Soraya Chemaly says the idea of resilience elevates individuals over society. But she misrepresents how psychologists use it

Fifteen years ago, the great American activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich launched a broadside against what would soon become known as toxic positivity.

The relentless pursuit of optimism and self-improvement is destructive, she argued. It turns our attention inward when we should be advocating for social change, overlooks the systemic causes of suffering, and rejects people who suffer as moral failures.

Ehrenreich experienced the collateral sting of positive thinking first-hand when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease, she wrote, gave her “a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture […] that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

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Review: The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma – Soraya Chemaly (Simon & Schuster)

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American feminist writer Soraya Chemaly, author of the bracing Rage Becomes Her, mines the same rich vein as Ehrenreich in her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma.

Resilience, Chemaly contends, is an ascendant idea that comes with truckloads of ideological baggage. Setting resilience up as a modern virtue elevates the individual over the community. Urging people to become more resilient is, she argues, tantamount to victim-blaming.

The Resilience Myth is a passionate indictment of a concept that is ripe for critical analysis. Some of Chemaly’s characterisation of mainstream notions of resilience hits the mark. The concept can be nebulous, resilience-building initiatives can be over-hyped, and resilience theorists must pay more than lip service to the social determinants of suffering.

However, her critique is deeply flawed. It caricatures the psychology of resilience, misunderstands the concept’s limited scope, and takes a simplistic, either/or view of how the individual and society contribute to it. These distortions lead to a radically unbalanced account.

What’s wrong with resilience?

Chemaly opens her case for the prosecution by arguing resilience is our culture’s dominant ideal for addressing life challenges. “The leitmotif of our accelerated and chaotic times”, it is fundamentally misguided.

True resilience, she writes,

draws its power from mutually nurturing relationships in supportive environments, serendipitous experiences, sharing resources, and creating tolerant, compassionate communities.

The mainstream view of resilience, however, is an individualistic one, focused on self-sufficiency and mental toughness. This view promotes “disconnection, hierarchy, and alienation from one another and the world”, undermining a commitment to shared goals.

Conventional ideas of resilience overlook the body too, she writes. “Resilience myths” suggest “our minds rule […] and the body is a stupid but necessary appendage”. How indivisible “mindbodies” create resilience is not fleshed out by Chemaly, a reference to (nonexistent) “mirror genes” not helping the case.

Turning to the development of resilience, Chemaly criticises the repressive and potentially harmful aspects of school-based initiatives aimed at instilling character strengths and values.

To foster grit and growth mindsets, she argues, is to overvalue conformity and academic achievement. Rather than pushing personal resilience on students, parents should be encouraged to become more involved with their children or offered mandatory classes “urging them to consider healthier collective norms and standards” for what happiness and success look like.

Chemaly is solidly on the side of young people in these matters. They experience high rates of distress “because the world is distressing, and adults have failed them”. Their misery also reflects honesty about the state of the world and pragmatic pessimism. “Teaching kids endless ways to be mindful, change mindsets, develop healthy habits” can help, she concedes, but these methods “are, in essence, window-dressing”.

Pragmatic pessimism, she suggests, is one form of negativity we need to cultivate. Chemaly takes to task Norman Vincent Peale (a mid-20th century advocate for positive thinking) and the positive psychology movement for promoting excessive optimism, steeped in privilege and narcissism.

Sadness and pessimism must be accepted sometimes, she advises, and we need the wisdom to know when hope should be reined in. Rather callously, she attributes elevated levels of suicide among working-class white American men to “aggrieved entitlement” when their lives fail to meet high, race-based expectations.

Part of the problem with conventional ideas of resilience, according to Chemaly, is that they are soaked in masculinity, militarism and capitalism. Initiatives to build resilience in the workplace have a punishing emphasis on toughness, productivity and “patriarchal governance”. They fail to appreciate the need for flexibility and the demands of nurturing roles.

Chemaly observes the failings of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, developed by the US Army to build resilience among serving members of the military (skewered recently in Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix).

Such training, Chemaly speculates, has been not just ineffective but actively harmful. Drawing a long bow, she even sees this approach to resilience training as a factor in the 2021 storming of the US Capitol and the rise of antidemocratic right-wing movements. This is based on a slight over-representation of servicemen in the ranks of rioters and far-right groups.

What is to be done?

Amid gradually looming threats such as climate change, Chemaly suggests we need to relinquish the very idea of “bouncing back” from adversity. A fundamentally conservative notion, it relies on a linear view of time and destructive beliefs in limitless growth, she contends.

