The Resilience Myth

‘Depression’, writes Ruth Cain, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Kent, ‘may appear almost self-protective: an opt-out from an unwinnable set of continual competitions’.27 Although stigmatised in many ways, it is the healthy response to a mad, uncaring world.

Albrecht studied the experiences of persistent drought and large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in Australia. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative emotions, exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness and a lack of control.

what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. So if somebody says hurtful or insulting things, you can say, “interesting, that person is saying hurtful and insulting things.” But you can separate your sense of yourself from them. We are really beginning to seriously understand how human beings can learn how to do that, to observe and

The intersecting catastrophes unspooling all around us don’t offer an escape from reality, but an intensification of it. So we have a choice: (1) Accept this reality. Accept the full toxic soup of conditions we’ve put ourselves in, as well as the thick, messy, profoundly human dramas playing out amidst it. And awaken to the burdens — of grief, hope