Soraya Chemaly

I received an advance uncorrected proof copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss,and while I finished it a couple of weeks back, sorting through my notes has required a bit of ... resilience. The book isn't long (there are only about 200 pages in the main text body) and Ms. Chemaly conveys her points succinctly in a story-like way … keeps it interesting.

First, the title may be a bit misleading. Resilience is not a myth - what we are conditioned to believe is resilience is. The author says in her Preface: "Our culture’s solution for handling life’s hardships is to learn to be resilient. But I must warn you that this book dismantles the very heart of our prevailing notions of individual resilience."

The book is timely, given the unfortunate proliferation of a perceived freedom to be toxic, at least in the USA. And also given that there are a lot of so called "alpha males" and their tragicomic spewings of myths of their imaginations polluting the social media feeds of impressionable egos of irresilient (usually young male) consumers. Interesting to me, OED says irresilient is a rare adjective, fewer than 0.01 occurrences per milion words. Well, I've blown up that stat with twice in two sentences! Anyway, they won't be reading this book.

Ms. Chemaly looks at the actual myths - strength and self-sufficiency being the first topic she tackles - and how our formative years, our environment, the effects the buzz phrases of "soldiering on" and "bouncing back" have on us, and makes her case that we really need to be part of a community to feed our true resilience. and she notes "We tend to think about resilience in reactive ways—how do we respond after adversity—but in practical terms resilience includes the steps we take to avoid adversity to begin with."

I think this could be an unpopular book among a certain wing of politics; the myth of bootstrap self-madeness goes against her message. It's worth a read. She says, "We live with the consequences of not reconciling ourselves to hard truths."

Formatting note: I like in-text citations (I detest uncited endnotes that the reader only discovers after reading, and then has to go back and try to figure out what they pertained to). And they were hyperlinked in the electronic copy I received. Extra nice. And for the publisher, I've noted a few typos at the end that your editors may or may not have caught.

Lots (lots) of notes, so a curated selection:

[on those toxic males] This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of [a sexual] reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.)

[turn of a phrase] Stephenie Meyer’s vampire series Twilight took off like wildfire in a political environment of similar fears. The first volume was published in 2005, in the aftermath of 9/11, in which brown-skinned Islamic extremists used airplanes—which, it must be said, are classically phallic projectiles—to penetrate U.S. airspace and destroy symbols of U.S. power.
I guess she probably needed to hammer home the message

[we all know some of those people] Refusing masks and vaccines is a prime example of how maladaptive a resilience of strength, impenetrability, and self-sufficiency can be.

[using Tetris as a "cognitive vaccine against PTSD] Research such as this has shed light on what’s known as dual-task processing, a way to reroute memories and minimize or even eliminate traumatic stress.
I found this to be interesting. Need to go find this study...

[coping methods] What we call “resilience” frequently translates into our finding ways to feel safe in our own skin, a sensation that allows us to cope with the uncertainty of anxiety-provoking life changes more openly and creatively. Interoception is therefore essential to resilience because being able to feel and interpret bodily changes and sensations helps us develop emotional awareness and regulate ourselves.

[on being taught to tough it out on our own] Each of us is a body, but together we are also interbodies.31 Your body is yours, but it is also part of everyone else’s environment, which has implications for how we respond to stress, hardships, and trauma. By default, however, we are taught and encouraged to overlook and ignore these facts, and when we do, we lose valuable insights.

[I had a hard time with this section] Despite that religious and spiritual practices involve the body, these interpretations of faith and spirituality are mainly centered on disembodied ideas and forces, including, for example, the idea of a soul, a pantheistic consciousness, or an afterlife free of limits and pain.

[semantics are tricky] Dualism isn’t all bad. For one, it is a useful cognitive shortcut. When we are faced with complexity, our ability to quickly flatten information into oppositions such as male/female, white/black, rational/irrational, thinking/feeling, can be a genuine advantage.
This is a different dualism - binary thinking is what I think she means, as opposed to the dualists of the mind being separate … outside of … the body. Except...
While splitting the mind from the body can be a useful short-term good coping mechanism in the face of mass deaths and constant physical threats, it is a spectacularly poor intellectual and philosophical structure on which to build a theory of long-term adaptivity and resilience.
Never mind

[on individual vs holistic resilience] “I’m still amazed by how quickly people slip towards the individual,” explained Michael Ungar, founder and director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Canada, when we spoke in early 2022. “They’ll give a head nod to resilience being about systems all around us, but then will give a definition of resilience as the individual ability to cope, ignoring a fundamental contradiction: my motivation to change and my being in an environment that enables change are equally weighted.”

