Promoting Resilience

Responding to Adversity, Vulnerability, and Loss

Neil Thompson, Gerry R. Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429614590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Promoting Resilience offers a fresh perspective that views resilience through a sociological lens, emphasizing the significance of loss issues and highlighting a range of practice implications across a wide range of fields.

Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of contributors, the book provides a solid foundation for developing a fuller and more holistic picture of the many challenges associated with promoting resilience. Chapters present a range of sociological perspectives that cast light on trauma and vulnerability. Combining theoretical richness with practical insights, chapter authors bring a sociological lens to enrich understanding of loss and adversity.

This volume offers a bedrock of understanding for students, clinicians, and researchers who want to extend and deepen their knowledge of the sociological aspects of overcoming life challenges.

Part I

Understanding Resilience

Introduction to Part I

Part One consists of an extended essay that is intended to set the scene for the range of chapters that comprise Part Two. In this essay we seek to argue and illustrate the case for a much broader understanding of resilience than is currently captured by the existing literature. While individual, psychological factors are clearly at play and no doubt have a very significant role to play, we feel the need to emphasize the point that there are also sociological factors to take into account. Indeed, an understanding of resilience that limits itself to psychological factors without also exploring the role of the social context will be a partial and potentially misleading understanding.

Our focus in Part One is therefore very much on how sociological issues have a part to play in making sense of resilience and, therefore, in promoting greater levels of resilience where possible. However, that is not the only point we want to stress. As experienced and established scholars in the fields of thanatology and of loss and grief more broadly, we are well aware that there is a close association between the major challenges of grief and the role of resilience in rising to those challenges. We therefore see close linkages between resilience as part of a framework for coping with adversity and life challenges, and grief as so often, if not the source of such challenges, an important component of them. Consequently, a key part of the message we seek to put across is the need for a fuller recognition of the interrelationship between resilience and coping on the one hand and loss and grief as major challenges on the other.

What serves as an important linking thread between these two sets of issues is vulnerability. Grief is strongly characterized by a powerful sense of vulnerability and insecurity, while resilience can be understood as a way of coping with or managing that vulnerability by “bouncing back” to a position of greater security, confidence and coping. We regard vulnerability as an important existential concept that needs to be understood both psychologically and sociologically.

Papadatou’s (2009) concept of being “vulnerable enough” is a useful notion in this regard. She argues:

Vulnerability is not a trait that we possess or lack. It is a lived experience that unfolds in novel, stressful, or threatening situations and exists on a continuum. We experience ourselves as more or less vulnerable when we accompany people through loss, separation, and bereavement… . The factors that determine our vulnerability at a given time and its effects upon caregiving are many: personal, interpersonal, work related, and social.

(p. 93)

Being “vulnerable enough” refers to finding a balance between being too vulnerable (and thus potentially disabled by vulnerability) and feeling “invulnerable” which means being unrealistic about the risk involved in the situations we are engaged with, and thereby neglecting self-care. Being “vulnerable enough” can therefore be understood as part of resilience, a core ingredient in a sense.

We are by no means offering a comprehensive review of the concept of resilience and related matters, but what we do hope we will have achieved in writing Part One is a foundation for further learning, a platform for broadening and deepening our understanding, a significant source of food for thought and a contribution to the major challenges human services professionals face in attempting to promote and capitalize upon resilience.

Figure 1.1 Resilience as a response to adversity, vulnerability, loss and grief

1 Making Sense of Resilience

Gerry R. Cox and Neil Thompson

Resilience is generally understood as a feature of our response to adversity, the ability to recover from the ups and downs that life presents and to be able to have increased hope, reduced stress, greater spirituality, plus more positivity in the face of the challenges of life. Resilience can be seen to arise in situations characterized by people being called upon to face financial crises, job loss, aging, losing their home in a fire or natural disaster, war and thousands of other such testing scenarios. Key to understanding resilience is vulnerability. Indeed, resilience can be understood as largely a question of how we manage our experiences of vulnerability. It is a part of the existential challenge of coping with what Sartre (2003) calls the “contingency of being,” by which he means the relative lack of guarantees and the constant exposure to a range of risks as a core element of human experience.

Underpinning the notions of both resilience and vulnerability is loss, although its significance is not always appreciated. The existential challenges that we need resilience to help us deal with will generally include no small amount of loss and thus be a source of grief. The loss of a sense of security is just one aspect of how loss and grief feature in situations characterized by vulnerability and a need for resilience. Similarly, losing a sense of normality and the trust and reassurance associated with it is likely to feature. We shall return to both these points below.

