This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Resilience Myth with Soraya Chemaly | 249

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Resilience has become a buzzword in today’s culture, thrown around by influencers, coaches, and even bootcamp instructors, all insisting we need to “push through” no matter the cost. But is resilience always the healthiest path forward? Does mental toughness, positivity, and grit serve us in the ways we think—or is there more nuance to uncover? In this episode, Nicole connects with Soraya Chemaly, activist and author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma. Together, they challenge conventional ideas about resilience and explore a new way of thinking—one that shifts from individual grit to collective care and community connection. Soraya’s previous book, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, was widely acclaimed and named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the Washington Post, NPR, and Psychology Today. This conversation offers insight into what really matters: kindness, compassion, belonging, and care—for ourselves and each other. It’s time to rethink resilience as more than just strength in isolation and embrace what it looks like to thrive, together. Connect With Our Guest: Soraya Chemaly Website: https://www.sorayachemaly.com/  Book: https://www.sorayachemaly.com/books  Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/  Related Podcast Episodes: How to Ask for Help with Dr. Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer Stress Less and Fear(Less) with Rebecca Heiss Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

I am Nicole Kalil, and you are listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. If you're a regular listener, you know that you can always count on me to bring a few things to the table. My stalker-like obsession with confidence, my unapologetic enthusiasm for cheese, and my general disdain for one-size-fits-all solutions and buzzwords. Friend, I experience actual physical discomfort when I hear certain words, and since I have zero poker face, you can actually see the exasperation and the physical restraint of keeping my eyes from rolling into the back of my head when somebody utters these words in my presence.

And let me be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of the words. In fact, they've probably all done more good than harm. They're probably more right than wrong and are more often well-intentioned than not. So it's not the words that I take issue with, it's the use of them. I cringe when these terms are tossed around like catch-all solutions to complex issues, stripped of their depth, power,

and nuance. Words like self-care, mental toughness, servant leadership, grind, manifest, accountability, empowerment, and today's buzzword, resilience. To be clear, and so you don't go running to your manifesting servant mental self-care coach to rat me out, I am not against these concepts, quite the opposite. I believe in their power, which is why it frustrates me to see them both trivialized and force-fed down our throats. Resilience, for example, has been hijacked by influencers and coaches to the point where it feels like a weapon. A red-faced boot camp instructor screaming at us to be resilient as if pushing through

pain is always the healthiest choice or without fail the best advice. So is resilience always the answer? And does it mean what we think it does? Do strength, mental fortitude, and positivity serve us as women, as humans, the way everyone claims they do? Or is it possible that things are just a little more nuanced than we like to preach? Here to challenge our thinking about resilience is Soraya Shamali, an activist and award-winning author of The Resilience Myth, New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, a thought-provoking exploration that challenges our most dearly held common myths of resilience and urges us to shift our perspective

from prioritizing individualized traits and skills to uplifting collective care and open-ended connections with our communities. Her first book, Rage Becomes Her, The Power of Women's Anger, was recognized as the best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and NPR, and her work is featured widely in media, documentaries, books, and academic research. Soraya, as you can probably tell, I'm more than a little fired up to have this conversation and thrilled that you agreed to be on the show. So let me first ask what you believe to be problematic about how resilience has become everybody's favorite go-to tool in their success toolkit? Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me on your show and for this delightful welcome. I feel pretty much the way you just

described about this word and problem. I think the main problem is that the word has become so expansive, so all purpose, that it really has lost meaning. And in that way, it kind of has become a container, a container for stereotypes, a container for dominant ideologies, a container for, as I sort of tried to explain in the book, for perpetuating a really unsustainable, unhealthy status quo. Our relationships are tied to the way our society regulates institutions and resources. And without personal individual control over any of those things, we are being held through this ideology of resilience responsible for it all. And so I think we need to take a step back and say, what is good about resilience? What's toxic about resilience? What do we want from it? We kind of make resilience what we need it to be in different eras in our history and in different contexts.

