These dark, uncertain times demand our full attention, compassion, and capacity to endure beyond what we previously thought we could endure. And by this I do not mean passive suffering or some sick, masochistic hair-shirt sort of endurance. Nor do I mean resilience, the saccharine notion that the human body, the human psyche, and even entire communities (or countries) can be like heated metal—stressed and stretched but not broken—that they can bounce back, return to steady state, and perhaps be stronger and wiser for the experience?
Paul Farmer, physician and global health expert, reminds us that, “The capacity to suffer is, clearly, part of being human. But not all suffering is equal, in spite of pernicious and often self-serving identity politics that suggest otherwise.” (1)
Trauma never happens in isolation. An individual trauma ripples outwards as well as inwards. Suffering from trauma is always a social process; recovering from trauma is always a social process.
Resilience, either from an individual or a community (or country as we are now facing), even if it were possible, would it be desirable? If most traumas, most disasters, are at least partially caused by and certainly compounded by social (in)justice issues, do we want to return to normal, to the status quo after our worlds, our bodies, our communities have been shaken to the foundations, have been seared by fire, have been permanently altered and scarred? Skirting close to the danger of glorifying trauma, of feeding an addiction to the pain and suffering so overly abundant in our world, is the recognition that individual and community healing “means repair but it also means transformation—transformation to a different moral state.” (2) And it means enduring, going on, doing what we can individually and collectively to transform the world for the better.
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Adapted from my book manuscript for Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins.
Sources for quotes:
- Paul Farmer. “On suffering and structural violence: a view from below.” In: Violence in War and Peace. Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). pp 281-289. Quote is from p. 288.
- Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction,” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, ed., Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 23. (Quote is from “Introduction” pp. 1-30. Quote is from p. 23)
See also: Arthur Kleinman, “The art of medicine: how we endure” The Lancet. January 11, 2014. Vol 383. pp 119-120.
Re: “Endurance Test.” The critique of resilience is, to me, a crucial issue. I hope this column will instigate a much-needed discussion. In favour of resilience, medical/care workers have to work in present circumstances, and doing that requires being resilient. But, I constantly see health-care conference programs with sessions on resilience, and nothing on resistance. Too often professional culture accepts the ideology of fixing the individual, rather than going after the source of the problem. Thanks for raising this vital issue.