Life involves a series of losses. Bereavement is just one such loss, but there will also be other significant losses (such as the ending of a relationship or indeed any major life change). Using loss and grief as a way of studying resilience can be found in such fields as psychology, theology and other important areas of study. To these the approach of sociology can add a different lens to the study of resilience. Sociology can help us to appreciate the value of a wider conception of resilience that goes beyond the personality characteristics of the individual.

The ability to become resilient in the face of grief and bereavement mirrors the ability to become resilient in the face of other losses and associated challenges that occur in our lives. Those who are able to withstand the loss of jobs, financial crises, danger, disasters and other such challenges are more likely to be resilient in the face of death and bereavement, and vice versa. This is one of the main reasons why an individualistic, traits-based approach to resilience is inadequate, as it fails to recognize that there will be significant variation in terms of (i) the social circumstances surrounding the experience of adversity; (ii) the differing loss issues involved; and (iii) the factors (psychological and sociological) that will play a part in shaping the individual’s response to the grief challenges faced.

Resilience, then, can be understood as the basis for coping not only with adversity in general but also with loss and grief issues in particular, as these latter issues are never far away from matters involving distress and suffering. In turn, human vulnerability can be understood as serving as the linking thread between them. One of the points we want to emphasize here is that resilience, loss and grief, and vulnerability are all closely interrelated. To develop a fuller understanding of resilience, we therefore need to be alert to the role of loss, grief and vulnerability in shaping how resilience is used, developed and, at times, blocked. We begin by considering the significance of adversity.

Facing Adversity

Adversity is, of course, not a new phenomenon. There are many similarities between today and the past. For example, the 14th century was characterized by upheaval, change, insecurity, and fear concerning the future. While this was the beginning of the Renaissance, it was also the time in which much of the security of the Middle Ages was coming to an end. It was a time of many wars, natural disasters, famine, sickness (including the Black Plague), corruption, decadence, bribery, and fear for the future. Not only was there no answer to the Black Plague, but cities were filling with people with no jobs and few skills, and homelessness led to crime and destruction of property. While the people of today would view themselves as more enlightened than those of the 14th century, many of the anxieties, concerns, and fears that plagued those of the past still exist today. Poverty, oppression, homelessness, wars, hostilities between nations, ethnic cleansing, marginalization, political corruption, greed, materialism, economic domination and extreme nationalism still exist. Today, new problems of global warming, AIDS, drugs, potential nuclear annihilation, cyber threats and ecological destruction loom on the horizon. Polarization threatens the very structure of the political system and society. Yet, resilience, where it can be developed, enables people today, as in the 14th century, to manage to face the uncertain future with hope and effort to make the world a better place by promoting greater levels of safety, health and well-being.

Resilience enables people to develop self-knowledge. This is not simply introspection, nor is it merely a psychological self-understanding, but rather it is a knowledge of self gained by understanding our place in our family, community, society, nation, ethnic group, work organization and so forth—it therefore has a sociological as well as a psychological dimension. By understanding our place in the social world in terms of culture, social location and so on, we can come to appreciate our own dignity and reason for living. Resilience is generally characterized by people having a sense of purpose (for example, in knowing why they need to get up in the morning) and having an awareness of their obligations not only to themselves, but also to the wider realm of families, community and society, which again highlights the need for a sociological perspective to be brought to bear.

Responding to Disasters

Often social situations will create the social circumstances for resilience to emerge and be developed. For example, emergency workers, such as firefighters, police and other first responders, are called upon to make use of resilience in their daily work, constantly engaging in difficult, demanding and threatening situations. Disaster scenarios are particularly significant instances of such situations.

They are also examples of how making sense of resilience needs to involve considering loss and grief issues, as so many loss issues will arise in such circumstances. Firefighters who deal with disasters, both natural and human, are expected to respond effectively to floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados and other “acts of God.” Chemical spills, airplane crashes, nuclear contamination, terrorist attacks and so forth are human made, and, in such scenarios, firefighters are likely to face human losses of all types. Being able to adopt a resilient approach in such extreme conditions can serve as a model for many types of challenging situations across a range of contexts.

