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The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma
The author of the “must read” (NPR) Rage Becomes Her presents a powerful manifesto for communal resilience based on in-depth investigations into history, social science, and psychology.
We are often urged to rely only on ourselves for strength, mental fortitude, and positivity. But with her distinctive “skill, wit, and sharp insight” (Laura Bates, author of Girl Up), Soraya Chemaly challenges us to adapt our thinking about how we survive in a world of sustained, overlapping crises.
It is interdependence and nurturing relationships that truly sustain us, she argues. Based on comprehensive research and eye-opening examples from real-life, The Resilience Myth offers alternative visions of relational hardiness by emphasizing care for others and our environments above all.
We are often urged to rely only on ourselves for strength, mental fortitude, and positivity. But with her distinctive “skill, wit, and sharp insight” (Laura Bates, author of Girl Up), Soraya Chemaly challenges us to adapt our thinking about how we survive in a world of sustained, overlapping crises.
It is interdependence and nurturing relationships that truly sustain us, she argues. Based on comprehensive research and eye-opening examples from real-life, The Resilience Myth offers alternative visions of relational hardiness by emphasizing care for others and our environments above all.
304 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 21, 2024
91 people are currently reading
4445 people want to read
About the author
Soraya Chemaly
12 books596 followersSoraya Chemaly is a writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in politics, religion, education, tech, and media. A 2016 Mirror Award Winner, her work appears in a wide range of publications including TIME, The Guardian, The Nation, Huffington Post, Verge, Quartz, The Atlantic and The New Statesman. Chemaly is also involved with multiple anti-violence and media equity organizations dedicated to expanding women’s freedom of expression and public parity. She has been named by Elle Magazine, The Telegraph, and Fast Company as among the most inspiring women to follow in social media and the co-winner of a 2017 Newhouse Mirror Award for Best Single Story. You can find her on Instagram @sorayachemaly and @ragebecomesher as well as Substack where she writes Unmanned.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
March 30, 2025
This is a stunningly good book. Over the last few years, I’ve been coming across people who are deeply into positive psychology. They are very well meaning. And it seems churlish in the extreme to be opposed to people being ‘positive’. How could that be a bad thing? I work in educational research and many schools are adopting positive psychology and particularly resilience – again, being opposed to these things sounds a bit like being opposed to motherhood. The problem is that I find that I am opposed to these things – while acknowledging that the people supporting them are, as I said, well meaning.
Okay, so what is positive psychology? Basically, it all started with Maslow and the humanist psychologists. They noticed that psychology tended to work with people who were dysfunctional. People with ‘issues’ – whether this be autism or anxiety or depression or schizophrenia – have been studied and studied. But the humanists said that rather than studying what makes people dysfunctional, perhaps we should also consider what it is that makes people psychologically well. So, positive psychology, rather than negative.
Resilience is about bouncing back after a setback. It is about grit and fortitude and going on the offensive and attacking your fears and combating adversity – and other military metaphors with all of their hyper-masculine implications.
There’s a lovely bit in this where she talks of Shackleton and how he overcame endless adversity to get his men home safely. She makes a couple of really telling points about this story. The first is that much of what he did in motivating his men to stay alive involved him in deploying what are generally considered to be feminine traits. The second was that he couldn’t have made the expedition in the first place without the support of women – not least his wife. And that ultimately, he died on yet another expedition and left her and their children in debt and danger. Men may get to be adventurers, but they only do so with lots and lots of support.
And that is the most telling criticism of resilience that she makes and makes repeatedly throughout the book – that too often it is taken to be, like merit, something held by individuals and therefore about character. She says that this is simply not the case. That resilience mostly comes from a position of privilege – and that privilege is social in nature, not individual. We claim it as our own, but really, like merit, it takes a village.
Overwhelmingly, it is men that get to be resilient and so masculine traits are virtually identical to the traits that we associate with resilience. When was the last time you heard a story of resilience that involved a woman doing things we define as feminine? Our resilience myths almost always involve men doing manly things – killing the enemy in wars, rescuing the wounded, running into oncoming fire to take out the machine gun nest.
She gives statistics in this that make your jaw drop. The growing number of young girls in the US who are committing suicide, the growing number of young people who, after being told to be resilience and to push through pain, end up having sports injuries, the mental health implications for students so exhausted from study who keep on pushing themselves beyond endurance because their whole lives depend on the marks they get on this one last exam. Our obsession with performance and being our best has become an illness.
This reminded me of Beck’s The Risk Society – we no longer belong to communities or unions or religions or even really nations. Now, we must fully rely upon ourselves to meet all of the challenges of life. That is why we need to be resilient – we have no one else we can rely upon. But what is this resilience other than a total dependence upon a resource – our own isolated selves – that is simply not up to the task of overcoming the challenges we face. You cannot fix climate change on your own, you cannot end gun violence on your own, you cannot restructure the economy on your own. All of these things can only be addressed by us working together. And so, resilience is looking at the world down the wrong end of the telescope, where we see ourselves magnified and our connections to others diminished. But it is those connections that make us strong.
Perhaps the best of this is towards the end where she discusses the power of stories to remake ourselves and our world. The importance of crafting stories so that our audience is capable of hearing the intent of them. She links this, and so much else in the book, back to native peoples and their intimate connection to the land and to their communities. She contrasts this with the hyper-masculine nature of our modern world and how this has made us all so terribly sick. Not just in the extremes of gun violence or our remarkable lack of empathy for the sick, the poor, the weak, the old, but also in our own self-loathing for not being good enough. We are thwarted desire – but rather than seeing our defeat as being a symptom of how we have structured our society, we end up believing that our failures are due to our own lack of resilience.
As with merit, this sickness impacts everyone – the successful as well as the botched and bungled. In our grossly inequitable world, the successful need to prove that they got where they are due to their superior work ethic. And so, we hear stories of CEOs who get up at 4am and spend an hour in the gym before working 16 hour days. What they are doing in that time is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess if any of that work amounts to anything productive or worthwhile. Except, it must, right? Otherwise, why are they getting so many rewards? All of this is pure nonsense – but if you are a winner in a grossly unjust world, you need to believe it is justified by your efforts – and so, like a rat in a cage, you keep pushing the lever to prove you deserve the rewards.
We need to step out of this rat race. We need to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. We aren’t just killing ourselves with our resilience, but the planet too.
The other statistic she mentions in this that made me wonder how I’d never noticed this before was that so many of the books that are banned in the US were written by either women or people of colour – often both. These are stories we prefer not to hear because they are stories that stress empathy as a curative for the disease of individualised resilience.
This is such a powerful book – powerfully written and with a powerful message for all of us. One based on hope and one that points us towards a world that would not only be better, but a world we all would likely prefer to live in. Resiling yourself to live in a world that would otherwise be insufferable is not the highest level of human nature. Resilience in the face of unsufferable pain is not courage, but cowardice. Saying ‘enough, no more’ is sometimes what is necessary – rather than, ‘I can push through, I can overcome this’. Together, we are stronger than any of us can be alone. Great book.
Okay, so what is positive psychology? Basically, it all started with Maslow and the humanist psychologists. They noticed that psychology tended to work with people who were dysfunctional. People with ‘issues’ – whether this be autism or anxiety or depression or schizophrenia – have been studied and studied. But the humanists said that rather than studying what makes people dysfunctional, perhaps we should also consider what it is that makes people psychologically well. So, positive psychology, rather than negative.
Resilience is about bouncing back after a setback. It is about grit and fortitude and going on the offensive and attacking your fears and combating adversity – and other military metaphors with all of their hyper-masculine implications.
There’s a lovely bit in this where she talks of Shackleton and how he overcame endless adversity to get his men home safely. She makes a couple of really telling points about this story. The first is that much of what he did in motivating his men to stay alive involved him in deploying what are generally considered to be feminine traits. The second was that he couldn’t have made the expedition in the first place without the support of women – not least his wife. And that ultimately, he died on yet another expedition and left her and their children in debt and danger. Men may get to be adventurers, but they only do so with lots and lots of support.
And that is the most telling criticism of resilience that she makes and makes repeatedly throughout the book – that too often it is taken to be, like merit, something held by individuals and therefore about character. She says that this is simply not the case. That resilience mostly comes from a position of privilege – and that privilege is social in nature, not individual. We claim it as our own, but really, like merit, it takes a village.
Overwhelmingly, it is men that get to be resilient and so masculine traits are virtually identical to the traits that we associate with resilience. When was the last time you heard a story of resilience that involved a woman doing things we define as feminine? Our resilience myths almost always involve men doing manly things – killing the enemy in wars, rescuing the wounded, running into oncoming fire to take out the machine gun nest.
She gives statistics in this that make your jaw drop. The growing number of young girls in the US who are committing suicide, the growing number of young people who, after being told to be resilience and to push through pain, end up having sports injuries, the mental health implications for students so exhausted from study who keep on pushing themselves beyond endurance because their whole lives depend on the marks they get on this one last exam. Our obsession with performance and being our best has become an illness.
This reminded me of Beck’s The Risk Society – we no longer belong to communities or unions or religions or even really nations. Now, we must fully rely upon ourselves to meet all of the challenges of life. That is why we need to be resilient – we have no one else we can rely upon. But what is this resilience other than a total dependence upon a resource – our own isolated selves – that is simply not up to the task of overcoming the challenges we face. You cannot fix climate change on your own, you cannot end gun violence on your own, you cannot restructure the economy on your own. All of these things can only be addressed by us working together. And so, resilience is looking at the world down the wrong end of the telescope, where we see ourselves magnified and our connections to others diminished. But it is those connections that make us strong.