[on the military training of one meaning of grit to "finish what I begin'] It’s unsavory to contemplate, I know, but what if you’re a military cadet, have the requisite grit, and your goal is sex? What if you begin is an unwanted sexual encounter and you believe failure isn’t an option? What if you see resistance to your actions as a challenge to overcome? What if domination is understood as strength but emotional expression and distress are considered weakness? It may seem like a harsh comparison, but grit, confidence, having a challenge orientation, commitment to task, and exercising control—all valued in resilience lessons—are also central to how rapists think and act.
Heavy and some might cry hyperbolic, but it's a valid thought stream that I've not heard much of.

A recent study of efficacy of teaching teens to recast their stories, learn mindfulness techniques, and develop gratitude practices, known as dialectical behavioral theory, revealed that kids exposed to this therapy, many of whom did not start off with depression or anxiety, worsened.
My (unpopular) position is that focusing on the harm concretizes it in the mind.

[authoritative vs authoritarian parenting] Having a tolerant, authoritative parent, for example, increases the likelihood of a child’s being resilient. Children of firm and responsive parents develop healthier autonomy, seeing themselves as independent but accepted, cared for, and connected. Authoritative parenting combines emotional intelligence, stress support, encouragement, and communication of confidence in a child’s abilities.
Authoritative, and she's not saying authoritarian (which is in the next paragraph)...
By comparison, children raised by more rule-driven, authoritarian parents are less able to manage change and self-regulate when stressed. Authoritarian parents value hierarchy and expect obedience and so are often less tolerant of emotional displays, making them less attuned to children’s needs or responsive to their distress. They are more likely to model rigidity and, as a result, children’s emotional competence suffers. Authoritarian parenting is more likely to traumatize children because it results in a higher likelihood of emotional repression, cognitive inflexibility, and fear-based reasoning.
Oh yeah. That first one. (And all three for my father from his parents.

In our mainstream script, however, little suggests the degree to which context, environment, and experience can affect a person’s ability to be optimistic or develop optimistic attitudes. Instead, resilient people are often depicted as naturally more optimistic, a trait that, furthermore, is linked to being gritty, strong, honorable, and, even, prominent.
Halo effect?

[on the problem of Norman Vincent Peale] His madly successful ideas about positive thinking can’t be divorced from a national refusal to feel discomfort and acknowledge privileges enjoyed by men such as Fred Trump, John Templeton, and Peale himself. But resilience often requires us to feel discomfort, sit with it, and parse what it means.

[on the former guy] In many ways, the relationship between the American public and Donald Trump mirrors the well-studied dynamics of intimate abuse. Aided by a media rife with distorting false equivalences, minimizing language, and the optimism of American exceptionalism, Trump was an upbeat, gaslighting machine of false hope, self-enhancing blather, and dangerous denialism and misinformation.
Preach!

[semantics - words matter] When former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo called [American Federation of Teachers leader Randi] Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world,” what he really meant was “the most dangerous person in my world.”

[uh oh] Training soldiers to develop resilience through positive psychology or cognitive behavioral therapy can therefore be harmful and counterproductive.

[we're in trouble] [failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari] Lake is one of the 42 percent of American voters who, in 2022, revealed that they thought “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”

[fear based illusions of resiliency] Strongmen don’t make people safer, a baseline for resilience at any scale. Rather, they maintain power by making people more afraid. They use language, images, and metaphors that increase contempt, anxiety, and disgust, and when they do, they can count on mainstream resilience as a recruitment tool. In the post 9/11 years that led to the election of Donald Trump, pathology and war metaphors undeniably informed an increasingly violent reactionary white supremacist moment that understood resilience as resistance, a synonym, after all, for immunity.

[we want resilience to move us past the obstacle as quickly as possible] Resilience takes time when we are all expected to make time, mainly for other people. Because most of us work to survive and take care of others, our time is not our own. For most people, taking time to adequately nurture the people we love and ourselves to stay well is exceedingly difficult. Because we are socialized to think of time as linear and in individualistic, competitive terms, we struggle to understand its social and political uses and to adapt in ways that emphasize community well-being and ecological adaptability.