There is a tendency for people to be drawn to disasters, both at the time and later (as illustrated by the concept of “dark tourism,” which refers to how scenes of tragedy can subsequently become a form of tourist attraction—Dermody, 2017). If there is a wreck or a fire, many will gather to observe and perhaps help. Many people will go to the scene of a chemical spill to see what is going on or to a fire or wreck or other such incident which may endanger themselves and others, thereby creating problems in many different ways. There is something intriguing about a disaster situation that brings to the fore human vulnerability and the contingency of which Sartre wrote.

Emergency workers are trained to cope with disasters of all sorts. What they are not necessarily trained to manage is the how to cope with the aftermath of disaster. This would include taking account of, and addressing, the vulnerability and insecurity generated by such situations. This is, of course, where resilience can be a significant feature.

Preventative efforts are limited in most cases, and so the main focus tends to be on what can be done after the fact. The disaster has an impact on both survivors and first responders. Some may be injured, missing, or may even have been killed. The people involved are likely to be in a state of shock, uncertain of what to do or where to go, not sure about the safety and well-being of loved ones, or even their own future. A profound sense of despair can emerge, an existential aloneness. What can be done to help? All of these scenarios involve a loss of security and normality—they introduce what sociologists call “anomie,” an uncomfortable and disquieting sense of “normlessness” (Durkheim, 2002) in which our everyday sense of reality (“homeostasis,” to use another technical term) breaks down and leaves us feeling very vulnerable.

Of course, emergency workers know that they must attend to immediate needs first: food, shelter, medical treatment, restoring community services. Emotional needs can easily be forgotten in the pressure of the moment. Ministering to the needs might include forming a missing persons group to help alleviate the anxieties of survivors worried about the safety and well-being of relatives and friends. Locating and caring for the dead is another form of ministry. While it may not make sense to dig up the dead and bury them again, it is critical for survivors to know and to have the appropriate rituals and ceremonies. Emergency workers are probably already doing these things. It is also important to know that what survivors may need most is compassion. Just as police officers want to get the facts of the crime and may neglect the emotions of victims, firefighters can easily neglect the emotional needs of victims in their zeal to “do their job.” Of course, they know that it may take years to return to financial and emotional stability following a disaster, but what happens immediately can have a major impact on that journey.

Another side of the picture is that those who come to the aid of survivors have their own needs that are typically not met. Caring for the caregiver is often lost as well. A number of years ago, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City had a walkway collapse, killing hundreds of people. Bodies were cut in half, decapitated and maimed. A chain saw was used to amputate a critically injured man’s leg. The firefighters and police worked professionally and sensitively, saving many and helping many. Later many of these workers had severe emotional problems. A number resigned from their jobs. Even people with a high level of resilience can struggle to maintain their ability to face loss if the demands placed on them are intense and/or prolonged enough—there are limits to resilience.

When a fire or other disaster occurs, people can grieve twice. They have lost loved ones, but they may have lost their home, place of employment or other such important things as well. They may also grieve because they survived and a loved one did not. Why was it not me instead of them? Profound guilt, anguish and sorrow are common among both workers and survivors. Such mental anguish often leads to self-destructive behavior, such as drugs, drink or even suicide. In a sense, this reflects an absence of resilience, a continuing struggle to deal with the emotional challenges involved. Disaster situations are therefore significant sites of concern when it comes to promoting resilience.

Enter Sociology

The topic of resilience has become a fashionable buzzword in the study of human distress, including the field of loss and grief. For example, in recent years, the importance of resilience and resilient responses has been recognized in the study of responses to bereavement (Rubin, Malkinson, & Witztum, 2012). Because most of the research and writing on the topic has a psychological basis, the sociological approach has not come to the forefront. While there is a legitimate and valuable need for study of individuals’ psychological reactions to adverse life experiences, such scholarship can be enhanced by the inclusion of a consideration of social factors and their influence upon reactions to adversity for individuals, groups and communities in general, and grief and its management in particular. The individual’s psychological reaction is shaped to a large extent by a host of social influences and constraints, including structural factors (ethnicity, nationality, gender, region, religion, social status, income, occupation and education and so on), as well as a range of significant cultural issues. While individual factors are clearly important, we need to understand them in the context of wider cultural and structural factors if we are to develop a fuller picture of resilience and thus be in a better position to promote it wherever possible (Thompson, 2018a).

Human behavior can be studied from many different perspectives. Sociology offers a unique “lens” for viewing and understanding resilience. It allows individuals to have a better awareness and broader underst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Editors and Contributors
• Resilience
• Part I Understanding Resilience
• Introduction
• Part II Developing Resilience
• Index