Perhaps the best of this is towards the end where she discusses the power of stories to remake ourselves and our world. The importance of crafting stories so that our audience is capable of hearing the intent of them. She links this, and so much else in the book, back to native peoples and their intimate connection to the land and to their communities. She contrasts this with the hyper-masculine nature of our modern world and how this has made us all so terribly sick. Not just in the extremes of gun violence or our remarkable lack of empathy for the sick, the poor, the weak, the old, but also in our own self-loathing for not being good enough. We are thwarted desire – but rather than seeing our defeat as being a symptom of how we have structured our society, we end up believing that our failures are due to our own lack of resilience.
As with merit, this sickness impacts everyone – the successful as well as the botched and bungled. In our grossly inequitable world, the successful need to prove that they got where they are due to their superior work ethic. And so, we hear stories of CEOs who get up at 4am and spend an hour in the gym before working 16 hour days. What they are doing in that time is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess if any of that work amounts to anything productive or worthwhile. Except, it must, right? Otherwise, why are they getting so many rewards? All of this is pure nonsense – but if you are a winner in a grossly unjust world, you need to believe it is justified by your efforts – and so, like a rat in a cage, you keep pushing the lever to prove you deserve the rewards.
We need to step out of this rat race. We need to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. We aren’t just killing ourselves with our resilience, but the planet too.
The other statistic she mentions in this that made me wonder how I’d never noticed this before was that so many of the books that are banned in the US were written by either women or people of colour – often both. These are stories we prefer not to hear because they are stories that stress empathy as a curative for the disease of individualised resilience.
This is such a powerful book – powerfully written and with a powerful message for all of us. One based on hope and one that points us towards a world that would not only be better, but a world we all would likely prefer to live in. Resiling yourself to live in a world that would otherwise be insufferable is not the highest level of human nature. Resilience in the face of unsufferable pain is not courage, but cowardice. Saying ‘enough, no more’ is sometimes what is necessary – rather than, ‘I can push through, I can overcome this’. Together, we are stronger than any of us can be alone. Great book.
March 31, 2024
Favorite Quote: The key to using optimism to enhance resilience is in rejecting black-and-white, either/or thinking. Resilient people use both optimism and pessimism strategically to gain the critical insights and information they need to adjust to change.
Synopsis: Resilience is something we hear far too often. Workplaces want resilient employees, the media wants resilient citizens - able to weather the ups and downs of systems over which they have no control. Employees and citizens want resilient systems, able to stand up to the temporal societal demands that confuse and control us.
But resilience is not what we need.
Throughout this book, Chemaly (author of Rage Becomes Her), explores why dismantling oppressive thinking and systems and building supportive community structures will make us more resilient. Taking the focus off individual resilience will increase both individual and community resilience if these systems are acknowledged and adjusted.
Why does this book beguile? Soraya Chemaly explores why our systems are set up to encourage us to fail. Systems of grit, tenacity, and perseverance perpetuate ableism and isolation. As we evolve into a global organism with microcosms, we must all figure out how to support one another, how to help ease the burdens of others (and let them help us), while tackling the oppressive and patriarchal systems that have gotten us where we are.
It’s not easy, but through The Resilience Myth, Chemaly breaks down some of the issues into manageable chunks, allowing readers to digest the information and apply it to their direct communities. I love this book because it gives me hope for the future!
Synopsis: Resilience is something we hear far too often. Workplaces want resilient employees, the media wants resilient citizens - able to weather the ups and downs of systems over which they have no control. Employees and citizens want resilient systems, able to stand up to the temporal societal demands that confuse and control us.
But resilience is not what we need.
Throughout this book, Chemaly (author of Rage Becomes Her), explores why dismantling oppressive thinking and systems and building supportive community structures will make us more resilient. Taking the focus off individual resilience will increase both individual and community resilience if these systems are acknowledged and adjusted.
Why does this book beguile? Soraya Chemaly explores why our systems are set up to encourage us to fail. Systems of grit, tenacity, and perseverance perpetuate ableism and isolation. As we evolve into a global organism with microcosms, we must all figure out how to support one another, how to help ease the burdens of others (and let them help us), while tackling the oppressive and patriarchal systems that have gotten us where we are.
It’s not easy, but through The Resilience Myth, Chemaly breaks down some of the issues into manageable chunks, allowing readers to digest the information and apply it to their direct communities. I love this book because it gives me hope for the future!
September 18, 2024
I must admit, I haven't had the best luck with giveaways this year. I thought this book was going to be a lot different than what it was. I thought it was going to be more self help but it's not. It talks about multiple reasons for trauma and coping but really no solutions to coping specifically. I think this book would be good for someone studying trauma, maybe if they work with patients who have trauma. Otherwise, this book read very boring to me. It wasn't what I had expected. Thank you to the author, Soraya Chemaly, One Signal Publishers and Goodreads for my free copy. This book gets a lot of good reviews so it's definitely worth checking out for some people. It just wasn't my cup of tea. Happy reading! 🩵
June 11, 2024
Mine was the kind of family that could make a psychologist a lot of money, if the main bad actors would ever admit they needed help and agree to see one. Alas, they didn't, and so I had the opportunity to learn the kind of resilience Chemaly criticizes in this book: pathological independence, total self-reliance, an appearance of calm and strength, and "functioning" as defined by productivity and engagement with school and employment.
And I nailed it. I got straight As. I went to university. I graduated and have been steadily employed in my field ever since. I pay my taxes, have never had a substance addiction, never been arrested. Statistically speaking, with my ACE score (a subject she touches on briefly but not, in my view, very convincingly -- more on that below) this was not the most likely outcome, and it's largely not the outcomes enjoyed by the many friends and acquaintances I have from similar backgrounds. I'm an outlier.
I did follow the general trends of traumatized children in repeatedly choosing bad partners, exposing myself to more mistreatment; not related, I also had a child with a very rare genetic syndrome that went undiagnosed for many years. Given my family background, there was no help, and I had no choice but to cope with it myself.
And I nailed that too, largely. I got through it, by myself. Of course I say "myself" as a white woman with some economic privilege; I could hire some housework help, for example, or buy meals. This is a social infrastructure that relies on other people. But that's largely unacknowledged in our society, and by the metrics and standards of the old ways of thinking about resilience, I did it by myself.
But it's been clear to me for a long time that this is a fucked up standard. For one, I see those friends who came from similar homes, despite therapy and medication, struggling with employment and housing and relationships and not able to be "resilient" as we define it, no matter how hard they try. For another, it failed me too.
Oh, I could be "strong." The morning after I was raped, I got up and went to work. I smiled at my coworkers and exceeded my targets. I couldn't date anyone for years; even now I struggle with trust (and yes, I went to talk to someone, who advised me that "this happens to men too" and "I'm sure the police will investigate this" -- and then talked to the police herself and found that, no, actually, they wouldn't).
But I could work, and keep working, and what struck me as the years passed was how our definitions of "resilience" and "strength" served the needs of capital, rather than people. As long as you look all right on the outside, and don't need to take time off work, you're good. Apparently. (As another therapist put it years later, "I can't even diagnose you with PTSD. You're too functional.") I could make everything look fine on the outside, which increasingly seemed to me what "resilience" really meant; not that you'd recovered, not that you were ok, but that you were seemingly unbothered altogether.
And look, I followed the research. (Following the research in a bunch of different areas is a hobby of mine and yes, I know that makes me a nerd and possibly a bit pedantic.) I read the positive psychology books about "learned optimism" and the importance of strengthening mental habits linked to resilience and how to recover from trauma and "get back to who you would have been" and post-traumatic growth and all of it. So the other thing I learned, when my dad got sick, was just how much those had all fucked me up.
That, altogether, they had encouraged me only in developing a denial so strong that I was blind to all the ways my family was damaging me, damaging my kid, killing my father. And I fell apart.
(Not in a way that jeopardized my work performance, oh heavens no. I was still undiagnosable in terms of any mental health diagnosis. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't trust people. I was mired in a profound grief for years, a despair that felt choking, some days. But I worked, so it was all ok.)
So I was very interested in this book (and I loved her first one).
It's good. It's more introductory than I personally would have liked, but if you check out my "brain stuff" shelf you'll see how much I've read about these ideas over the years, and if you haven't read that much, you'll probably find her information newer than I did.
Chemaly's basic argument is that our cultural idea of resilience is false and sexist; that it is a codification of untrue ideas about individualism, what strength is, the importance of relationships and contact and support, and that it is based in sexism -- in this case, that our received ideas of what makes a "real man" are the basis of the concept of resilience, and denigrate other values that are better suited and able to make people truly resilient.
She touches on most of what I've experienced and learned myself: how damaging supposed "positive psychology" is, how flawed the research, the unacknowledged assumptions and biases that form how we think about it, the conditions and contexts that allow people to truly recover from horrifying events. How our discomfort with "negative" emotions hinders healing by all but prohibiting those who are suffering from talking about it, or even feeling the true impact of their experiences. That, as she says, "Life is not war unless we make it so," describing how much of our psychological and cultural understandings of resilience come from military contexts where the primary motivation was equipping soldiers to stay in the field, and how inappropriate this is outside (and possibly even inside) the military. And, god love her, how destructive our human exceptionalism is, and how this belief in our superiority and entitlement separates us not only from nature but from each other.
There are only two real flaws for me.
