Why and for whom ‚resilience‘ as a core value can be dangerous.
Article 3 in the series on Perimenopause, Burnout & The Nervous System.
Live lecture on April 14th (online): Perimenopause Beyond Hormones – How Stability Shifts And How It Can Be Restored
We are taught that hyperresilience is a superpower. What midlife tends to make visible is: What we call resilience is often just the capacity to take a punch. And the body, right now, is asking to stop taking punches.
Resilience, at its root, means to resist well, under all kinds of pressure. The logic follows: reinforce, strengthen, become less breakable. And when something troubles you anyway, when you get irritated, when your capacity is not what it was, the conclusion the mind reaches, is: I am not strong enough yet. We can even get irritated at getting irritated.
This is two problems at once
A mind organised around pressure
A mind proactively oriented toward pressure (which it reads as threat to fail) is always occupied with threat. That state is called hypervigilance: a part of the mind permanently scanning, anticipating, preparing. With this disposition, we can never fully sit and enjoy and be in the moment. The mind automatically will go to some future situation: „If it’s nice now, then it might become less nice in five minutes, or next month, or tomorrow, or next year..!“
Such a mental reflex can come from trauma. From conditioning, from environments that made hypervigilance necessary. It is detrimental to our health, as it destabilises, increasingly, as the decades go by. The impact takes time to become visible, which is part of why it is so easy to miss until the 40’s arrive.
Hypervigilance had a function. It was a legitimate response to a real environment. The problem is that it cannot be sustained without replicating a chronically stressed environment: cortisol too activated, the nervous system never fully at rest.
When we then pursue resilience – more reinforcement, more capacity, bigger walls – we are working with the same logic as hypervigilance, not against it. We are holding the reinforcement instead of changing the underlying pattern.
The load, and the system producing it
If we accept that the answer to imbalance is always to strengthen ourselves, we stop seeing the other options: avoiding the stressor, ending it, being more honest about what we are and are not willing to carry.
On one hand, resilience can give agency: “I have a lot of load to bear, now it gets acknowledged how I am always required to be strong“, is held in that word resilience. But many people habitually accept that load, instead of looking at the system that causes the disproportionality of the load in the first place.
That system might be societal, structural, relational. It might also be internal. Maybe I was conditioned to accept that load.
Under the framing of a seemingly empowering word, we found a new flavour of self-abandonment. There is no mercy in a conglomerate of unlimited demands on oneself. No compassion in permanent insistence on being the one who can take it.
This matters particularly for BPoC, for people with complex PTSD, for people currently in perimenopause, and for neurodivergent people. The instruction to be strong correlates with a lifelong gaslighting, of allegedly being „too sensitive“. We have been told we are too sensitive when we were not hyperresilient. That is why I suggest caution using „resilience“ in the context of empowerment and self advancement.
My invitation, in response to this toxic automatism, is to self-solidarity:
With this conditioning in mind (hello merciless 1990’s), every time you have a desire to strengthen, check: Am I treating my body like a servant right now? Am I mentally talking down to myself? How many negative things have I told myself in the last 10 hours?
Temptation of Thicker walls
An endless reinforcement makes the walls thicker. It does not restore any balance, quite the opposite; something that is reinforced to the nth degree is shut off. And that is one of the temptations of resilience. A traumatised part may think: “I will reinforce so well that nothing can hurt me; then I am safe.” But doing that means ignoring the part that is afraid of getting hurt. Not showing compassion to that part, not validating it, not being with that part, and not educating it that now, these days, you are in charge, and the fear may no longer match the severity of the current situation.
In childhood, completely powerless indeed, anxiety and fear were about immediate survival. That is how the danger and the response to it got conditioned. It is how we grew up and hard-wired.
And it is possible to have one’s entire life arranged around avoiding a particular fear, which seems so abysmally horrible – because it once mirrored a real existential threat.
Attempting to avoid auch a fear costs a lot more than unlearning the connection between the reality of that dangerous situation back then and today. Unlearning in a neurological way and in a psychological way, maybe even in a spiritual way, and also in a relational way. Because involved in our pain and danger, were people.
Ironically, we always attract what we are most seeking to avoid. Hypothetical example: You don’t want to get hurt again, so you don’t open up, keep your real personality covered so that you cannot get deeply hurt … thus you are perceived as someone who cannot open up, people do not open up to you, and eventually spend more time with someone else who is more open. If that happened, you got hurt solely through the attempt to avoid precisely that hurt. Such is the mechanism with many different fears.