[cyclical trauma] Even if we want to think time is linear and progressive, our healing is not. After a crisis, a person or community might experience well-being for a time, only to then fall into disruption and despair again, then again into improvement. Trauma makes us feel as though we are out of the “normal” flow of time, and the desire to restore that sense is powerful.

[on our contributions] We may, as individuals, adopt climate-friendly personal habits, but these habits are Pyrrhic in the face of the challenges we face.
An Unfortunate Truth

[relinquishing personal power] It's rare that "learning to be resilient" includes civics and the influence of voting on our lives, but elections are risk calculations tied to resilience expectations.[...]
We’re schooled to think of resilience in highly individualized ways, but the degree to which we can and have to be resilient depends on people we empower to make risk decisions for us. We give others the authority to impose their risk perceptions and resilience understandings on the rest of us.

[oh, that term...acceptable risk] The real power that risk decision-makers have isn’t just in defining what constitutes a risk, but defining what constitutes an acceptable risk. Acceptable to whom? For how long? At what cost?

[a trend that isn't new] The study revealed a subset of the white men to be the most risk-prone, approximately 30 percent, who had greater-than-average trust in authority and technology. These men tended to be conservative, hierarchical thinkers, and hypercommitted to individualism.
Why am I not surprised?

[elected officials] Our resilience, both personal and political, is constantly being tested because our institutional threat assessment is concentrated in the hands of people whose risk perceptions and social values are woefully out of sync with the needs of a diverse and pluralistic society. Across all major U.S. sectors, the lack of diversity in our decision-making bodies is a risk that we can’t afford as a country. No amount of individual-resilience skills building will generate the adaptability and resolve that we need collectively.
OUr pseudo-democracy puts us in difficult situations.

[on writing] When we keep diaries, we engage in similar processing. By writing and rewriting, we project ourselves into alternative outcomes with more deliberation. Narrative therapy helps individuals explore troubling experiences in ways that reduce their relevance and emotional resonance.
Nope. Not everyone (though I am given to understand from indirect experience that it does work...for some.)

[and on reading] Reading fiction has similar effects but extends the benefits to relationship enhancement. Fiction requires us to put ourselves in imaginary scenarios. When we do that, we stimulate the section of our brains responsible for interpreting other people’s feelings and thoughts.
Not for everyone… I like to just read.
[if you're not with me...] It’s a “we-them” resilience that doesn’t teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another. [...] Resilience means looking outward, not primarily inward. [...]We don’t adapt to change. We, and our relationships, change.

Typos?:

This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of asexual reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.) ["a sexual reward"]

He died during period, between 2003 and 2010, during which more than $20 million of Templeton funds funded the work of deniers of anthropogenic climate change. ["during period"]

an their CEO made $22 million ["and"]

This list, supposedly related to a Texas congressional bill mischaracterizing and opposing critical race theory. [fragment]

We goes by the name resilience today doesn’t recognize this fact. {"What" goes]… (altro)

The author disputes the idea that there is something wrong with women being angry. She discusses the ways in which women have had their anger suppressed, or have suppressed it themselves, including the policing of women by other women. She suggests that anger is a powerful force, but unexpressed anger has a negative effect on women's health and wellbeing. The book is lucid and well written, though there are a few places where the use of sentence fragments jarred. The main reason this book does not get five stars is the constant insistence of dealing with things that are not about women, per se, but about other ways in which people are oppressed; while intersectionality is a valid concept and should be considered in many feminist actions, there are times when it pushes the main topic, women, out of the way in favor of other axes of oppression. Also, the author insists against all evidence that trans women are subject to the same levels of oppression that women are, and uses the godawful term ciswomen once or twice. Not awful, possibly just enough to cool the fires from activists that might target her otherwise. The main complaint is that there are a few interesting pieces of data she throws out there but leaves unexplored. One of these is the research that discovered white women tend to have more unexpressed anger and lower self-esteem than women of color...why is this? There is little to indicate the author knows, or cares. She breezes by that, introducing it as an interesting statistic that then goes away, never to be mentioned again. This is sort of like going to a movie and only getting to see the trailer. Perhaps since she is not a white woman herself, she felt she was not qualified to explain that, though my best guess is that no one is asking that question, so research on the whys has not been done. Otherwise, a book I would highly recommend, and not only to women who need to know that it's okay to be angry, but also to men who need to know that women's anger is justified in many cases, and that it is no more invalid than men's anger.… (altro)