On is that the number of subjects covered is so broad that none of them can be treated in the detail that would make them, in my view, truly convincing. They all feel like surveys.
The other is that, sometimes, this cursory treatment means that key parts are overlooked. One such was her discussion of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE; I mentioned this above). She covers the basic concept, and the converse importance of resilience factors such as close connections in childhood to counter the effects of childhood trauma. And that's true. But the emphasis on resilience means some parts are overlooked or skimmed over; yes, 6 or more ACEs results in a loss of 20 years of life on average. Also importantly, 7 or more ACEs results in a 100% chance of mental illness in adulthood, regardless of childhood protective factors.
Resilience -- even the resilience Chemaly champions, and which I largely agree with -- has limits. People can't recover from everything, either individually or collectively. Some things kill you. Some things leave you with long-term damage you can't ever recover from, no matter the therapy or treatment.
However, as an opening into a more humane conception of resilience and recovery than what has been on offer, written well, I'd recommend it -- especially if you've been repeatedly shamed for suffering.
And I nailed it. I got straight As. I went to university. I graduated and have been steadily employed in my field ever since. I pay my taxes, have never had a substance addiction, never been arrested. Statistically speaking, with my ACE score (a subject she touches on briefly but not, in my view, very convincingly -- more on that below) this was not the most likely outcome, and it's largely not the outcomes enjoyed by the many friends and acquaintances I have from similar backgrounds. I'm an outlier.
I did follow the general trends of traumatized children in repeatedly choosing bad partners, exposing myself to more mistreatment; not related, I also had a child with a very rare genetic syndrome that went undiagnosed for many years. Given my family background, there was no help, and I had no choice but to cope with it myself.
And I nailed that too, largely. I got through it, by myself. Of course I say "myself" as a white woman with some economic privilege; I could hire some housework help, for example, or buy meals. This is a social infrastructure that relies on other people. But that's largely unacknowledged in our society, and by the metrics and standards of the old ways of thinking about resilience, I did it by myself.
But it's been clear to me for a long time that this is a fucked up standard. For one, I see those friends who came from similar homes, despite therapy and medication, struggling with employment and housing and relationships and not able to be "resilient" as we define it, no matter how hard they try. For another, it failed me too.
Oh, I could be "strong." The morning after I was raped, I got up and went to work. I smiled at my coworkers and exceeded my targets. I couldn't date anyone for years; even now I struggle with trust (and yes, I went to talk to someone, who advised me that "this happens to men too" and "I'm sure the police will investigate this" -- and then talked to the police herself and found that, no, actually, they wouldn't).
But I could work, and keep working, and what struck me as the years passed was how our definitions of "resilience" and "strength" served the needs of capital, rather than people. As long as you look all right on the outside, and don't need to take time off work, you're good. Apparently. (As another therapist put it years later, "I can't even diagnose you with PTSD. You're too functional.") I could make everything look fine on the outside, which increasingly seemed to me what "resilience" really meant; not that you'd recovered, not that you were ok, but that you were seemingly unbothered altogether.
And look, I followed the research. (Following the research in a bunch of different areas is a hobby of mine and yes, I know that makes me a nerd and possibly a bit pedantic.) I read the positive psychology books about "learned optimism" and the importance of strengthening mental habits linked to resilience and how to recover from trauma and "get back to who you would have been" and post-traumatic growth and all of it. So the other thing I learned, when my dad got sick, was just how much those had all fucked me up.
That, altogether, they had encouraged me only in developing a denial so strong that I was blind to all the ways my family was damaging me, damaging my kid, killing my father. And I fell apart.
(Not in a way that jeopardized my work performance, oh heavens no. I was still undiagnosable in terms of any mental health diagnosis. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't trust people. I was mired in a profound grief for years, a despair that felt choking, some days. But I worked, so it was all ok.)
So I was very interested in this book (and I loved her first one).
It's good. It's more introductory than I personally would have liked, but if you check out my "brain stuff" shelf you'll see how much I've read about these ideas over the years, and if you haven't read that much, you'll probably find her information newer than I did.
Chemaly's basic argument is that our cultural idea of resilience is false and sexist; that it is a codification of untrue ideas about individualism, what strength is, the importance of relationships and contact and support, and that it is based in sexism -- in this case, that our received ideas of what makes a "real man" are the basis of the concept of resilience, and denigrate other values that are better suited and able to make people truly resilient.
She touches on most of what I've experienced and learned myself: how damaging supposed "positive psychology" is, how flawed the research, the unacknowledged assumptions and biases that form how we think about it, the conditions and contexts that allow people to truly recover from horrifying events. How our discomfort with "negative" emotions hinders healing by all but prohibiting those who are suffering from talking about it, or even feeling the true impact of their experiences. That, as she says, "Life is not war unless we make it so," describing how much of our psychological and cultural understandings of resilience come from military contexts where the primary motivation was equipping soldiers to stay in the field, and how inappropriate this is outside (and possibly even inside) the military. And, god love her, how destructive our human exceptionalism is, and how this belief in our superiority and entitlement separates us not only from nature but from each other.
There are only two real flaws for me.
On is that the number of subjects covered is so broad that none of them can be treated in the detail that would make them, in my view, truly convincing. They all feel like surveys.
The other is that, sometimes, this cursory treatment means that key parts are overlooked. One such was her discussion of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE; I mentioned this above). She covers the basic concept, and the converse importance of resilience factors such as close connections in childhood to counter the effects of childhood trauma. And that's true. But the emphasis on resilience means some parts are overlooked or skimmed over; yes, 6 or more ACEs results in a loss of 20 years of life on average. Also importantly, 7 or more ACEs results in a 100% chance of mental illness in adulthood, regardless of childhood protective factors.
Resilience -- even the resilience Chemaly champions, and which I largely agree with -- has limits. People can't recover from everything, either individually or collectively. Some things kill you. Some things leave you with long-term damage you can't ever recover from, no matter the therapy or treatment.
However, as an opening into a more humane conception of resilience and recovery than what has been on offer, written well, I'd recommend it -- especially if you've been repeatedly shamed for suffering.
June 5, 2024
I received an advance uncorrected proof copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss,and while I finished it a couple of weeks back, sorting through my notes has required a bit of ... resilience. The book isn't long (there are only about 200 pages in the main text body) and Ms. Chemaly conveys her points succinctly in a story-like way … keeps it interesting.
First, the title may be a bit misleading. Resilience is not a myth - what we are conditioned to believe is resilience is. The author says in her Preface: "Our culture’s solution for handling life’s hardships is to learn to be resilient. But I must warn you that this book dismantles the very heart of our prevailing notions of individual resilience."
The book is timely, given the unfortunate proliferation of a perceived freedom to be toxic, at least in the USA. And also given that there are a lot of so called "alpha males" and their tragicomic spewings of myths of their imaginations polluting the social media feeds of impressionable egos of irresilient (usually young male) consumers. Interesting to me, OED says irresilient is a rare adjective, fewer than 0.01 occurrences per milion words. Well, I've blown up that stat with twice in two sentences! Anyway, those “alphas” won't be reading this book.
Ms. Chemaly looks at the actual myths - strength and self-sufficiency being the first topic she tackles - and how our formative years, our environment, the effects the buzz phrases of "soldiering on" and "bouncing back" have on us, and makes her case that we really need to be part of a community to feed our true resilience. and she notes "We tend to think about resilience in reactive ways—how do we respond after adversity—but in practical terms resilience includes the steps we take to avoid adversity to begin with."
I think this could be an unpopular book among a certain wing of politics; the myth of bootstrap self-madeness goes against her message. It's worth a read. She says, "We live with the consequences of not reconciling ourselves to hard truths."
Formatting note: I like in-text citations (I detest uncited endnotes that the reader only discovers after reading, and then has to go back and try to figure out what they pertained to). And they were hyperlinked in the electronic copy I received. Extra nice. And for the publisher, I've noted a few typos at the end that your editors may or may not have caught.
Lots (lots) of notes, so a curated selection:
[on those toxic males] This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of [a sexual] reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.)
[turn of a phrase] Stephenie Meyer’s vampire series Twilight took off like wildfire in a political environment of similar fears. The first volume was published in 2005, in the aftermath of 9/11, in which brown-skinned Islamic extremists used airplanes—which, it must be said, are classically phallic projectiles—to penetrate U.S. airspace and destroy symbols of U.S. power.
I guess she probably needed to hammer home the message
[we all know some of those people] Refusing masks and vaccines is a prime example of how maladaptive a resilience of strength, impenetrability, and self-sufficiency can be.
[using Tetris as a "cognitive vaccine against PTSD] Research such as this has shed light on what’s known as dual-task processing, a way to reroute memories and minimize or even eliminate traumatic stress.
I found this to be interesting. Need to go find this study...
[coping methods] What we call “resilience” frequently translates into our finding ways to feel safe in our own skin, a sensation that allows us to cope with the uncertainty of anxiety-provoking life changes more openly and creatively. Interoception is therefore essential to resilience because being able to feel and interpret bodily changes and sensations helps us develop emotional awareness and regulate ourselves.
[on being taught to tough it out on our own] Each of us is a body, but together we are also interbodies.31 Your body is yours, but it is also part of everyone else’s environment, which has implications for how we respond to stress, hardships, and trauma. By default, however, we are taught and encouraged to overlook and ignore these facts, and when we do, we lose valuable insights.
