially. I did not feel resilient; I felt sad, overwhelmed, confused, angry, grief and I was in shock at how powerful Mother Nature can be and how vulnerable we are at the mercy of her fury at times.
I believe the people who lost their homes, separated from loved ones, wrestling with the instability and the prolific anger of mother nature also did not feel resilient. I believe they were surviving because there wasn’t a choice.
Trauma is a natural response to not knowing whether you will survive a perceived threat. The brain and body go into overdrive, like an autopilot just to move past an experience that feels intolerable. Like, it isn’t even real.
The last few years have taken so much from us, it has been relentless for our nation. From the COVID-19- enforced lockdowns, separation from loved ones, mandates, war, political division and a heavy dose of natural disasters. We have all faced layers of trauma as a nation, a community and as individuals. Do I think we are resilient because of this? I don’t know. I think we have learnt to numb ourselves through distraction. However, I don’t think we have even started to process the enormity of the impacts. First, to process something challenging or painful you need to feel safe. You cannot widen your window of tolerance if you feel unsafe.
Therefore, it is going to take time, for people affected to assemble some level of normalcy, whether that is about housing, structure, reconnection. Knowing people care will help a lot, knowing that people are not forgotten is essential to reduce impacts.
I found that during being impacted by natural disasters my instinct drove me to connect. I reached out to friends, asking if they want to talk. I sent messages to my clients asking them if they were feeling safe? I connected more to my neighbours than I have before in order so we could take a collective response to initiate further flood defence. In the instant, I listened to my instinct and connected to others I felt more relaxed. I have witnessed people doing similar in places that were inundated with water. Communities pull together and forge teams to locate the isolated and connect to gather supplies. What a wonderful example of the best of humanity. When we are connected, we feel safer, more contained.
However, let’s reflect on this so-called resilience. See, even this collective response of the community is not going to mitigate the pain and fear that these individuals have experienced. You can’t unfeel vulnerability. Trees and rivers/creeks that were once a thing of beauty are being turned into worries, missiles and symbols of threat to your family.
Trauma is accumulative, it doesn’t stand on its own. Traumas build on each other and do not need to have a direct correlation with each other for the impacts to be felt. A trauma impact brought on by a sexual assault/toxic relationship can be reignited if someone loses their house to an environmental disaster. A resolved eating disorder can reestablish itself when your income is suddenly cut off, Why? Because, the body remembers and trauma is stored at a cellular level, the body can recall the feeling of trauma wherever it comes from. Trauma is a feeling of loss of control. It is a loss of safety within the body. If this repeats or goes unwitnessed, then a person’s core beliefs change. The expectation of life being safe becomes more delicate, less tangible. Boundaries have been invaded. The impacts accelerate, hypervigilance is raised, sleeplessness through fear or nightmares, survival strategies become unhealthy possibly through self-medication, sense of self is lost. Disconnection becomes the adaptation to mitigate the harm.
So, imagine for those who have been impacted by a natural disaster, what their sense of survival is going to feel like if they were already carrying unresolved trauma from their past. Not resilient, I imagine.
The presumption of resilience in society is to normalise something, to make it something that we put up with. What this really means is ‘put up with it’, ‘shut it down, ‘make it go away’, and pretend. Do these feel like familiar things we tell ourselves when the world has moved on? When the focus is not on our healing, or we are not given a safe space to process what is going on inside ourselves?
Locating resilience within is about finding flexibility and elasticity. This is about being able to flex with the highs and lows of life. You change shape as a result, but it is okay because you have a secure base to return to when you are ready, when you have the capacity. Which takes time, it can take a long time. You need to make meaning out of the experience, you need to be given the space to feel the pain that you couldn’t access when you were experiencing the threat, whether that was environmental, physical, psychological etc. You need to be given the opportunity to re-narrate your story, to see yourself as a survivor, as someone powerful to rise above a dominant experience, and this only happens if you have permitted yourself to own what it is like to feel vulnerable and at the mercy of powerlessness, with accountability and self-compassion. We cannot negate emotional pain, but we can learn to understand and accept it and that helps reduce the overwhelm that it brings. This brings us back into a state of awareness where we can take responsibility to build our resilience, and our window of tolerance will naturally widen as a result. Resilience is not a by-product of trauma; tolerance is. Resilience comes from slowly building new foundations, through belief in self, connection to others, and honouring the time that true restoration needs to build, where we remind ourselves of humanness and our capacity for empathy for self and others, even at times when we might have lost everything ourselves. We can’t heal in isolation; we will tolerate and repress all our needs, and this leads to judgment of others who may cry out for help and prevents us from doing the same.
I speak every day with people who have been impacted by trauma, and their wisdom speaks to me. They say it is ‘not now that a person feels the pain or needs the help to process what has happened’. Right now, people will be focusing on basic needs, such as food, clothing, housing, and safety. This is survival mode. It will be afterwards, maybe when they feel safe or rehoused again. Maybe once the mud is dry and the rivers look beautiful and non-threatening again, maybe that is when people will need to speak and connect to the real fear they felt and how it still lives within them.
So, even though the initial danger has passed, the winds and the rain have decreased, and the fires are out. The muscle memory of our bodies holds on tightly to the tension it felt in those moments of helplessness. Galvanising for the next perceived threat coming its way. It is up to us to mend by sharing stories and holding space for emotional pain. It is empathy that guides us back to a path we have known before. Our shared understanding of hardship reflects our need to create balance and self-love, which builds us a new map of our resilience.
