Have We Gone Too Far with Resiliency?

Abstract

Are we spending too much of our energies charting and applauding the ability of individuals, families, and groups to successfully sustain societal abuse, hardship, and injustice? It has been because of the fear of this possibility that I have never been a big advocate of what is known in the helping professions as “resiliency.” My goal here is not to argue for the abandonment of efforts to enhance resiliency. Instead, my intent is to caution social workers about it. I suggest that we as social workers think more critically about the implications of our advocacy and interventions. Resiliency can be thought of as the ability to withstand bad things happening to you without the expected devastating outcomes. Advocates of resiliency typically attempt, through internal changes of the individual or the strengthening of some environmental support, to allow the person to withstand some negative force and manage to “beat the odds” of negative outcomes (Garmezy, 1974). For sure, withstanding hardship and beating the odds of falling victim to difficult situations are noble as well as romantic aspirations—they have, in fact, a certain quixoticism associated with them. Those in the helping professions who work with poor populations of color have, for some time now, advocated, studied, and talked about resiliency. I believe that we have perhaps taken the resiliency perspective too far. At times, it seems as though we have lost sight of why people need to be resilient in the first place. We too seldom ask the difficult questions, such as “Why do most of our efforts to teach and promote resiliency focus on the poor and, particularly, poor people of color?” “Why do these populations need to be so imbued with resilience and what are called ‘protective factors’ (from whom and what are we protecting them)?” In discussing my reservations about resiliency, I have sometimes used the imagery of a group of children being lined up and each hit on the head with a baseball bat. Researchers then examine this traumatized group in an attempt to determine which few do not have the expected outcome, such as a large knot on the head or a fractured skull. Having once identified this group of atypical positive deviants who are hard headed, exceptional in some way, or just plain lucky, we then attempt to identify which single factor or cluster of factors allowed these “exceptional” children to avoid the natural consequences of being hit on the head with a baseball bat. We then proceed to devise ways to impose or transfer this “strength, skill, or talent” to the majority group of normal children—who are behaving as one should, having been hit on the head with a baseball bat. Clearly, this approach is unfair as it puts the onus of responsibility for averting the trauma on the potential victim. We must ask ourselves: Does this approach enable the victimizers to continue with their bludgeoning of poor groups and at the same time vitiate the demand for greater societal equity and change? Over the years, I have witnessed many people who have overcome astronomical odds to be modestly successful. But the question is: Why must so many poor people and individuals of color be so skilled, so talented, so adaptive, or—as in the case mentioned earlier—so hard headed? Our efforts to promote strength and resiliency models seem to have blurred our vision and taken our eyes off of the big picture, which is to reduce suffering by promoting greater social justice and societal equity. I believe that the seductiveness of resiliency theory has lulled many who attempt to help those at risk of hardship into taking their eyes off those who are swinging the baseball bats. Our rather limited success at significantly improving the lives of minorities and poor people while using this focus suggests that we need to sustain a balanced perspective. We certainly should continue to look for strengths and protective factors, but we must be more willing to acknowledge the problems that the poor and minority