You know, it's one thing in climate change. It's another thing in education. It's another thing in personal self-care. So this is just, as you said, a way of stepping back and saying, let's look at this again. Let's really think hard about what we want and what we mean. Okay, so let's do that with your guidance. What is good about resilience? And what are we actually talking about here? I know in your book, you kind of go to the etymology and the history of the word. So if you could give us from your research and your insights, what you believe to be the parts of resilience that we should hold on to? Well, in terms of the etymology, what was really kind of funny and fascinating is that the first use of the word in the English language that has been documented is in a letter written

on behalf of Henry VIII to argue for divorce from his first wife. And the idea was that he could return, interesting way to think of returning from a trauma, his first wife, his marriage, but he could return to his original state. That idea of returning to a previous state is still inherent in our idea of resilience. But over time, the word resilience was applied to, in a scientific way, to material. So the resilience of matter, the resilience of steel, the resilience of tree trunks, you know, that idea that it can bend but not break. And that was then used to describe people who had experienced hardship and yet managed to have happy, fulfilled, purposeful lives, particularly children who faced adversity. And so you could see it migrate from one discipline to another until in the 70s,

it was taken up in system science to describe the resilience of ecologies. And so at that point, it became a more kind of interdisciplinary idea that then went on to be used in virtually every discipline, psychology, climate change, banking, education, sports, the military. I mean, there is no limit, and this is part of the problem, to the applications for this idea that things should not break but bend back, or in more recent parlance, things should be anti-fragile. And that's actually it. I think that's the part, is the anti-fragile, the bend but not break, but somehow we're supposed to talk about neither the bending or the potential breaking, but the happiness and fulfilling and strength that comes after the fact. There's also

what you said, the return to previous state. Is that even a possibility? It's not, right? Right. Okay. It just isn't. I even argued with my editor because I didn't want to say in the subtitle of the book, after trauma. I really struggle with that because in fact, what I'm saying in the book is, first, you cannot return to a previous state. Second, even if you could, it probably wasn't that good to begin with for most people if they were in a condition of harm, right? If they were in a situation that was out of their control or that perhaps, which is the third point, was historic. If in the context of your life, you didn't have one event that you would bounce back from, but rather circumstances of hardship and poverty and

abuse, what are you supposed to return to? And so that framing, I think, really hurts us in our understanding of what we need to do as a society to help people be well and thrive and find peace. And that's the ultimate thing that we're talking about, or I think people are trying to talk about on the other side of resilience, is the happiness, the success, the being at peace, the getting what you want. Finding meaning, finding purpose in life, reducing mental distress, being healthy. Like people have very different goals for what they mean by resilience. You know, in education, there's a very problematic goal, which is that kids should get good grades.

And so all of a sudden in schools, for example, resilience is equated with high performance. But kids who are performing well aren't necessarily well. They aren't necessarily healthy. They aren't necessarily safe. They aren't actually resilient. They're just capable of delivering on this particular product of resilience that we've identified as desirable. It's anecdotal, but that speaks to my experience. I often did relatively well in school naturally. Yes. I didn't have to work very hard or study very hard. I can remember getting an A on a book assignment that I didn't even read the book. And I had to learn a skill later on in life. It did not happen just because I was getting good grades. There was no correlation, basically, is what I'm saying.

There was no correlation. And a lot of kids, and I think this is important because as a society, we're starting to understand adverse childhood experiences, which are called ACEs, right? And over 65% of Americans have adverse childhood experiences. And if you are a woman, and if you are of color or marginalized in another way, you have four or more ACEs. And the more ACEs you have, the higher the probability that you will have poor outcomes over the course of your life. So that's important science. But a lot of kids who are going through adverse childhood experiences, they actually become protective of those around them. And so, for example, in order to reduce stress at home, they will be excellent students.

They will be prototypical good girls. all of the things to kind of ensure that they are not causing more stress that will then create more adverse experiences in their own homes or communities. Okay. I want to ask about some of these common myths of resilience or maybe their terms. I think of like self-help or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You mentioned toxic positivity. What are some of the more common myths of resilience that we should be questioning or at the very least considering that you think are problematic? Each chapter focuses on a different myth. And so I start with the myth of strength, which is totally ill-defined and super masculinized, right? It's this idea of mental fortitude, rationality, distance from emotions. And we never really define it. Like what I ask is, okay, so we have some big notion of strength. It's resilient people are strong. We don't actually

ever really say what that means, but we all pretend we know what that means, right? And so in the absence of clarity, we end up with this very masculine ideal of sort of a faux stoicism that you don't complain, that you aren't emotional, maybe, right? That you're self-sufficient. And none of those things in and of themselves help us be resilient. Very often, particularly in gendered ways, women are doing the care work and the emotional labor that allows a lot of men to feel independent and self-sufficient, that allows those men to feel strong and emotionally stoic. Because actually, they've outsourced that very difficult work to other people. They are in fact dependent on those people. Another example that I use is that we