Resilience as identity
If we pride ourselves on being able to take a lot of pressure, or being less fragile than someone else, we may look down on somebody and say: “That one is already on the verge of collapse; I have been in much more difficult situations, they should pull themselves together.” This is dangerous, because this way, resilience becomes connected to our identity. Then it is difficult to admit when something is too much. But admitting when something is too much, is the only way to avoid accidents, a burnout, and amateurish planning. If I take on everything that comes, I am not being very strategic, and I am also not respecting my own time. How should people respect my time if I don’t respect my time?
Someone who is taking everything on, because they can, is locating themselves permanently in difficulty, as if that is the proper place for them to be.
You would not say to your best friend: “I think you should take on more random load that people have no business inflicting onto you, just accept it. And you should progressively get more load as you get more resilient. As you get stronger, you should waste more time, you do not deserve to feel light, and you also do not deserve to relax.” Would we say something like this to a friend? Of course not. But we say it to ourselves whenever we insist on being the strong one, when we take pride in being resilient.
The societal picture
This is particularly tricky in a society that rewards especially women and nonbinary people for always being the one who does not flinch under load. The ideal woman™: taking all the load, taking all the nonsense. She takes care of everything and has the managing job and arranges all the activities for all the children, and then she does the fundraiser, and she never complains. That is most important. She does also not get snappy or irritated or have mood swings. She is only strong. Not even an actual personality.
And what happens in perimenopause? Mood swings.
While resilience is the acceptable mode of being, how healthy is it, really, to accept such a one-dimensional fantasy character for oneself?
Another discussion will need to be whom this version actually serves, what concrete purpose that picture has in society.
It is very difficult to have full self-acceptance when nobody around you shows you that they accept you without hyperresilience. This is why letting go of it can never be a demand. Saying: „You have to be less resilient,“ would be cruel and clueless. Of course you have to be resilient.
I ask you however, to examine your relationship to that resilience, and the proportion of that resilience. Is your whole pride being resilient? Or do you hate being resilient? Or hate having to be resilient? Or is it ambivalent?
Just thinking about these things in all honesty with yourself, also allowing the scary thoughts (you need not admit them to anybody but yourself):
My wish to remain very resilient, what do I want to protect myself from? What exactly is it that I hope to never experience again? Is it a feeling? Is it abandonment or grief or terror? What exactly is it?
This inner dialogue alone, in an authentic and deeply honest way, will be able to guide you. Do reach out to whatever you want to call it, inner child, or vulnerable part of yourself, or hidden part behind the resilience – and initiate a loving conversation and exploration about this topic. It is your most valuable relationship and guidance. This will do more for your health than any amount of additional resilience. Especially over 40.
A note on longevity
In so called ‚midlife‘, the idea of resilience can become fanatic in the sense of longevity. Long life is of course not bad at all, but if it is about not accepting the process of ageing, we are just getting old, not mature.
The attitude “I really need to work out to strengthen my muscles and my bones now, so that later I don’t get osteoporosis and remain more stable if I fall” is brilliant, and necessary.
But if the resilience dialogue goes: “I need to meditate more, so that I am more even-minded the next time this person absolutely disregards my feelings, and I need to somehow harden myself against my own stress response”, this would not be a form of maturity.
Shall we reinforce some things? Yes, absolutely, always for health, sustainability, always in a gentle way. Never in a “I’m in denial of the normal ageing process” way. All the medicine, supplements, gym machines – if we use them for health, wonderful. If we use them from a sense of panic: dangerous. No hormone and no gym is capable of shielding us from the damage panic does to a nervous system and brain over 40.
Health as the capacity to feel
So far we have covered why hyperresilience is not the answer and not at all the same as health; and how to switch from “yeah, bring it on because I am so capable“ to “Actually, I’m quite friendly with myself now, and I can love and protect myself like a friend, like I also love and accept the limitations of my friend.”
Mental, psychological, and spiritual health is not primarily about the capacity to withstand external stressors. It is more about your capacity to feel; to be with your authentic self. That can indeed seem quite scary for some dispositions, but is in fact, once you do commit yourself to it, deeply enjoyable and liberating.
Read On In Series Perimenopause, Burnout & The Nervous System:
Video Playlist on Perimenopause, Burnout and Nervous System (english)
Live Talk “Perimenopause Beyond Hormones – How Stability Shifts And How It Can Be Restored”