What is it that makes an individual, a family, a community, a society, a nation, and a global citizenry thrive?
Could it be resilience? If this is the case, we should be working out how to maximise it against all the odds. Today, in our society, the odds do seem to be against us.
I spent the last week in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. For two days, I attended the 7th annual psychological trauma and Juvenile Justice Conference. It is part of the initiative of the Trauma Informed Care Project from Orchard Place. The aim of the project is to spread the word and change the way we work. Quite literally, the project is working to educate people in understanding the enormity of the evidence of trauma and what we can all to understand recognise and respond to the effects of trauma.
http://www.traumainformedcareproject.org/about.php
The conference was run by the renowned Dr Bruce Perry, a neuroscientist and child psychiatrist and Dr Stuart Ablon, a child psychiatrist. Both emphasise collaboration and relationships as the only way we can move beyond trauma.
In between their teachings on the brain and how we can put this new found understanding of our neural connectivity into working practice, they kept mentioning that if we had resilience the lasting effects of a traumatic event and period may be negligible.
Bruce Perry spoke about how resilience has been formed within our very being from a time immemorial. Societies cohere to protect, care and nurture so each generation profits from the cooperation of the other – transference of generational positivity! Societies have also gone to great lengths to help people recover from trauma, knowing that war, territorial battles and abusive behaviours are somewhat inevitable when we have hundreds of thousands of cultures living on the same planet. Nearly all societies have been founded and structured around recovery and healing, this is apparent in war rituals, grieving ceremonies, deliberate processes of mourning and storytelling to help us overcome trauma. These ceremonies and rituals are still alive and well in Indigenous societies around the world. The repetition, the rhythm and the movement of these practices help regulate our brains so we can relax, mend the emotional centres of our brain and move into our pre-frontal cortex so we can both reason and have abstract thought. In other words, we can dream of a better tomorrow and have hope for a transformative future.
Dr Perry says it all and better in this short talk…
https://www.chicagoideas.com/videos/the-body-s-most-fascinating-organ-the-brain
I do think it is important to relate what he is saying to our politics of today.
Evolution and today
In the last two centuries, or so, we have departed from our 250,000 years of evolutionary roots. We have moved from roots which grounded strong and coherent communities, to privileging the individual against all, even to the extent that one British Prime Minister would announce there is no such thing as society! However, in the last few years, with the collapse of neoliberalism, we have seen such defiant pronouncement of individual power crumble. There is a society. After years of organising people around the primacy of the economy and not community, we have come to realise that growing inequality has led to many disastrous consequences - wars and climate change. Now, we are in search of society again.
I believe that we are at a critical juncture where we can harness the incredible technological developments of the 20th and 21st century with our relational roots from the not so distant past which has grown great resilience, still alive today.
I’m going to make a bold statement here: Let’s disregard survival of the fittest, and the triumphalism of the individual over another, and believe (in this blog post at least) that we human beings are here because of an evolutionary history of cooperation, relationships and community.
It is our grounding in networked relations which fosters resilience. When the world catapulted head first into unregulated markets our cooperative roots meant that we were, and remain, strong enough to withstand the gradual erosion of community, for the last 40 years, at least. I believe this most strongly because no matter what we have thrown at Indigenous societies from a colonial genocide to ongoing policies of discrimination, they survive, in many instances thrive, or fight back. In Australia, what we are witnessing in our first peoples today, is 60,000 years of outstanding cooperative strengths, remarkable interwoven ecological knowledge into the most intimate and intricate kinship structures, and practices and processes around reciprocity that have survived beyond private property ownership. All of this is a relational force to be reckoned with, and yet to be defeated against all the odds.
Can we triumph against the odds? If Indigenous societies tell us anything (and they teach us a whole lot), yes we can!
This is an incredibly simple description of history and there are many intersecting trajectories that have brought positive and negative outcomes to cultures across time and space.
But the premise is this:
A balance is required. That balance is between the trauma and stress inflicted on a society, and the ability for a society to foster collective resilience. If trauma outweighs resilience there is a general decline or plummet in wellbeing. If the two are equal, we may be able to recover from trauma and even learn from traumatic periods and events.
Now, if resilience outweighs trauma, does that equal the society we want? Could this be a society of flourishing well-being?
This balance is best portrayed in the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores.
We were presented with the ACE scores in the conference. The more adverse childhood experiences you have the more the likelihood of these lifetime results below… The most striking being that if you have six or more your life expectancy will be 20 years below those who receive a lower ACE score. For those in Australia, this is a statistic we are all too aware of in the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians.
There is good news. We can rebuild resilience. If we are to respond to trauma by responding to what the evidence is telling us we could transform trauma within a generation. Goodbye life expectancy gap, and hello equality.
Watch this slide show by Dr Perry that presents how we can build resilience.
We build resilience by believing in safety through strong relational communities and through normative stress. Stress can be a good thing. It challenges us to build new neural pathways, to think differently and to innovate. However, this stress must be small and repetitive, and if all things go array we must know that we can fall back into the safety and care of community. If stress is huge and unpredictable, and there is no care or support to fall back into when things go wrong, you remain on high alert, and you have no access to your pre-frontal cortex. There is no ability for you to be empowered and innovative. In other words, there is no resilience, because not only do you not feel safe but you have no ability to change and adapt if you need to.
At the conference, we were also presented with this documentary.