don't think in terms of women's strengths. So women are particularly good at endurance, right? Women can run 99% of the time in an ultra marathon, women will beat men's times. But we don't think of women as beating men in races because the way we think of races are short and fast or maybe marathons where women don't necessarily do as well. But if you went beyond the point of a typical marathon, women would start doing better and better and men would stop doing better and better. So was that a kind of strength? Women live longer, girl babies survive more. I mean, there are all of these things that might suggest strength, but we don't think of them as resilience. So that I would say is a myth, this myth of amorphous strength. And then yes, toxic positivity, because in fact, there are all of these biases that we have with positivity that

result in our ignoring pragmatic truths, ignoring limits, and not necessarily planning well for the future. So as an alternative to that, I suggest strategic pessimism, which allows you to think honestly about the circumstances. You don't lose hope because you're actually planning for change, but you're being realistic about risks and you're deciding, you're making a plan, which is much more resilient than just crossing your fingers and being optimistic. And then I think there's a third big myth, which is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which really comes out of a warlike mentality, a conflict mindset, a survival of the fittest ethos. And in fact, that's not really true. Positive experiences also make you stronger, but nobody talks about that, right? The thing is, if you keep experiencing hardship, your likelihood of experiencing traumatic stress or poor physical outcomes increases. It

doesn't get less because you keep having harder and harder things happen to you. And so I think that's a really destructive myth, you know? I think, sure, it's really good to manage disappointment and understand limits. But again, everything has its limits, right? You can't just think, well, the more pain I experience, also a very Christian idea, right? That you suffer and then you are rewarded in some way in the afterlife, for example. That's not how trauma works. It's not how resilience works. Okay. So as you were talking, so many different thoughts were going through my head, and I'm going to rattle them off and they might seem disjointed, but you're right. This idea of strength, that's nebulous. We don't even really know what we're talking about, but so often I see resilience and maybe it's just who I'm looking at or what I'm seeing, but

resilience tied with physical strength. Absolutely. Almost so much where people are using physical strength as a way to build mental and emotional resilience. Does that work? And how much does it work? Because I also think sometimes I'm like, some of us are dealing with things that are hard enough as it is. We don't need to go out and like push our bodies to the limit to try to practice resilience. It feels almost privilege thing to me where it's like, I don't have enough aces. So I'm just gonna go and push my body to the max to build resilience,

as opposed to building resilience through life's challenges and hardships and traumas. And again, I know we're not gonna go out looking for those things or desiring those things. Where do you see a connection or do you see connection with physical strength and even endurance and our resilience? Right. Well, first of all, there's no doubt that there is an ideology of resilience that is based on a person's capacity to absorb pain, physical pain, and to overcome. And so I write about

Ernest Shackleton, the Arctic explorer, because he is, if there's any person that embodies masculine resilience, it is him, right? Goes literally into a disaster and overcomes incredible, like incredible physical deprivation, and yet manages to rescue all of his men, keep everybody alive and get out after months and months and even years of this expedition. And so that becomes an ideal, right? You see Ernest Shackleton being used in schools by the military and corporate programming at conferences. And that's the ideal, that it's a combination of brute physical strength and the mental toughness and optimism and faith. Those are his qualities. So much so, he is such an avatar for this that his own personal qualities were included in the most used international scale of resilience. They include optimism and faith

because Ernest Shackleton had optimism and faith, which is really quite stunning, right? But having said all of that, what I want to focus on is this idea of mental toughness, because that I think is what you're saying, right? And in fact, when we talk about physical strength, ultimately, we're talking about power of mind over matter. You use your mental toughness to overcome the weakness of the body, right? And if you think about even the phrase mental toughness, its inversion is physical frailty. So first of all, there's a deep ableism in that, that people who can't be and aren't physically strong can't be resilient in that way. That's one thing. disdaining the body. And when we do, we're disdaining people associated with bodies, like women, and in our history, like black people and indigenous peoples. And we're disdaining the needs of the body, which are human. We all have needs. We're disdaining our fragility, our frailty, our interdependence. And we're essentially saying we're not going to look,

we're not going to talk, we're not going to think about the material reality of our lives. And so if you say to everybody, you can just be mentally tough, you don't have to talk so much about social safety nets, or clean water, or community care, or safe environments, because you can just hold people as individuals responsible for powering through and doing what they need to do to be self-sufficient. Okay. So thank you for that. So many things going through my mind and it speaks to what I feel to be true as well. So what does help us be resilient? When you said about the myths, you said those don't help us be resilient. So what does? So there are lots of good dimensions of the things that I've categorized as myths, right?

