Beyond the bounce back
I’ve upset a lot of people over the years talking about why employers should stop sending people to resilience programs.
Sorry to any consultants reading this who have made a living from delivering resilience programs – I did back in the day too, which is why I feel confident that they don’t do what they are intended to.
I’ve written a lot about where they go wrong:
Many are based on outdated information, cherry-picked studies, or outright pseudoscience
They put the emphasis on individuals as opposed to the flawed organisational systems they’re trying to operate within
And my personal favourite – insulting people who have demonstrated their resilience time after time, surviving the worst experiences that life could throw at them, by thinking that a one-day workshop could teach them anything about ‘bouncing back’.
Bouncing back was never the point. Adverse life experiences change us. We don’t ever bounce back to our original state in the way that many resilience advocates describe – a fact that is at the heart of the post-traumatic growth movement. The idea of bouncing back after adversity assumes that adversity is time limited and discrete, but for many people adversity is a daily experience. People from groups who experience frequent oppression and discrimination often experience adversity as ongoing and compounding. Bouncing back from an individual incident becomes irrelevant when multiple incidents are experienced on a daily basis.
Read the full article at The Trauma-informed Leader on Substack.