[I had a hard time with this section] Despite that religious and spiritual practices involve the body, these interpretations of faith and spirituality are mainly centered on disembodied ideas and forces, including, for example, the idea of a soul, a pantheistic consciousness, or an afterlife free of limits and pain.
[semantics are tricky] Dualism isn’t all bad. For one, it is a useful cognitive shortcut. When we are faced with complexity, our ability to quickly flatten information into oppositions such as male/female, white/black, rational/irrational, thinking/feeling, can be a genuine advantage.
This is a different dualism - binary thinking is what I think she means, as opposed to the dualists of the mind being separate … outside of … the body. Except...
While splitting the mind from the body can be a useful short-term good coping mechanism in the face of mass deaths and constant physical threats, it is a spectacularly poor intellectual and philosophical structure on which to build a theory of long-term adaptivity and resilience.
Never mind
[on individual vs holistic resilience] “I’m still amazed by how quickly people slip towards the individual,” explained Michael Ungar, founder and director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Canada, when we spoke in early 2022. “They’ll give a head nod to resilience being about systems all around us, but then will give a definition of resilience as the individual ability to cope, ignoring a fundamental contradiction: my motivation to change and my being in an environment that enables change are equally weighted.”
[on the military training of one meaning of grit to "finish what I begin'] It’s unsavory to contemplate, I know, but what if you’re a military cadet, have the requisite grit, and your goal is sex? What if you begin is an unwanted sexual encounter and you believe failure isn’t an option? What if you see resistance to your actions as a challenge to overcome? What if domination is understood as strength but emotional expression and distress are considered weakness? It may seem like a harsh comparison, but grit, confidence, having a challenge orientation, commitment to task, and exercising control—all valued in resilience lessons—are also central to how rapists think and act.
Heavy and some might cry hyperbolic, but it's a valid thought stream that I've not heard much of.
A recent study of efficacy of teaching teens to recast their stories, learn mindfulness techniques, and develop gratitude practices, known as dialectical behavioral theory, revealed that kids exposed to this therapy, many of whom did not start off with depression or anxiety, worsened.
My (unpopular) position is that focusing on the harm concretizes it in the mind.
[authoritative vs authoritarian parenting] Having a tolerant, authoritative parent, for example, increases the likelihood of a child’s being resilient. Children of firm and responsive parents develop healthier autonomy, seeing themselves as independent but accepted, cared for, and connected. Authoritative parenting combines emotional intelligence, stress support, encouragement, and communication of confidence in a child’s abilities.
Authoritative, and she's not saying authoritarian (which is in the next paragraph)...
By comparison, children raised by more rule-driven, authoritarian parents are less able to manage change and self-regulate when stressed. Authoritarian parents value hierarchy and expect obedience and so are often less tolerant of emotional displays, making them less attuned to children’s needs or responsive to their distress. They are more likely to model rigidity and, as a result, children’s emotional competence suffers. Authoritarian parenting is more likely to traumatize children because it results in a higher likelihood of emotional repression, cognitive inflexibility, and fear-based reasoning.
Oh yeah. That first one. (And all three for my father from his parents.
In our mainstream script, however, little suggests the degree to which context, environment, and experience can affect a person’s ability to be optimistic or develop optimistic attitudes. Instead, resilient people are often depicted as naturally more optimistic, a trait that, furthermore, is linked to being gritty, strong, honorable, and, even, prominent.
Halo effect?
[on the problem of Norman Vincent Peale] His madly successful ideas about positive thinking can’t be divorced from a national refusal to feel discomfort and acknowledge privileges enjoyed by men such as Fred Trump, John Templeton, and Peale himself. But resilience often requires us to feel discomfort, sit with it, and parse what it means.
[on the former guy] In many ways, the relationship between the American public and Donald Trump mirrors the well-studied dynamics of intimate abuse. Aided by a media rife with distorting false equivalences, minimizing language, and the optimism of American exceptionalism, Trump was an upbeat, gaslighting machine of false hope, self-enhancing blather, and dangerous denialism and misinformation.
Preach!
[semantics - words matter] When former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo called [American Federation of Teachers leader Randi] Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world,” what he really meant was “the most dangerous person in my world.”
[uh oh] Training soldiers to develop resilience through positive psychology or cognitive behavioral therapy can therefore be harmful and counterproductive.
[we're in trouble] [failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari] Lake is one of the 42 percent of American voters who, in 2022, revealed that they thought “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”
[fear based illusions of resiliency] Strongmen don’t make people safer, a baseline for resilience at any scale. Rather, they maintain power by making people more afraid. They use language, images, and metaphors that increase contempt, anxiety, and disgust, and when they do, they can count on mainstream resilience as a recruitment tool. In the post 9/11 years that led to the election of Donald Trump, pathology and war metaphors undeniably informed an increasingly violent reactionary white supremacist moment that understood resilience as resistance, a synonym, after all, for immunity.
[we want resilience to move us past the obstacle as quickly as possible] Resilience takes time when we are all expected to make time, mainly for other people. Because most of us work to survive and take care of others, our time is not our own. For most people, taking time to adequately nurture the people we love and ourselves to stay well is exceedingly difficult. Because we are socialized to think of time as linear and in individualistic, competitive terms, we struggle to understand its social and political uses and to adapt in ways that emphasize community well-being and ecological adaptability.
[cyclical trauma] Even if we want to think time is linear and progressive, our healing is not. After a crisis, a person or community might experience well-being for a time, only to then fall into disruption and despair again, then again into improvement. Trauma makes us feel as though we are out of the “normal” flow of time, and the desire to restore that sense is powerful.
[on our contributions] We may, as individuals, adopt climate-friendly personal habits, but these habits are Pyrrhic in the face of the challenges we face.
An Unfortunate Truth
[relinquishing personal power] It's rare that "learning to be resilient" includes civics and the influence of voting on our lives, but elections are risk calculations tied to resilience expectations.[...]
We’re schooled to think of resilience in highly individualized ways, but the degree to which we can and have to be resilient depends on people we empower to make risk decisions for us. We give others the authority to impose their risk perceptions and resilience understandings on the rest of us.
[oh, that term...acceptable risk] The real power that risk decision-makers have isn’t just in defining what constitutes a risk, but defining what constitutes an acceptable risk. Acceptable to whom? For how long? At what cost?
[a trend that isn't new] The study revealed a subset of the white men to be the most risk-prone, approximately 30 percent, who had greater-than-average trust in authority and technology. These men tended to be conservative, hierarchical thinkers, and hypercommitted to individualism.
Why am I not surprised?
[elected officials] Our resilience, both personal and political, is constantly being tested because our institutional threat assessment is concentrated in the hands of people whose risk perceptions and social values are woefully out of sync with the needs of a diverse and pluralistic society. Across all major U.S. sectors, the lack of diversity in our decision-making bodies is a risk that we can’t afford as a country. No amount of individual-resilience skills building will generate the adaptability and resolve that we need collectively.
OUr pseudo-democracy puts us in difficult situations.
[on writing] When we keep diaries, we engage in similar processing. By writing and rewriting, we project ourselves into alternative outcomes with more deliberation. Narrative therapy helps individuals explore troubling experiences in ways that reduce their relevance and emotional resonance.
Nope. Not everyone (though I am given to understand from indirect experience that it does work...for some.)
[and on reading] Reading fiction has similar effects but extends the benefits to relationship enhancement. Fiction requires us to put ourselves in imaginary scenarios. When we do that, we stimulate the section of our brains responsible for interpreting other people’s feelings and thoughts.
Not for everyone… I like to just read.
[if you're not with me...] It’s a “we-them” resilience that doesn’t teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another. [...] Resilience means looking outward, not primarily inward. [...]We don’t adapt to change. We, and our relationships, change.
Typos?:
This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of asexual reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.) ["a sexual reward"]
He died during period, between 2003 and 2010, during which more than $20 million of Templeton funds funded the work of deniers of anthropogenic climate change. ["during the period" and no comma]
an their CEO made $22 million ["and"]
This list, supposedly related to a Texas congressional bill mischaracterizing and opposing critical race theory. [fragment]
We goes by the name resilience today doesn’t recognize this fact. {"What" goes]
First, the title may be a bit misleading. Resilience is not a myth - what we are conditioned to believe is resilience is. The author says in her Preface: "Our culture’s solution for handling life’s hardships is to learn to be resilient. But I must warn you that this book dismantles the very heart of our prevailing notions of individual resilience."
The book is timely, given the unfortunate proliferation of a perceived freedom to be toxic, at least in the USA. And also given that there are a lot of so called "alpha males" and their tragicomic spewings of myths of their imaginations polluting the social media feeds of impressionable egos of irresilient (usually young male) consumers. Interesting to me, OED says irresilient is a rare adjective, fewer than 0.01 occurrences per milion words. Well, I've blown up that stat with twice in two sentences! Anyway, those “alphas” won't be reading this book.
Ms. Chemaly looks at the actual myths - strength and self-sufficiency being the first topic she tackles - and how our formative years, our environment, the effects the buzz phrases of "soldiering on" and "bouncing back" have on us, and makes her case that we really need to be part of a community to feed our true resilience. and she notes "We tend to think about resilience in reactive ways—how do we respond after adversity—but in practical terms resilience includes the steps we take to avoid adversity to begin with."
I think this could be an unpopular book among a certain wing of politics; the myth of bootstrap self-madeness goes against her message. It's worth a read. She says, "We live with the consequences of not reconciling ourselves to hard truths."
