From the Spring edition of Contentment Magazine
By Frank Forencich, PhD
Life is the Art of Drawing Without an Eraser
– John W. Gardner
I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian, and I enjoy the process of pushing back. As a teacher and coach, my goal is to nurture high-functioning individuals and help them overcome the stresses and traumas they face. In doing so, I’ve familiarized myself with the literature on therapy, counseling, and wellness that has emerged in recent decades, keeping track of the commonly used language. Throughout this journey, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the concept of resilience, especially as it is portrayed in popular health and wellness media.
As I see it, we’re looking in the wrong direction. Stresses, big and small, come into our lives, and we long to regain the sense of control, predictability, and wholeness that we experienced in days gone by. We bravely declare that we will rebuild and bounce back. We tell our friends that we will get back in shape as we dream about returning to our former youthful vigor and exuberance. Likewise, we imagine degraded ecosystems returning to their original, old-growth glory after being raped by strip-mining, clear-cutting, and development. It’s no wonder we see a growing industry of resilience training in education, business, community settings, and leadership. It seems like everyone wants to go back.
But our thinking is fundamentally flawed. The river of ecosystem function, human physiology, and mental health only flows forward, and as Heraclitus taught us, it’s never the same river twice. Strictly speaking, there can be no bouncing back for any living systems, whether they be habitats, human bodies, or spirits. Healing does occur, but when it does, it’s always a transformation to some new state of integration. The thing we call “resilience” is better described as a creative process of moving forward.
Suppose you suffer an athletic injury. With rest and treatment, you’ll probably get over it and resume your favorite sports; you might even conclude that you are back to normal. But the tissue in question is different than before. Your body has engineered some microscopic workarounds and compensations. There is some new scar tissue, some thickening of fibers, and maybe some new sensory-motor activity in your brain and neuromuscular system. Your body works well enough now, and it no longer gives you pain, but in essence, it’s really a different body. You haven’t bounced back; you’ve bounced forward.
The same holds true for habitats and bioregions. When a forest ecosystem burns or is clear-cut, it eventually transforms to a new state of function and health. We might say that it “heals,” but conditions are not precisely the same. Some species have disappeared, and new ones have taken hold. Given enough time, the forest grows again and may even appear to have recovered, but subtle new relationships between plants, animals, and microorganisms exist. In a sense, it’s really a new forest.
As for the human mind and spirit, our misplaced belief in resilience is all part of what we might call Golden Age psychology, the belief that the present moment is intrinsically inferior to the utopian perfection of the past. Things were better in the good old days, so we believe. For those in the Paleo health and fitness movement, the golden age for the human species was our indigenous ancestors’ hunting and gathering, pre-agricultural era. For Islamic fundamentalists, it was the 12th century. For modern political-cultural conservatives, it was the 1950s. And for most of us in our senior years, it was the days of our youth when hormones ran wild and the world was ripe for adventure; if only we could return to the glory days of our 20s, all would be well. But in the end, all this romantic wishfulness is a delusion and a distraction from the matters at hand.
The problem with our popular image of resilience is that it offers a false hope of return. All our modern “re” words suffer a similar flaw: return, restore, rebound, rebuild, rewild, regenerate, recuperate. The belief is seductive: with good luck, the right attitude, and hard work, we can take our broken lives and bodies, put them back into their original order, and everything will be as good as new or as nature intended. But this belief in backward-facing resilience can blind us to the very actions and attitudes we need to move forward. Even worse, it can leave us feeling hopeless—if going back fails, nothing is left but to suffer in frustration. In short, our popular belief in resilience can break our hearts and leave us empty-handed.
All of which speaks to the present moment in history. The chaos and stress burden confronting us today escalates with terrifying speed and intensity. Climate and ecological breakdown are underway, and now, with the advent of a new administration in Washington, some people are forecasting catastrophic economic and social turmoil, while others are recovering from that fear that they have experienced over the past four years. Likewise, for the people of Los Angeles and North Carolina whose lives have been ravaged by hurricanes and wildfires, there can be no putting tragedy back in the bottle; whatever the challenge, we must move forward.
Writing about the adversities of the modern world, author Naomi Klein has advocated for resistance but famously advised, in a book by the same name, that “No is not enough.” In other words, we’ve got to do more than push back against our circumstances, whether they be personal or political. In other words, there’s got to be a creation and a future-oriented “Yes.” The time has come to take the broken pieces of our lives and assemble them into something new, something functional, maybe even something beautiful. In this, our efforts must be less like restoring an old artwork and more like bricolage, the improvisational, do-it-yourself art of working with whatever you’ve got. Assess your resources, whatever they might be, and start looking for something that works together. For every no, look for a yes.
This orientation towards healing forward and creating forward might sound like a strategy for occasional use, especially in the wake of trauma, injury, disease, or social chaos. But when we take the lesson to heart, we start looking at our lives from a new perspective. In this, creating and healing forward become fundamental personal life skills in their own right. This is not just something we do in the aftermath of adverse events; it’s an orientation we can practice every day, always working with what we’ve got on hand, continuously putting together new combinations that move us ahead. In this practice, healing and creating forward are muscles that get stronger with use; the more we practice bouncing forward, the more skillful we become.
Frank Forencich, PhD, explores the forward-looking theme in his article Create Forward, Heal Forward. He philosophically describes a helpful perspective: We are not recovering from something but building something new in our lives. In that sense, we are not bouncing back from anything but creating something new. This gives birth to the idea of healing forward.
