Resilience and connection

To some extent, it’s about perspective.

It can be easier to manage a narrow window of existence: your office, your corner grocery, your sister on the other side of town. It’s not exactly comfortable all the time, but it’s what you are accustomed to. Eventually even the parts of your day-to-day existence that are painful, the parts that are dangerous become more palatable than fear of the unknown. That’s how you get stuck — mired in a combination of complacency and discontent. It’s the kind of trap that gnaws you to the bone, and the longer you stay the more difficult it becomes to envision anything else. The idea of making big change, even change for the better, can be especially paralyzing if you have experienced abuse.

Recently I sat on the rooftop of a villa in Phuket with a childhood friend for the occasion of a milestone birthday. The scene was serene: lush, tree covered mountains rolled into the sea. This backdrop and our faces were illuminated with ambient city light from below and a billion stars piercing the black sky above. She paused and laughed softly in the middle of a reminiscent musing. “How did we get here?”

My friend and I had the kind of trauma that doesn’t usually lend itself to a life of island getaways — statistically, we are outliers. Black swans.

What factors play a role in the long-term outcomes of those who experience trauma? Why do some people seem to thrive after events that bring lifelong chaos and hardship to others?

Sheldon Cohen describes resilience as “a social network's provision of psychological and material resources intended to benefit an individual's capacity to cope with stress.” This would certainly align with both her experience and mine, although the network at play for both of us hinged on interaction with social service organizations. I have spent a great deal of time within the space of these columns extolling the virtues of the social services network as critical for community cohesiveness, sustainability, safety, public health, and civic engagement.

Conversely, isolation and loneliness have adverse effects on those who have experienced trauma. The “rat paradise” study undertaken at University of Texas at Austin demonstrated that rats who were socially isolated were more vulnerable to substance abuse than those who were granted access to socialization. Brigham Young University research identified the impact of isolation and loneliness on health outcomes as equivalent to the health outcomes of smoking a pack of cigarettes per day. How we interact with people matters — especially those who have already experienced hardship.

Unfortunately, for much of history the typical course of action in dealing with people who had symptoms related to trauma was banishment. Workhouses, poor farms, abusive orphanages, incarceration facilities, asylums and more were essentially warehouses where people could be kept out of sight and out of mind. Further, many of the challenges that led to people being relegated to institutions were directly associated with poverty. Clearly, there have been great strides made in how we address some of these issues today, but there are still many areas of opportunity to change the way we ostracize people — particularly when it relates to substance abuse disorder and policies that disproportionately impact those in poverty (like cash bail).

The key is connection. Having someone to turn to in times of hardship, doubt, insecurity, emergency. Someone able to connect you to opportunities for upward mobility; someone to say your name in the right room at the right time. It is mentorship and education, it is breaking bread and breaking the ice.

I believe it is also critical to be forthright about a common misconception associated with resilience, and that is the idea that someone who has achieved visible status, or financial stability, or has the public visage of what society would consider success after trauma no longer experience any negative effects of what they have survived. That is simply not the case. For many people, achieving whole personhood is work that continues for the entirety of their lives. To go through difficult emotions, to lean on the support of others, to do the ongoing work of exposing and healing the parts of yourself that have been wounded, and to live with the invisible outcomes are all completely normal and valid experiences. To believe otherwise only lends itself to impostor syndrome.

It’s about perspective. The way you view yourself and the way you view others can change immensely based on your vantage point. If it’s time to make a terrifying change that will alter your path for the better, make today the day.

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