Aaron reviewed Resilience Myth by Soraya L. Chemaly
The Resilience Myth
4 stars
I suppose that I had never given much thought, myself, to the concept of resilience. I mean, everyone faces adversity, needs to fight back, blah blah blah, and so on. But Chemaly's book really does a great job of peeling back the layers of what is going on underneath all this resilience talk, and the degree to which people, in the name of resilience, end up burying their pain. Moreover, focusing on "resilience" takes the focus away from the people doing harm -- those who are causing everyone else to have to be resilient. It turns out to be a deeply individualistic concept, turning us away from community. As she writes on page 206, "It's a 'we-them' resilience that doesn't teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another." I confess that once I started thinking about resilience in the way that Chemaly …
I suppose that I had never given much thought, myself, to the concept of resilience. I mean, everyone faces adversity, needs to fight back, blah blah blah, and so on. But Chemaly's book really does a great job of peeling back the layers of what is going on underneath all this resilience talk, and the degree to which people, in the name of resilience, end up burying their pain. Moreover, focusing on "resilience" takes the focus away from the people doing harm -- those who are causing everyone else to have to be resilient. It turns out to be a deeply individualistic concept, turning us away from community. As she writes on page 206, "It's a 'we-them' resilience that doesn't teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another." I confess that once I started thinking about resilience in the way that Chemaly outlines, the concept and its associated hyper-individualism seemed so deeply engrained in American life that I'm not sure how to overcome it, but the final chapter offers some useful thoughts.