Formatting note: I like in-text citations (I detest uncited endnotes that the reader only discovers after reading, and then has to go back and try to figure out what they pertained to). And they were hyperlinked in the electronic copy I received. Extra nice. And for the publisher, I've noted a few typos at the end that your editors may or may not have caught.
Lots (lots) of notes, so a curated selection:
[on those toxic males] This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of [a sexual] reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.)
[turn of a phrase] Stephenie Meyer’s vampire series Twilight took off like wildfire in a political environment of similar fears. The first volume was published in 2005, in the aftermath of 9/11, in which brown-skinned Islamic extremists used airplanes—which, it must be said, are classically phallic projectiles—to penetrate U.S. airspace and destroy symbols of U.S. power.
I guess she probably needed to hammer home the message
[we all know some of those people] Refusing masks and vaccines is a prime example of how maladaptive a resilience of strength, impenetrability, and self-sufficiency can be.
[using Tetris as a "cognitive vaccine against PTSD] Research such as this has shed light on what’s known as dual-task processing, a way to reroute memories and minimize or even eliminate traumatic stress.
I found this to be interesting. Need to go find this study...
[coping methods] What we call “resilience” frequently translates into our finding ways to feel safe in our own skin, a sensation that allows us to cope with the uncertainty of anxiety-provoking life changes more openly and creatively. Interoception is therefore essential to resilience because being able to feel and interpret bodily changes and sensations helps us develop emotional awareness and regulate ourselves.
[on being taught to tough it out on our own] Each of us is a body, but together we are also interbodies.31 Your body is yours, but it is also part of everyone else’s environment, which has implications for how we respond to stress, hardships, and trauma. By default, however, we are taught and encouraged to overlook and ignore these facts, and when we do, we lose valuable insights.
[I had a hard time with this section] Despite that religious and spiritual practices involve the body, these interpretations of faith and spirituality are mainly centered on disembodied ideas and forces, including, for example, the idea of a soul, a pantheistic consciousness, or an afterlife free of limits and pain.
[semantics are tricky] Dualism isn’t all bad. For one, it is a useful cognitive shortcut. When we are faced with complexity, our ability to quickly flatten information into oppositions such as male/female, white/black, rational/irrational, thinking/feeling, can be a genuine advantage.
This is a different dualism - binary thinking is what I think she means, as opposed to the dualists of the mind being separate … outside of … the body. Except...
While splitting the mind from the body can be a useful short-term good coping mechanism in the face of mass deaths and constant physical threats, it is a spectacularly poor intellectual and philosophical structure on which to build a theory of long-term adaptivity and resilience.
Never mind
[on individual vs holistic resilience] “I’m still amazed by how quickly people slip towards the individual,” explained Michael Ungar, founder and director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Canada, when we spoke in early 2022. “They’ll give a head nod to resilience being about systems all around us, but then will give a definition of resilience as the individual ability to cope, ignoring a fundamental contradiction: my motivation to change and my being in an environment that enables change are equally weighted.”
[on the military training of one meaning of grit to "finish what I begin'] It’s unsavory to contemplate, I know, but what if you’re a military cadet, have the requisite grit, and your goal is sex? What if you begin is an unwanted sexual encounter and you believe failure isn’t an option? What if you see resistance to your actions as a challenge to overcome? What if domination is understood as strength but emotional expression and distress are considered weakness? It may seem like a harsh comparison, but grit, confidence, having a challenge orientation, commitment to task, and exercising control—all valued in resilience lessons—are also central to how rapists think and act.
Heavy and some might cry hyperbolic, but it's a valid thought stream that I've not heard much of.
A recent study of efficacy of teaching teens to recast their stories, learn mindfulness techniques, and develop gratitude practices, known as dialectical behavioral theory, revealed that kids exposed to this therapy, many of whom did not start off with depression or anxiety, worsened.
My (unpopular) position is that focusing on the harm concretizes it in the mind.
[authoritative vs authoritarian parenting] Having a tolerant, authoritative parent, for example, increases the likelihood of a child’s being resilient. Children of firm and responsive parents develop healthier autonomy, seeing themselves as independent but accepted, cared for, and connected. Authoritative parenting combines emotional intelligence, stress support, encouragement, and communication of confidence in a child’s abilities.
Authoritative, and she's not saying authoritarian (which is in the next paragraph)...
By comparison, children raised by more rule-driven, authoritarian parents are less able to manage change and self-regulate when stressed. Authoritarian parents value hierarchy and expect obedience and so are often less tolerant of emotional displays, making them less attuned to children’s needs or responsive to their distress. They are more likely to model rigidity and, as a result, children’s emotional competence suffers. Authoritarian parenting is more likely to traumatize children because it results in a higher likelihood of emotional repression, cognitive inflexibility, and fear-based reasoning.
Oh yeah. That first one. (And all three for my father from his parents.
In our mainstream script, however, little suggests the degree to which context, environment, and experience can affect a person’s ability to be optimistic or develop optimistic attitudes. Instead, resilient people are often depicted as naturally more optimistic, a trait that, furthermore, is linked to being gritty, strong, honorable, and, even, prominent.
Halo effect?
[on the problem of Norman Vincent Peale] His madly successful ideas about positive thinking can’t be divorced from a national refusal to feel discomfort and acknowledge privileges enjoyed by men such as Fred Trump, John Templeton, and Peale himself. But resilience often requires us to feel discomfort, sit with it, and parse what it means.
[on the former guy] In many ways, the relationship between the American public and Donald Trump mirrors the well-studied dynamics of intimate abuse. Aided by a media rife with distorting false equivalences, minimizing language, and the optimism of American exceptionalism, Trump was an upbeat, gaslighting machine of false hope, self-enhancing blather, and dangerous denialism and misinformation.
Preach!
[semantics - words matter] When former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo called [American Federation of Teachers leader Randi] Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world,” what he really meant was “the most dangerous person in my world.”
[uh oh] Training soldiers to develop resilience through positive psychology or cognitive behavioral therapy can therefore be harmful and counterproductive.
[we're in trouble] [failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari] Lake is one of the 42 percent of American voters who, in 2022, revealed that they thought “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”
[fear based illusions of resiliency] Strongmen don’t make people safer, a baseline for resilience at any scale. Rather, they maintain power by making people more afraid. They use language, images, and metaphors that increase contempt, anxiety, and disgust, and when they do, they can count on mainstream resilience as a recruitment tool. In the post 9/11 years that led to the election of Donald Trump, pathology and war metaphors undeniably informed an increasingly violent reactionary white supremacist moment that understood resilience as resistance, a synonym, after all, for immunity.
[we want resilience to move us past the obstacle as quickly as possible] Resilience takes time when we are all expected to make time, mainly for other people. Because most of us work to survive and take care of others, our time is not our own. For most people, taking time to adequately nurture the people we love and ourselves to stay well is exceedingly difficult. Because we are socialized to think of time as linear and in individualistic, competitive terms, we struggle to understand its social and political uses and to adapt in ways that emphasize community well-being and ecological adaptability.
[cyclical trauma] Even if we want to think time is linear and progressive, our healing is not. After a crisis, a person or community might experience well-being for a time, only to then fall into disruption and despair again, then again into improvement. Trauma makes us feel as though we are out of the “normal” flow of time, and the desire to restore that sense is powerful.
[on our contributions] We may, as individuals, adopt climate-friendly personal habits, but these habits are Pyrrhic in the face of the challenges we face.
An Unfortunate Truth
[relinquishing personal power] It's rare that "learning to be resilient" includes civics and the influence of voting on our lives, but elections are risk calculations tied to resilience expectations.[...]
We’re schooled to think of resilience in highly individualized ways, but the degree to which we can and have to be resilient depends on people we empower to make risk decisions for us. We give others the authority to impose their risk perceptions and resilience understandings on the rest of us.
[oh, that term...acceptable risk] The real power that risk decision-makers have isn’t just in defining what constitutes a risk, but defining what constitutes an acceptable risk. Acceptable to whom? For how long? At what cost?
[a trend that isn't new] The study revealed a subset of the white men to be the most risk-prone, approximately 30 percent, who had greater-than-average trust in authority and technology. These men tended to be conservative, hierarchical thinkers, and hypercommitted to individualism.
Why am I not surprised?
[elected officials] Our resilience, both personal and political, is constantly being tested because our institutional threat assessment is concentrated in the hands of people whose risk perceptions and social values are woefully out of sync with the needs of a diverse and pluralistic society. Across all major U.S. sectors, the lack of diversity in our decision-making bodies is a risk that we can’t afford as a country. No amount of individual-resilience skills building will generate the adaptability and resolve that we need collectively.
OUr pseudo-democracy puts us in difficult situations.
[on writing] When we keep diaries, we engage in similar processing. By writing and rewriting, we project ourselves into alternative outcomes with more deliberation. Narrative therapy helps individuals explore troubling experiences in ways that reduce their relevance and emotional resonance.
Nope. Not everyone (though I am given to understand from indirect experience that it does work...for some.)
[and on reading] Reading fiction has similar effects but extends the benefits to relationship enhancement. Fiction requires us to put ourselves in imaginary scenarios. When we do that, we stimulate the section of our brains responsible for interpreting other people’s feelings and thoughts.
Not for everyone… I like to just read.
[if you're not with me...] It’s a “we-them” resilience that doesn’t teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another. [...] Resilience means looking outward, not primarily inward. [...]We don’t adapt to change. We, and our relationships, change.