Optimism does help people, but maybe not for the reasons we think. So for example, optimistic people might have a rosier sense of the future, but optimistic people often have personalities that attract other people, which means that they have people around them who they are connected to, who they can rely on, right? We don't think about that as a key component of optimism and outcomes or take grit. We have really taken the idea of grit and run through the goalposts with it, right? Grit is taken by many people as an unquestioned good. You know, just be grittier, you know, just keep doing the work, just persevere. But Angela Duckworth, who wrote a viral book about grit in 2013 or 14, she herself 10 years later, when asked, what has changed in your thinking?

She says, I used to think that gritty people were self-sufficient individuals. But what she has learned is that what really gives people who are gritty the advantage, the resilience advantage that they have is that they know when to rely on other people. They know how to find those people. They are very strategic about how to be dependent in good ways, you know? And so over and over again, what we come back to is that in, when we emphasize the hyper-individuality, when we emphasize the self-contained mind-based strength, we are minimizing care, connection, interdependence, love, mutual regard, all the things that we as a species evolved to have, the things that have enabled us to evolve to this point, it isn't lone wolf resilience, it's collective care.

And so what I try and move through in the book is this shift one from one paradigm of hyper individualism to another, which is of mutual care and understanding the infinite ways in which we rely on mutual care and interdependence without ever recognizing it, even in our bodies, like chapter two is about how we're in we're persons, but we are actually interpersons, right? We are relating to each other physically in ways we're just starting to understand, just a little bit, you know, and the potential for what that represents, I think, is immense. Mm-hmm. So can you give us some examples of how this mutual care in the form of resilience might look or play out? Sure. I mean, I think the best example actually comes from the way indigenous communities have

adapted to 400 years of colonization and this sort of evisceration of their cultures and traditions and resources and the levels of community dissolution and mental health issues and sexual violence in a lot of indigenous communities are epidemic. in that people might be told, well, go get therapy, right? Individualized, psychoanalytic, behavioral cognitive therapy, where they would have to change themselves. That would be a typical response. And yet practitioners well-versed in Western medicine and psychiatry, but also coming from indigenous cultures, realized that was insufficient. And that in order to lift any individual in their community, the entire community had to be involved. And in fact, the community itself had the tools to build resilience through culture, through music, through shared stories, through collective grieving, through historical processes. That's a very different model, right? And it's important to look at how different it is and why it's important. It's funny because I think that people who have more power take a lot for granted, like institutions that validate them, you know, but if you don't have

institutions that validate you, people who look like you, your history, your notions of how we relate, then what are you left with culturally, right? You, you really don't have meaning in your life that the wider society recognizes. And so that development of belonging and the development of reciprocal respect and dignity are collective resources. We deny some people those resources while overcompensating with other people, you know. And I think that that's a pretty good example. I think it's a great example. And I think, as you said, belonging is easier for some than it is for others. For those, it may not be easy for, or it's just not already existing and support. What might you recommend of how to find or create that? Well, you know, this is so interesting. I've

thought so much about this in terms of women in the workplace. There are lots of sectors that are hostile to women. Tech is one, finance is another. I love it when people say male-dominated industries. I'm like, which ones are not male-dominated except for the proto-maternal ones, right? Nursing, healthcare, teaching, administrative work. Those are all extensions of maternal functions where norms are structured, are hostile to women feeling that they are recognized, that their needs are institutionalized, that the relationships that they have are respected, right? We know this already. We know that it's virtually impossible to be a parent and healthy and work.

Those three things are mutually incompatible right now if you're a woman particularly. And so the question about belonging cuts across everything. It's about our stories. It's about our built spaces. It's about our laws. It's about our science. And I know that can feel overwhelming, but in fact, it's about ultimately narrative. What stories do we tell ourselves in the process of building our society? You know, what stories do we tell about workers, about parents, about what counts as real work? Do we pay people who work or not? We get to decide. It's our culture.

And right now, we're in the middle of a really big conflict over who decides and in what ways, particularly when it comes to gendered relationships. The word that kept popping up as you were talking is curiosity. It's something that I am trying to lead with in my own paradigms and thought processes. And when I hear certain words, just to be curious about them and not take them for granted or just buy into. I have to ask this one question because it's what led me to you. A friend of mine, Liz, lost her beloved mother and is in the heartbreak of it. And she has just been so brave in sharing her journey. And one of the things that she said was she hates how people say she's so strong and she's so resilient as she's

going through this heartbreak. There was another woman who shared a similar story after losing her husband and she had mentioned your book. Long story short, that's what had me diving deep into your work. And so as it relates to resilience, why is it or when is it maybe not the best thing? When does it not help people to tell them to be resilient or that they're strong?