We must also consider risk alongside resilience, asking “who will have to be most resilient” in the face of emerging threats? Chemaly argues risks are unfairly distributed across society, imposing greater resilience burdens on marginalised groups.

In the end, efforts to build personal resilience are not up to the task of overcoming the threats humanity faces. To do this we must develop shared narratives, moving

our suffering and our knowledge from the realm of individual psychology to the realm of social and political discourse.

Nothing short of radical social change is required because resilience is “an ideal that can ultimately only be achieved through brutality”.

Toxic individualism, rigid gender ideologies, and global white supremacy have strangleholds on our culture, but they don’t have to define us as they do our myths of resilience.

How this monstrous concept might be replaced is distilled by Chemaly into ten key messages. To list just the first five: No one can go it alone. Cognitive flexibility is critical. Emotional competence is liberating. Resilience means looking outward, not primarily inward. Resilience is a dynamic and complex process.

Is resilience a myth?

Chemaly’s book presents resilience as an entirely wrong-headed and destructive idea, tainted with a poisoner’s pantry of toxins: capitalism, individualism, masculinity, militarism, whiteness.

Yet her account of the mainstream psychology of resilience bears almost no resemblance to how psychologists talk, think or write about the topic. Most of the correctives she proposes are already snugly embedded in mainstream understandings.

Ideas such as “no one can go it alone” and “resilience means looking outward, not primarily inward” reflect the explicit recognition in the psychology of resilience that social support and attachment are vital for coping, and many of the strengths believed to enable resilience are interpersonal in nature. The most popular psychological model of strengths lists qualities such as fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, social intelligence and teamwork.

A standard emphasis in studies of coping is on people having a repertoire of skills and strengths, and on the importance of managing emotional responses in ways that are sensitive to a situation.

All major theorists of resilience recognise it’s a dynamic and complex process. Personal strengths and skills exist alongside, and in interaction with, relationships, families, communities, and social institutions.

It may be true that “resilience” is sometimes employed in simplistic ways, especially by people who popularise it. However, Chemaly’s criticism of the “mainstream” view of resilience does not capture the reality of how the idea is conceptualised or assessed.

Part of the problem here is that The Myth of Resilience misrepresents the concept’s scope. From a psychological perspective, resilience – especially when understood as a set of skills or strengths for dealing with adversity – is merely one element contributing to differences in individuals’ wellbeing.

Many other elements will also contribute. How much adversity people face, their social connections, their cultural background, their physical health, their economic resources, and so on.

Chemaly, starting from a much looser definition of “resilience” (whatever contributes to good lives and healthy societies), faults mainstream ideas of resilience for overlooking societal factors and levels of risk, when these are explicitly outside the concept’s scope. It’s like redefining bats to include birds and then criticising the original concept for omitting feathers.

It is obvious that a well-functioning and resilient society can’t be achieved simply by boosting the coping skills of its members. No student of the psychology of resilience would claim it could.

The goal of that psychology is not to create utopia but simply to understand and enhance how individuals deal with the slings and arrows of life. Pursuing that goal has met with modest but real success.

Rejecting psychology

Part of the problem with The Resilience Myth is that it rejects any meaningful role for psychological factors in social wellbeing. In its desire to “move … from the realm of individual psychology to the realm of social and political discourse” the book maintains the real factors of interest are all systemic, structural and collective, not psychological.

Why not both? It should be possible to recognise that our welfare as individuals and societies depends in a multi-levelled way on both psychological and societal factors, among others. There is no incompatibility between enhancing how we cope personally with life’s challenges and also striving for better social relations and fairer societies.

There is something ironic in a book that touts its rejection of dualism and binary thinking being so prone to them. Individual versus collective and psychological versus social are false binaries just as much as mind versus body. Chemaly’s rejection of individual psychology leaves her with a simplistic form of social reductionism.

Ultimately The Resilience Myth is more a declaration of a political worldview than a focused analysis of an imperfect concept. The book reads as if Chemaly is trying to force the entirety of contemporary American progressivism through a small, resilience-shaped hole. The result is a work that fails to do any sort of justice to how resilience is actually examined and understood psychologically.

Instead of offering a considered critique of the concept, and a constructive evaluation of its limitations and misuses, Chemaly caricatures and dismisses it.

Readers who share her politics may enjoy the book for attacking the right enemies, but its one-sidedness leaves it with little to offer for anyone wanting a nuanced critique of resilience.