Typos?:
This one theory endlessly fuels silly and sexist norms and standards, including, today, entire TikTok trends shaming "beta men" who "used to hunt" for being reduced to doing things like "asking for oat milk in their coffee" or being simps, being nice to woman without the expectation of asexual reward (an evolutionary meat-for-sex proxy.) ["a sexual reward"]
He died during period, between 2003 and 2010, during which more than $20 million of Templeton funds funded the work of deniers of anthropogenic climate change. ["during the period" and no comma]
an their CEO made $22 million ["and"]
This list, supposedly related to a Texas congressional bill mischaracterizing and opposing critical race theory. [fragment]
We goes by the name resilience today doesn’t recognize this fact. {"What" goes]
April 22, 2024
This book struck such a deep chord with me, and the multitude of tabbed pages on my copy speaks to that! Just being alive in 2024 means that you have experienced some kind of trauma or that you’ve pondered over resilience and the best ways to “bounce back” after a disappointment or tough period. What I love about this book is how it challenges the predominant capitalist, individualistic, narcissistic ethos of our society today. In short, to be resilient you must ditch your aggressive individualism and look outwards towards communal care, give up preconceived notions of a timeline for healing or feeling, honor your emotions—all of them, and leave space for imagining a new world. I couldn’t recommend this book more. I loved it from start to finish.
Huge thank you to the publisher, One Signal Publishers & Atria, for providing an ARC without requirement of a review.
Huge thank you to the publisher, One Signal Publishers & Atria, for providing an ARC without requirement of a review.
August 9, 2024
Surprised by this after how much I loved Rage Becomes Her. This seemed disjointed and off-topic to me most of the time. The whole thing can be summed up by the sentence "Community support is necessary for people to be resilient", and I don't think this is something anyone would argue with, so I'm not sure why a whole book was needed since it didn't really reframe anything else about the concept of resilience. It's also not such a binary....community support is essential AND individual resilience is valuable. There were many things she claimed "everyone" assumes about resilience that I don't assume and wouldn't think everyone assumes. It didn't resonate for me.
July 30, 2024
Sometimes the right book appears at the right time, and that’s what this book is to me. My adult daughter and I listened to it during a long drive on a trip we took to deal with a family emergency. We were both still processing our recent experiences and we stopped and started the book as points the author made sparked more discussion between us. How can I not give 5-stars to a book that helped me this much. Right time and right place.
On another note, the author is Bahamian and there is a fair amount in the book on The Bahamas so I think I’m going to use this book for my arounf the world journey.
On another note, the author is Bahamian and there is a fair amount in the book on The Bahamas so I think I’m going to use this book for my arounf the world journey.
August 31, 2024
*thank you to Atria for sending me an ARC in exchange for my review*
Whew! 😅 This book is a conversation starter if I ever saw one! Resilience is such a buzz word these days, and it was refreshing to see someone point out the problems with our approach to resilience.
Undeniably, western culture carries an expectation that an individual should always bounce back from whatever they experience. Mental toughness is the key to survival of the fittest in our society. But should it be? This is the question Soraya Chemaly poses in her book.
While I was fully on board with the conversation Chemaly opens in her book, I did not love the hyper-focus on what’s wrong with our approach to resilience. It was at least 90% of the content. The book as a whole had a negative and decidedly frustrated tone, which I don’t even think is unwarranted. I just needed some hope—some idea of how we can start making changes in our own lives.
So conversationally, I loved this book. It made me dig in and ask questions. It pointed out some blind spots for me. But I needed more in terms of how to start building relational and community resilience. Maybe that’s the point? Maybe we are supposed to have that conversation within our own communities. It can’t hurt to try.
Whew! 😅 This book is a conversation starter if I ever saw one! Resilience is such a buzz word these days, and it was refreshing to see someone point out the problems with our approach to resilience.
Undeniably, western culture carries an expectation that an individual should always bounce back from whatever they experience. Mental toughness is the key to survival of the fittest in our society. But should it be? This is the question Soraya Chemaly poses in her book.
While I was fully on board with the conversation Chemaly opens in her book, I did not love the hyper-focus on what’s wrong with our approach to resilience. It was at least 90% of the content. The book as a whole had a negative and decidedly frustrated tone, which I don’t even think is unwarranted. I just needed some hope—some idea of how we can start making changes in our own lives.
So conversationally, I loved this book. It made me dig in and ask questions. It pointed out some blind spots for me. But I needed more in terms of how to start building relational and community resilience. Maybe that’s the point? Maybe we are supposed to have that conversation within our own communities. It can’t hurt to try.
June 24, 2024
A very interesting book that made me rethink what resilience really means and what it entails. I always thought it was an individual quality only accomplished by one person. The author challenges us to think of it in a different way - as a part of a community. I love how she sums up resilience as “the exercise of love, compassion, and care as our responsibility to one another”. The author cites lots and lots of studies supporting all of her points. She gives compelling reasons to her way of viewing resilience and made me realize it is a much more shared experience. I give the book 4 stars.
September 5, 2024
I really wanted to like this, and if I'm being completely fair - I enjoyed the first third of the book. But I echo what some previous readers have commented:
+ The text is repetitive, and almost reads like a collection of essays that argue (over and over again) that we over-emphasize individual responsibility and under-emphasize community/ social support when it comes to resilience.
+ The author's focus is almost entirely on the negative aspects of the problem, and they don't really attempt to direct the reader to solutions or means of problem-solving or approaching resilience in a new or creative way. I wouldn't have taken as much issue with this, had it not been for the tag-line on the cover. "New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma" is positive, hopeful, forward-thinking language - completely out of step with the negative/ repetitive tone of the book. I found this pretty misleading.
I think the author's major error was boldly promising "New Thinking" on the label. It's 2024, complaining endlessly about the damages of individualism isn't "new" - neither is pointing at all the flaws in our systems - that's easy. The hard work is to offer creative, new ideas and solutions. That would be New Thinking. And it was missing from this book.
+ The text is repetitive, and almost reads like a collection of essays that argue (over and over again) that we over-emphasize individual responsibility and under-emphasize community/ social support when it comes to resilience.
+ The author's focus is almost entirely on the negative aspects of the problem, and they don't really attempt to direct the reader to solutions or means of problem-solving or approaching resilience in a new or creative way. I wouldn't have taken as much issue with this, had it not been for the tag-line on the cover. "New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma" is positive, hopeful, forward-thinking language - completely out of step with the negative/ repetitive tone of the book. I found this pretty misleading.
I think the author's major error was boldly promising "New Thinking" on the label. It's 2024, complaining endlessly about the damages of individualism isn't "new" - neither is pointing at all the flaws in our systems - that's easy. The hard work is to offer creative, new ideas and solutions. That would be New Thinking. And it was missing from this book.
June 19, 2025
The author uses an incredibly broad notion of “resilience” to progress her extreme liberal ideas on society. There are certainly important thoughts here about oppression and recovery from trauma, but the author misrepresents much of the literature on trauma, cherry picking studies which progress her liberal agenda. The field of clinical and social psychology have addressed many of the author’s concerns about positive psychology with the advancement of second wave positive psychology. Overall, the book is interesting, but I hope that readers do not finish it with a negative perception of trauma and positive psychology.
December 31, 2024
"No one is resilient alone at all times and in all contexts, and none should feel they must be. Yet disconnection, hierarchy, and alienation from one another and the world are the premises of our conventional resilience. Our cultural script for resilience, therefore, is part of the same systems and worldviews that require us to be so resilient to begin with."
Read this book. A sharp, insightful, deeply kind work that both tears toxic narratives of self-sufficiency down to the studs and offers us a bold, hopeful, and more adaptive model of resiliency as a collective and antihierarchical project.
In March of 2024, I broke my arm. It was awful. It defined much of my year. But I am profoundly grateful both for the social and structural factors that allowed me to recover and for the clarity and insight I gained (about my self, care, and capitalism amongst other topics) from the experience. I'm grateful too to end this year with a book that so perfectly articulates it all.
Read this book. A sharp, insightful, deeply kind work that both tears toxic narratives of self-sufficiency down to the studs and offers us a bold, hopeful, and more adaptive model of resiliency as a collective and antihierarchical project.
In March of 2024, I broke my arm. It was awful. It defined much of my year. But I am profoundly grateful both for the social and structural factors that allowed me to recover and for the clarity and insight I gained (about my self, care, and capitalism amongst other topics) from the experience. I'm grateful too to end this year with a book that so perfectly articulates it all.
December 21, 2024
Very solid book. My criticism is nitpicky:
I sense some questionable conclusions and false dichotomies here and there, but most of it is very solid.
I was missing a grander point than the one put forward. Books such as these feel like they grab a word and run with it as an excuse to say what they really want to say on any topic remotely connectable.
It’s a sign of incoherance when one struggles to describe a book’s main point, though I am sure other readers’ experience will vary.
The prose is dry and the audiobook narrator droll; both really hurt the engagement. A few witticisms and original metaphors sprinkled in would have gone a long way, but I guess that isn’t the author’s style.
I sense some questionable conclusions and false dichotomies here and there, but most of it is very solid.
I was missing a grander point than the one put forward. Books such as these feel like they grab a word and run with it as an excuse to say what they really want to say on any topic remotely connectable.
It’s a sign of incoherance when one struggles to describe a book’s main point, though I am sure other readers’ experience will vary.
The prose is dry and the audiobook narrator droll; both really hurt the engagement. A few witticisms and original metaphors sprinkled in would have gone a long way, but I guess that isn’t the author’s style.
August 1, 2024
I really love the ideas behind this book and I think it's a good and modern reminder for examples of how we need new thinking towards strength and resilience.
