What Does Resiliency Mean to You? There's Controversy Around the Term
By Elaine Miller-Karas for Psychology Today
The word resilience derives from the Latin resilire, meaning "to jump back."
Helping communities prepare for and respond to traumatic experiences including human-made and natural disasters, past and present, has been a significant part of the work I have been involved with for the past two decades. While in Belfast, Northern Ireland, many years ago, on the eve of beginning training about building community resilience, a community member approached me and shared concern about any gathering using the word resilience. They shared that there was a billboard in their neighborhood cautioning community members about the word resilience.
Stop Calling Me Resilient
A quote by Tracie L. Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute was on that billboard. It read, “Stop calling me resilient. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.”1 In other words, the person shared that being called resilient minimizes one’s history and lived experience. It was the government’s way of ignoring the needs of the people. In their view, resilience had been weaponized as a term used to marginalize, oppress, or trivialize individual and community suffering and ignore the community's needs. The same perspective toward the word resilience has been echoed within many communities within the United States for many reasons, including in the context of structural racism.
Unpacking the Definition of Resilience
Many resilience initiatives are being launched worldwide, including within the United States, to address the mental health needs of individuals and communities pre- and post-disasters. We must unpack the term when working on mental health initiatives promoting resilience. This does not mean we do not share our perspectives, but the dialogue is essential for community engagement. One standard definition of resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from adversity. This has been a troubling definition for many from marginalized communities. As one community member stated, bouncing back to what? Oppression, poverty, systemic racism, insecure housing?
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