What do we do when people are in the times where strength and resilience may not be either available or the healthiest choice in that moment? You know, I've never personally, even before I came to the point of writing this book, I've never really understood telling someone they're being strong. I'm like, what does it do? What does it get them? And I've come to the conclusion that telling somebody they're being strong is more about the person saying it than the person hearing it. Because, in fact, one of the effects of telling someone they're being strong is to essentially convey some sense of you don't need too much from me. So instead of saying you're so strong, one alternative is what you're going through is so difficult.

What can I do? What do you need? Those are very different approaches to this situation, right? And I think a lot about domestic violence, intimate violence, because so often the women in those circumstances, and it is primarily women, I understand that it can work in many ways, but the women going through this are told, you can be strong for the family, or you can be strong, he's really good in the end, or whatever it may be. But being resilient becomes very important. And we see that in spades in religious communities, where the woman is expected to somehow be strong for the good of the institution of the family, right? But in fact,

that actively endangers those women. It puts them into environments of harm where they are being gaslit, where they are facing true physical violence, where they are facing emotional and financial abuse. And so again, the question is, what do you want to achieve by telling someone they're strong that way? And I don't think there's much good that comes out of it. I really don't. I think there are many better alternatives to doing that. Maybe one last question to tie into that is when is it okay?

And I don't even know if that's the right way to frame it. But there are times where we're not strong. Absolutely. Where we're not resilient. Where it's not even the best available choice for us in those moments. What are some things that we might want to be mindful of, or that could be choices on the road to resilience? Right. Well, one thing is the overwhelming majority of us are resilient. We do. Yeah, we're here. We're here. And we experience

adversity and hardship. And we come out on the other end and eventually find purpose and meaning and happiness, actually. And so it's important to note that resilience, unlike our myths, is not exceptional. Our media particularly loves depicting resilience as the outcome of an exceptional person doing exceptional things. But in fact, it's unexceptional, which is why in the book, I say what we should be focusing on is what as a society are we doing that actually hurts people's natural ability to be resilient? What is it about the way our society is organized that is causing so much harm in defiance of the fact that we are innately built to be resilient, right? So that's thing number one. The second thing too is I think a lot about time and I write a lot about time

because we live in an accelerated technological and social environment and speed is valued in modernity. And we're supposed to bounce back as fast as possible. And we are not very patient with ourselves or with other people. And resilience doesn't care. Adaptation does not care. Our long-term adaptation does not care about clock time, does not care about work time. It's going to take the time it takes. You cannot force it to happen. And so self-compassion and patience and patience for other people, I think, is really essential. And the other thing, the third thing is being resilient over time isn't linear. It comes in fits and starts. You might take two steps forward, one step back. You know, you might experience things

cyclically. You might grieve for years and it's terrible and sad, but then you're okay. There's really no one size fits all model for this. And which is why I go back in the end again to thinking about the fact that the opposite of resilience isn't as we learn weakness or fragility. It is loneliness. That's a completely different way of thinking about it. If you think I can, I can experience a lot of horrible things. If I am loved, if I have my friends, if I have my community, if I know the people I trust, if I honestly, if my society is providing for me in a way we don't, if my society is making sure that I won't be unhoused, that I won't be imprisoned because of my mental illness, that I will have medical care. I mean, there are societies that provide those things, but ours is

not one of them. And I would argue that our resilience mythology contributes to that problem. The individualism, right? The individualism, right? your time. This has been fascinating. I know people are going to want to get your book. So I'm going to remind you it's the resilience myth. Uh, we'll put the link in show notes. Um, if you go to Amazon fine, but let me just remind you local bookstores, let's keep them in business. Soraya again, thank you so much. Well, thank you so much, Nicole. It was really delightful to talk to you. All right. As we do on this podcast, I'm going to ask us to question, or at the very least consider the buzzwords and phrases that we take for granted that are being tossed around as if they're a foregone conclusion, an answer to all of our problems, and a would-be secret to success if everybody wasn't already talking about them. From woman's work to confidence, what it means to be strong, and what it feels and looks like to be resilient. Let's question what we think we know

and also learn when it's okay to not be those things. There are lots of ways to grow and create success, tactics that we can try, but where and with who can you just be and practice the things that really matter? Kindness, patience, compassion, belonging, and care for yourself and for others. Be resilient with and for one another. Together, that is woman's work.