Read
December 9, 2024And she’s right too
March 24, 2025
whole and free, rest and peace.
November 17, 2024
I will be rereading this book over and over again
Excerpt from the book that suns up the deep thought and reflection that is needed to get through the text.
Resilience means surviving, but it also means celebrating when we see each other survive. We go by the name resilience today doesn’t recognize this fact. Instead, it easily turns into narcissistic maladaptation that tacitly relies on carelessness and exploitative behaviors towards others. That an inclusive resilience of care, connection, and kindness might seem naive or impossible stems directly from our deepest and most corrosive cultural beliefs: that some of us are special and chosen; that you can only rely on yourself; that we must suffer to be saved, must work for our rewards, have to compete to the death to survive. Teaching that love and tenderness must be earned and that we have to continuously prove our worth leads to isolation, competition, and despair— widespread ills we are now all too sadly familiar with.
I received an e-Arc from the publisher on Netgalley.
Excerpt from the book that suns up the deep thought and reflection that is needed to get through the text.
Resilience means surviving, but it also means celebrating when we see each other survive. We go by the name resilience today doesn’t recognize this fact. Instead, it easily turns into narcissistic maladaptation that tacitly relies on carelessness and exploitative behaviors towards others. That an inclusive resilience of care, connection, and kindness might seem naive or impossible stems directly from our deepest and most corrosive cultural beliefs: that some of us are special and chosen; that you can only rely on yourself; that we must suffer to be saved, must work for our rewards, have to compete to the death to survive. Teaching that love and tenderness must be earned and that we have to continuously prove our worth leads to isolation, competition, and despair— widespread ills we are now all too sadly familiar with.
I received an e-Arc from the publisher on Netgalley.
September 20, 2025
An interesting repudiation of modern ideas of self reliance, strength and success, highlighting how they are offshoots from old, patriarchal, colonialist belief systems; but I found the book both too broad and too vague, whilst relying heavily on anecdote and assertion.
April 26, 2024
Full review to come
dnf
July 22, 2024DNFing after chapter one, and I barely made it through that. I really wanted to like this - the core concept (resilience is community) is one I deeply agree with & it came highly recommended to me. Contextualizing 9/11 through a frame work of phallic symbols and penetration with little to no leg work to support that was entirely too much. The wild list of topics covered in chapter one alone paint a very chaotic and unfocused picture, and I gotta dip out.
July 9, 2024
While I didn't come away from this writing with any new, groundbreaking insights, I still thought the author did a great job synthesizing the same themes of other writers that challenge our broader culture's individualistic, bootstraps-type assumptions about resilience and that place those in their context of white supremacy and patriarchy.
July 1, 2025
Chemaly's main point in this book is — I think — that Western culture tends to define "resilience" in a way that is individual-focused and emphasizes personal strength, optimism, and fortitude, and yet what actually allows people to lead healthy, happy lives in the face of challenges in a combination of privilege, community support, and other resources. That is, in my opinion, a clearer and more direct thesis statement than Chemaly actually ever gives us in this book. I think all the pieces are there, and there are many great pieces that make up this book, but there are two primary issues I had with the book as a whole: One, Chemaly doesn't clearly define "resilience" herself, and so while she pushes back on several of the ways that other people have defined or talked about it, she also liberally uses the word in a variety of contexts to mean slightly different things. Two, she can't help including a number of progressive "gotcha" talking points that both lack nuance and require some amount of creativity to tie back to resilience. It's not that I disagree with her general worldview, but it bugs me to no end when my fellow liberals make their points in such black-and-white, ultraprogressive terms that they undoubtedly turn off a huge potential audience who could stand to hear some of the more nuanced, countercultural points Chemaly is making about the topic of resilience.
It's a shame, because there are some really excellent passages in this book, and then suddenly Chemaly is talking about the hijacked airplanes on 9/11 being phallic symbols of penetration and I'm like, "Ummm......" She returns frequently to the story of Hurricane Dorian's impact on The Bahamas, where many of her family members live, but not in any kind of organized way; I think the book would have been stronger, and her points easier to follow, if she'd chosen a consistent format, such as opening each chapter with the next installment of the story about the hurricane, using that to make a bigger point about resilience, and then sharing other examples illustrating the same point. But her approach was much more haphazard than that, and I felt like I lost the thread many times trying to figure out how her current story or topic tied back into the main point of a chapter. And sometimes she shared something and seemed to think her point in sharing it was self-evident when it definitely wasn't. For example, when she told the story of a man experiencing a workplace shooting, and then revealed it was actually a story of a boy who'd experienced a school shooting, I think that was supposed to be some "aha!" moment for the reader in realizing they viewed those two things differently, but I didn't see the difference and she didn't really explain her point, so I was just confused.
I wish this had been a stronger book. I think Chemaly's primary point (as I understand it) is a good one, and she has a lot of good material here. But the end result of putting it all together isn't something I'd readily hand to another reader.
It's a shame, because there are some really excellent passages in this book, and then suddenly Chemaly is talking about the hijacked airplanes on 9/11 being phallic symbols of penetration and I'm like, "Ummm......" She returns frequently to the story of Hurricane Dorian's impact on The Bahamas, where many of her family members live, but not in any kind of organized way; I think the book would have been stronger, and her points easier to follow, if she'd chosen a consistent format, such as opening each chapter with the next installment of the story about the hurricane, using that to make a bigger point about resilience, and then sharing other examples illustrating the same point. But her approach was much more haphazard than that, and I felt like I lost the thread many times trying to figure out how her current story or topic tied back into the main point of a chapter. And sometimes she shared something and seemed to think her point in sharing it was self-evident when it definitely wasn't. For example, when she told the story of a man experiencing a workplace shooting, and then revealed it was actually a story of a boy who'd experienced a school shooting, I think that was supposed to be some "aha!" moment for the reader in realizing they viewed those two things differently, but I didn't see the difference and she didn't really explain her point, so I was just confused.
I wish this had been a stronger book. I think Chemaly's primary point (as I understand it) is a good one, and she has a lot of good material here. But the end result of putting it all together isn't something I'd readily hand to another reader.
August 22, 2024
Listened to the audiobook on the recommendation of a friend while doing an intensive researching trauma and abuse cycles.
It took me a minute to get into it, but once I bought the premise- that the idea of individual resilience in the face of adversity is some heroic trait- everything fell into place afterwards. The author is passionate and willing to tackle some tough topics, and does a good job framing certain experiences that everyone can relate to.
Pros:
- Brings up tons of good talking points and research to back it up.
- The author has strong experience to pull from
- Ends with a general direction to take in life
Cons:
- The author brings a strong stance to bat and assumes that the reader is already at a certain stage of emotional maturity. This cuts down on the number of people(specifically men) who will willingly read through the book with a completely open mind. If you're trying to get a working man who grew up on a farm, in church, and votes red to read this book, there are several steps he'll have to take before being ready for it. (Base empathy, base open mindedness, base respect for scientific process and results, base capacity to listen to a strongly spoken woman. Yes, these are incredibly basic, but I couldn't help realizing while listening to it that some of the men I grew up with and currently work with would throw it away without a second thought due to some or all of those reasons. Lots of work to do.)
- The author has some pretty Freudian comparisons to make that are definitely more opinion than fact. And, while I agree that one could conceivably associate airplanes and missiles with phallic representation, form follows function.
All in all, I'm glad to have listened to this book, and it poked some holes in my understanding of the American dream and bootstrapping. Would recommend to anyone who feels a lack of community or support and is trying to do it all on their own and wonders why it isn't working.
Would recommend to everyone, really, but one would need the mental/emotional prerequisites listed above in the cons section.
It took me a minute to get into it, but once I bought the premise- that the idea of individual resilience in the face of adversity is some heroic trait- everything fell into place afterwards. The author is passionate and willing to tackle some tough topics, and does a good job framing certain experiences that everyone can relate to.
Pros:
- Brings up tons of good talking points and research to back it up.
- The author has strong experience to pull from
- Ends with a general direction to take in life
Cons:
- The author brings a strong stance to bat and assumes that the reader is already at a certain stage of emotional maturity. This cuts down on the number of people(specifically men) who will willingly read through the book with a completely open mind. If you're trying to get a working man who grew up on a farm, in church, and votes red to read this book, there are several steps he'll have to take before being ready for it. (Base empathy, base open mindedness, base respect for scientific process and results, base capacity to listen to a strongly spoken woman. Yes, these are incredibly basic, but I couldn't help realizing while listening to it that some of the men I grew up with and currently work with would throw it away without a second thought due to some or all of those reasons. Lots of work to do.)
- The author has some pretty Freudian comparisons to make that are definitely more opinion than fact. And, while I agree that one could conceivably associate airplanes and missiles with phallic representation, form follows function.
All in all, I'm glad to have listened to this book, and it poked some holes in my understanding of the American dream and bootstrapping. Would recommend to anyone who feels a lack of community or support and is trying to do it all on their own and wonders why it isn't working.
Would recommend to everyone, really, but one would need the mental/emotional prerequisites listed above in the cons section.
January 1, 2026
I went into The Resiliency Myth hoping for a fresh perspective on resilience — especially something that could offer “new thinking,” as the subtitle promises. Unfortunately, while the book has a few strong insights, the overall execution fell short for me.
Chemaly’s central argument- that the Western view of resilience is too individualistic and ignores the communal, interconnected approaches seen in other cultures- is an important and timely point. I appreciated her distinction between short bursts of strength vs. long-term endurance and her reframing of how strength is expressed, particularly among women. That perspective was compelling.