I encourage you to watch it. I will try and have a screening when I get back to Fitzroy Crossing for those of you reading this back home.
ACE scores do not matter if we can build community effectively and revitalise resilience.
Our conventional understanding of resilience is pretty accurate. When we have the evidence of neuroscience we have the collateral to prove that trauma can be transformed.
Resilience is defined by the trusty Oxford English Dictionary as:
- The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
- The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
With these definitions, it makes sense that resilience is the counter to trauma. If you have a good degree of resilience, when trauma hits, you are far more likely to have the ‘capacity to recover’, or a ‘substance/object’, like your brain, is ‘elastic’ enough to be re-wired and to ‘spring back’. This is the science of neuroplasticity, the healing abilities of our neural networks and pathways to transform our minds and bodies.
Politics of NOW
The UK elections are a good example. A huge swing to Labour is the sign of a spring back, a growing movement to transform a politics of distrust, competition and austerity to one of community, collectivism and relationships.
It is a new wave of politics which is considering how to represent people across the traditional left-right spectrum, who are united in their determination to a see a more equal, coherent society made up of resilient, empowered communities. Anywhere else in the world continuing to sit in the traditional left/right oppositional dialogue (hello! Australia, you better catch-up) – is missing what the public wants – a government reflecting multiplicity that can elevate the community to the national and can weave its economic, social and health policies and legislation around a commitment to well-being.
A commitment to revitalising resilience.
Hi Jane, nice work. I am really enjoying reading your blogs. I agree that some of the work on the connection between resilience and trauma (particularly the contributions from neuroscience) is is fabulously interesting and often very practically useful. I am intrigued that some of what neuroscience is recently recognising is what many using Indigenous knowledge systems have taken as right for many thousands of years. The pattern of not recognising this until science confirms it is a little disconcerting and, I think, reflects a subtle default position from non-Indigenous people ... 'that non-western systems are unreliable'. Historical patterns show us that when science has dropped its performance of authority and worked with other knowledge systems then monumentally important things happen.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read your work I am taken to the writing of Richard Sennett who probably comes at this topic from a slight different position. In his recent work he takes the position that we have lost many of our institutions, practices and systems that help people learn to be social. For example, the capacity to enter into a conversation is something that is learned, (like other crafts that need to be mastered we need to practice them for 10,000 hours before we get good at it), through our involvement in institutions like local associations, civic activity, involvement in the gift economy and in formal settings where it is a key element in the curriculum. He makes the judgment that these kids of skills are actually enormously valuable in the market place (as well as civic life). Indeed, with out them businesses fail. In a more global world, culturally and social competent people are even more valuable, particularly where they can move across cultural and social settings, languages and codes. He takes the view that over the past twenty or so years many of these institutions and practices have been 'sacked' with little investment being put into social, emotional and cultural intelligence. For example, the adoption of an outcomes approach to education and community service funding has seen the loss of investment in social processes and relationships. In modern corporate governance 'wisdom' there is almost no investment in relationships (I recently did the Aust Company Director's training and while they talked about the need for 'emotional intelligence' there was no content or time commitment to this ... assuming that all we have to do is say that it is important and it will become so).
Now here is the kicker (according to Sennett or me, I can't remember). If Sennett is right then at this moment in history we are seeing poor investment in social and emotional capacity at etc same time as it is becoming more and more valuable, both because of the shortage of competent people and because of the lack of investment. This is creating a massive demand.
In my view, Australian institutions such as universities have not cottoned onto this.
PS. Beware the allure of 'community'. As Bauman reminds us, it is a highly ambivalent place that is both warm, comfortable and supportive at the same time as the act of excluding the outsider.
Hi Dave, great you are enjoying the posts and great points! I completely agree that there has been a rapid decline in our abilities to relate to one another effectively. This is incredibly clear in personal life – rarely knowing our neighbours or neighbourhoods, and as you point out, in professional settings where our work is centred around effectiveness often being interchangeable with efficiency.
DeleteAs I said, and agree with you, we are at a critical juncture were if we are to see things change we need to invest in emotional, social, and cultural intelligence more than we ever have before.
So how do we do it? I think we create a groundswell of relationships, connections and interconnectivity. We do that within community settings that still exist, in community based organisation, or wherever there is connections that aren’t organised or imposed through detached policy making. Social media has seen the creation of thought communities across huge distances. It united the rural in the American elections and for Brexit – it happened so rapidly that the mainstream media and urban centred folks, on the whole, didn’t feel or see the shift – because it was virtual and confined to specific social networks. On the converse this networking also had great effect in destabilising the conservatives in the recent British elections.
When I write and think about community and resilience I don’t think it is a comfortable position, I think it is one of the hardest positions to occupy, because we are considering what does community look like now. Above all, I consider myself part of a global community – I want to instil in all of my interactions wherever I am in the world some sort of sense of relationality.
We are in search of the principles of community while accepting diversity and diverging positions but still wanting to advance equity for all people, and where people are most vulnerable and unequal consider how our institutions can safe guard, care and maybe even protect.
So, yes, I agree, beware of the trappings of a return to an idealised community – that is impossible. But building local, regional, national and international communities that is where it is at.
I’m pretty sure my next blog post will focus on evidence – base and evidence informed – I might even address the knowledge hierarchies and discrimination. Great comments Dave. It has made me think about it a lot.