Linden Connects

Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. These are the words offered as synonyms for resilience. Take a moment and sit with the energy of those words in your body, even just reading them. How do you feel? (Seriously: how do you feel?)

I realize why people are tired of hearing the word. It's because we are tired.

All of these words have the energy of enduring, of standing in the face of an oncoming storm and holding one's ground, gritting one's teeth and buckling down and digging deep and efforting into the void, pretending like I am a stone and not a squishy meatsack with feelings and needs. Sometimes this stance is necessary, but it’s damn sure not sustainable.

What if resilience wasn't about efforting into the void? Withstanding and enduring and all that?

The way that I think about resilience, the way that I've come to understand it based on what I know about stress and trauma and the biology of our brilliant nervous systems is that it is less about enduring and more about the ways that we cultivate our capacity to stay engaged with the world and regulated in the face of all of its many challenges. When I facilitated social-emotional learning classes with high schoolers, one of the things that I would tell them is that it's not that the load gets lighter but that our backs get stronger. That is resilience.

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Resilience Isn’t What You Think — Linden Connects Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. There is a rigidity innate to these words, a hardness that evokes images of armored soldiers and exhausted mountaineers. To me, the message of these words is: work harder, try harder, keep going, do more. There is a ti