However, the book felt much longer than its 300 pages. The writing often drifted into the overly abstract or needlessly elaborate, making the key messages hard to hold onto. Lines like “prepare to bask in an orgy of pseudo-militaristic violence” or “diffuse sadness and amorphous grief” felt more like attempts to impress than to clarify. In many places, the writing style overshadowed the message.
Another issue is that the book shifts from resilience into broader commentary on systemic oppression. While those themes can coexist, the transition didn’t feel smooth. Instead of deepening the conversation, it felt like the original thesis got lost in a much larger, and less focused, critique. It also seemed like the book leaned heavily on problem identification without offering many actionable solutions.
Chemaly’s tone can also be polarizing. If you disagree with her viewpoint or are looking for a more balanced discussion, her voice may come off as dismissive or overly strident. At times, her critiques felt like they were trying too hard to find meaning in minutiae, such as reading significance into popular baby names like Liam and Olivia as reflections of gender-based societal expectations.
There are a few worthwhile takeaways, but they’re buried beneath repetition and heavy-handed writing. Ultimately, I respect the intention of the book and some of its ideas, but the execution didn’t live up to its promise. A more concise, solution-focused version might have had greater impact.
Chemaly’s central argument- that the Western view of resilience is too individualistic and ignores the communal, interconnected approaches seen in other cultures- is an important and timely point. I appreciated her distinction between short bursts of strength vs. long-term endurance and her reframing of how strength is expressed, particularly among women. That perspective was compelling.
However, the book felt much longer than its 300 pages. The writing often drifted into the overly abstract or needlessly elaborate, making the key messages hard to hold onto. Lines like “prepare to bask in an orgy of pseudo-militaristic violence” or “diffuse sadness and amorphous grief” felt more like attempts to impress than to clarify. In many places, the writing style overshadowed the message.
Another issue is that the book shifts from resilience into broader commentary on systemic oppression. While those themes can coexist, the transition didn’t feel smooth. Instead of deepening the conversation, it felt like the original thesis got lost in a much larger, and less focused, critique. It also seemed like the book leaned heavily on problem identification without offering many actionable solutions.
Chemaly’s tone can also be polarizing. If you disagree with her viewpoint or are looking for a more balanced discussion, her voice may come off as dismissive or overly strident. At times, her critiques felt like they were trying too hard to find meaning in minutiae, such as reading significance into popular baby names like Liam and Olivia as reflections of gender-based societal expectations.
There are a few worthwhile takeaways, but they’re buried beneath repetition and heavy-handed writing. Ultimately, I respect the intention of the book and some of its ideas, but the execution didn’t live up to its promise. A more concise, solution-focused version might have had greater impact.
September 6, 2024
I have very mixed feelings about this book. As a straight white male a lot of what she says is hard to hear (even though it’s hard I think she has a lot of good points, although there are a few I don’t completely agree with).
I think the title of the book and the subtext is a little misleading to the actual thesis of the book. There is a focus on resilience but there’s also a lot of other political underlays throughout the book.
I love and agree with the idea that resilience as individuals and communities needs to be enlarged. I think my biggest disagreement or pushback on her thesis would be the fact that she seems to fall into an All-or-Nothing fallacy where the current state of the world and our definition of resilience has no redeeming qualities. I don’t think she actually believes that but it comes across that way (and not just her argument on resilience but on some other issues as well).
Also, her style is probably prone to alienating people who disagree with her and attracting only those who already agree with her.
My least favorite line is that she is disgusted (I don’t remember the actual word, but it was VERY strong) that the top names in the US are Liam (cause it means warriors) and Olivia (cause it means peace although it actually means olive tree which can be a symbol of lease so she got this wrong). She uses this as one of her examples of it being okay for men to be aggressive in our society and women are supposed to be meek and weak.
My favorite part is at the beginning when she destroys the definition of what it means to be strong and how men excel in short term bursts of strength but how women are WAY better and stronger when it comes to endurance sports. Like women are amazing and strong and she did a great job at illustrating this.
Overall: worth the read, worth thinking about, but it’s worth using the book to inform and deepen how you think about the issues the book addresses not just to adopt how the book frames everything.
I think the title of the book and the subtext is a little misleading to the actual thesis of the book. There is a focus on resilience but there’s also a lot of other political underlays throughout the book.
I love and agree with the idea that resilience as individuals and communities needs to be enlarged. I think my biggest disagreement or pushback on her thesis would be the fact that she seems to fall into an All-or-Nothing fallacy where the current state of the world and our definition of resilience has no redeeming qualities. I don’t think she actually believes that but it comes across that way (and not just her argument on resilience but on some other issues as well).
Also, her style is probably prone to alienating people who disagree with her and attracting only those who already agree with her.
My least favorite line is that she is disgusted (I don’t remember the actual word, but it was VERY strong) that the top names in the US are Liam (cause it means warriors) and Olivia (cause it means peace although it actually means olive tree which can be a symbol of lease so she got this wrong). She uses this as one of her examples of it being okay for men to be aggressive in our society and women are supposed to be meek and weak.
My favorite part is at the beginning when she destroys the definition of what it means to be strong and how men excel in short term bursts of strength but how women are WAY better and stronger when it comes to endurance sports. Like women are amazing and strong and she did a great job at illustrating this.
Overall: worth the read, worth thinking about, but it’s worth using the book to inform and deepen how you think about the issues the book addresses not just to adopt how the book frames everything.
August 5, 2025
I love Soraya Chemaly’s concise writing style that cuts right to the heart of social ills. When I found out she had written a book about resilience, I knew I could trust her critique of the ubiquitous cultural call to be resilient. The thing about this book is that it honors the concept of resilience with the respect it deserves by sorting out what are healthy ways to be resilient (emphasizing community care and interdependence, establishing systemic supports, unlearning harmful racial and gender biases and their subconscious relationship to the way we talk about resilience, emphasizing the critical aspect of rest and recovery, etc etc) versus unhealthy expectations of resilience (spoiler alert: Christian white supremacy patriarchy is alive and THRIVING in popular and widely-accepted perceptions of resilience). Mental health research and practices that are not rooted in an anti-racist and feminist approach serve in upholding damaging systems that keep marginalized people in traumatic circumstances. Chemaly’s systemic approach to mental health is critical in times like these. I remember reading “Rage Becomes Her” and seeing the world through new eyes, and “The Resilience Myth” is having a similar effect on me.
Read
October 1, 2025I’m not going to rate this because it didn’t have my full attention for much of it while I was listening to the audiobook. That said, I think that might reflect the writing and probably the narration. But still, I don’t think I can say for sure. I agree with the central thesis of this book and think it gave interesting examples with a lot of social and historical context. The flow was hard to follow at time for me, as in, I’d often feel like I missed something between examples or like I’d lost the thread of what was being illustrated. But, it did sort of feel like basically the same point being made on repeat in every chapter, so it didn’t much matter. Eventually I stopped going back when I thought I’d miss something because… it just didn’t feel necessary. But maybe I just didn’t need to be convinced much. There’s clearly a lot of research in these pages and interesting personal experience as well. But I heard about this book when the author went on a podcast I listen to and honestly I think the podcast mostly covered it for me. But that’s probably because I was already on my pro-community anti-individualism grind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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November 16, 2024I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly makes it very clear that resilience is a difficult subject. If you are from a privileged background, you will be supported and applauded for your efforts to overcome obstacles. If you are not, or if you are a person of color, you will often be seen as a failure who couldn’t handle the pressure and cracked, no matter what you do. The most important lesson in this book is that self-care and self-preservation are crucial when you are dealing with insurmountable odds. Reaching out to others in a similar situation, relying on them, and allowing the trauma to heal is one of the best things you can do. Just prioritize compassion in this world instead of trying to tear each other down.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to write a review. The Resilience Myth is currently for sale at your favorite bookstore. #goodreads #atria
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to write a review. The Resilience Myth is currently for sale at your favorite bookstore. #goodreads #atria
November 19, 2024
Soraya Chemaly’s The Resilience Myth challenges conventional wisdom about resilience, often portrayed as an individualistic ability to “bounce back” after hardship. Instead, Chemaly redefines resilience as a collective process that emphasizes interdependence, community care, and systemic change. Through a feminist and anti-capitalist lens, she critiques societal norms that equate resilience with stoic endurance and self-reliance, which often perpetuate isolation and ableism  .
Chemaly explores how systems of oppression—such as capitalism and patriarchy—reinforce a narrow and harmful understanding of resilience, particularly through workplace “grind culture” and unrealistic expectations for recovery. She advocates for shifting focus from individual grit to fostering supportive communities that prioritize care and inclusion  .
The book also highlights the embodied nature of resilience, arguing that mental and emotional recovery is deeply connected to physical well-being. Chemaly critiques the militaristic and gendered narratives around resilience, which glorify toughness for men while imposing self-restrictive behaviors on women
Chemaly explores how systems of oppression—such as capitalism and patriarchy—reinforce a narrow and harmful understanding of resilience, particularly through workplace “grind culture” and unrealistic expectations for recovery. She advocates for shifting focus from individual grit to fostering supportive communities that prioritize care and inclusion  .
The book also highlights the embodied nature of resilience, arguing that mental and emotional recovery is deeply connected to physical well-being. Chemaly critiques the militaristic and gendered narratives around resilience, which glorify toughness for men while imposing self-restrictive behaviors on women
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