Another point is that resilience does not reduce risk or vulnerability. It’s about how you react/recover from trauma, it is not a protective factor in preventing trauma. To judge someone with high resilience as lower risk is to betray them.
#resilience “The difference between ‘resilience’ and ‘don’t let the bastards get you down’? The latter places the problem w/ the bastards, the former places the problem w/ you”. We must not allow pressure for resilience to permit broken systems to persist.
Individualized Resilience
Dr Ruth Moyse @mum2aspergirl speaking about the dreaded term ‘resilience’ and countering that by pointing out that it’s already a feat of endurance for autistic learners just being present in environments that repeatedly fail to meet their needs. #LondonVirtualAutisticConference
I hate the word ‘resilience’
In bullying or abusive situations it’s often used as
gaslighting
victim blaming
derailing
& I feel It’s often used to neglect responsibility to stop a situation happening or continuing
It’s evil
Dr Ruth adds that an autistic child who is in school is already being hugely resilient, each and every day, overcoming exhaustion and bewilderment. Powerful slides showing how many were already not coping in Year 1 of school, but persisted for years before burning out.
As @mum2aspergirl points out, the problem is not centred within the child.
For me, it is not the child’s responsibility to sort out the utter mess that the adults have made of their school life by not understanding autism. It is not up to the child to just be ‘more resilient’.
Ann Memmott PgC MA 🌈 (She/They) (@AnnMemmott) July 12, 2022
Telling an autistic person to up their resilience isn’t helpful. That can actually make it worse. I can only speak for myself, but when I have a meltdown or when I can feel myself heading for one, I get very worried about the impact on other people. Am I disturbing them? Am I making them feel uncomfortable? Are the going to view me as immature or irrational? Will this hurt my career prospects? These are the thoughts that are spiralling through my mind. They fuel my anxiety and speed up that loss of control.
The M Word: We need to talk about adult autistic meltdowns | by Ashlea McKay | Medium
Consider the current buzz about self-regulation: teaching students to exercise self-discipline and self-control, to defer gratification and acquire “grit.” To discipline children is to compel them to do what we want. But because we can’t always be there to hand out rewards or punishments as their behavior merits, some dream of figuring out a way to equip each child with a “built-in supervisor” (as two social scientists once put it) so he or she will follow the rules and keep working even when we’re not around. The most expedient arrangement for us, the people with the power, is to get children to discipline themselves — in other words, to be self-disciplined.
Proponents of this idea like to point out that cognitive ability isn’t the only factor that determines how children will fare in school and in life. That recognition got a boost with science writer Dan Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence in 1996, which discussed the importance of self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy, and the ability to love and be loved. But a funny thing has happened to the message since then. When you hear about the limits of IQ these days, it’s usually in the context of a conservative narrative that emphasizes not altruism or empathy but a recycled version of the Protestant work ethic. The goal is to make sure kids will resist temptation, override their unconstructive impulses, put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do — and keep at it for as long as it takes.
Social psychologists sometimes use the term “fundamental attribution error” to describe a tendency to pay so much attention to character, personality, and individual responsibility that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are. This error has political implications: The more we focus on people’s persistence (or self-discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies and institutions. Consider Paul Tough’s declaration that “there is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than the character strengths…[such as] conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance, and optimism.” Whose interests are served by the astonishing position that “no antipoverty tool” — presumably including Medicaid and public housing — is more valuable than an effort to train poor kids to persist at whatever they’ve been told to do?
The most impressive educational activists are those who struggle to replace a system geared to memorizing facts and taking tests with one dedicated to exploring ideas. They’re committed to a collaborative approach to schooling that learners will find more engaging. By contrast, those enamored of grit look at the same status quo and ask: How can we get kids to put up with it?
Grit: A Skeptical Look at the Latest Educational Fad (##) – Alfie Kohn
“We are asking students to change a belief system without changing the situation around them,” he said. It can be irresponsible and unfair to talk about grit without talking about structural challenges, he said, referring to the recent interest in interventions tied to the concepts of grit and perseverance.
So, what are those challenges? If a hypothetical classroom of 30 children were based on current demographics in the United States, this is how the students in that classroom would live: Seven would live in poverty, 11 would be non-white, six wouldn’t speak English as a first language, six wouldn’t be reared by their biological parents, one would be homeless, and six would be victims of abuse.
Howard said that exposure to trauma has a profound impact on cognitive development and academic outcomes, and schools and teachers are woefully unprepared to contend with these realities. Children dealing with traumatic situations should not been seen as pathological, he argued. Instead, educators need to recognize the resilience they are showing already. The instruments and surveys that have been used to measure social-emotional skills such as persistence and grit have not taken into account these factors, Howard said.
Schools can do a better job of talking about the extent to which student trauma exists, teaching children coping mechanisms, and providing mental-health services.The conversation about growth mindsets has to happen in a social and cultural context, he said, because cultural, institutional, and historical forces have an effect on individuals.
When the Focus on ‘Grit’ in the Classroom Overlooks Student Trauma – The Atlantic
Group Resilience
Octavia Butler said, “civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.”
She also said “all that you touch you change / all that you change, changes you.” We are constantly impacting and changing our civilization—each other, ourselves, intimates, strangers. And we are working to transform a world that is, by its very nature, in a constant state of change.
Janine Benyus, a student of biomimicry, says “Nature/Life would always create conditions conducive to life.” She tells of a radical fringe of scientists who are realizing that natural selection isn’t individual, but mutual—that species only survive if they learn to be in community.
How can we, future ancestors, align ourselves with the most resilient practices of emergence as a species?
Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep, and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. The quality of connection between the nodes in the patterns.
Dare I say love.
And we know how to connect—we long for it.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (pp. 17-18). AK Press.
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (p. 44). AK Press.
My favorite life forms right now are dandelions and mushrooms—the resilience in these structures, which we think of as weeds and fungi, the incomprehensible scale, the clarity of identity, excites me. I love to see the way mushrooms can take substances we think of as toxic, and process them as food, or that dandelions spread not only themselves but their community structure, manifesting their essential qualities (which include healing and detoxifying the human body) to proliferate and thrive in a new environment. The resilience of these life forms is that they evolve while maintaining core practices that ensure their survival.
A mushroom is a toxin-transformer, a dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread… What are we as humans, what is our function in the universe?
One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.
Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion. I think of how delightful it is to see something new in my lovers’ faces, something they may only know from inside as a feeling.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (p. 12). AK Press.
One core practice of resilience is transformative justice, transforming the conditions that make injustice possible. Resilience is perhaps our most beautiful, miraculous trait.
One place to turn to with a transformative justice lens is our shared vision. When we imagine the world we want to shift towards, are we dreaming of being the winners of the future? Or are we dreaming of a world where winning is no longer necessary because there are no enemies?
Resilience: The ability to become strong, healthy or successful again after something bad happens. the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, bent, etc. an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.
“Resilience: (v) The way the water knows just how to flow, not force itself around a river rock; then surely I can stretch myself in the shape my own path is asking of me.”
—Corina Fadel
