Resiliency

I recently read a Costco Connection article and the headline on the front page didn’t sit right with me. It said “Cultivating Resilience, A look at what it takes to grow through adverse experiences”. They had a picture of a flower growing through a crack in cement right next to it, which really does scream resilience, doesn’t it?

The part that I had an issue with was “grow through” adverse experiences. First off, resilience is defined as successfully adapting to challenging life experiences, focusing on the mental, emotional and behavioural aspects of the experience.

The article claims that scientists are saying that is the old definition, but that now they are really trying to focus on how you can learn resilient behaviour. In today’s modern world, where a lot of us either work at jobs we hate, or we work from home, we all feel very isolated. That’s not just an outcome of covid - it’s an outcome of our hyperconnectivity. We are all connected with social media accounts, and we no longer feel the need to connect personally, even over the telephone.

According to this article, these scientists are developing methods to teach people resilience in the workplace so there are less people calling in sick or going on short term disability. In effect, it’s all about saving the big corporations money, and the end game is MAKE MORE MONEY!

I think we should be focusing on the healing of adverse events - not growing, but taking the time to feel the emotion and deal with the mental load that comes from a devastating life event. Instead, employers want to ensure that their investments are going to be good little productive machines and so they can grow their capital.

Now, I’m all for productivity and technology, but when we talk about adverse events, we’re talking about things like deaths in the family, vehicle accidents and sports accidents. Even simply losing your job could be classified as an adverse event. Now while we’re dealing with the stress, the agony and the grief, we’re expected to learn from our experience?

I say forget the learning. The person has to deal with the seven (or five) stages of grief before learning should ever be brought up. When you’re in the epitome of an adverse event, the last thing on your mind is basically everything but that event. You need to deal with your current situation, whether that’s a physical thing/task at hand - whether that’s to try and find a new job, apply for disability, or heal from an injury or a death of a loved one.

Next comes the mental load and the emotional feels. This is the biggest hurdle with an adverse event. You may wonder what the future holds, how things are going to change, and what your next steps are.

The process of grief; the process of going through the physical motions take time, sometimes a year or longer. Once we feel like we’re in a safe place again, we can begin to learn from the situation. For example, my son was born with cystic fibrosis. I wasn’t able to write a blog on the experience until a year and a half later, because it took me that long to detach myself long enough to write about it. Obviously, the whole situation still hurts me, but I can look at it from a different side of things now. I’m now on the other side of my grief bridge, and I’m ready, willing and open to learn from the experience, or better yet, teach and share with others who may be going through the same thing.

Thank you so much for reading my thoughts on resiliency.

Take care of yourself,

Sandra 🧡