Elizabeth: I think the sort of resilience work that is trauma-informed is very powerful. Work that recognises trauma, addresses the trauma, and addresses those inequalities and the experiences that people have faced. So, it's not throwing resilience out, it's just, again, recognising that resilience may enable us to survive, but it doesn't, maybe as you say, mean the acceptance of intolerable systemic issues that really need to be broken down and rethought and rebuilt.
There is this notion that the more resilient we are, the more we can just absorb these intolerable conditions, these degrees of toxicity that no human being should be required to endure. So is it possible that this exaggerated notion of resilience actually becomes something that drives human rights violations, in a sense, because it gets us to turn a blind eye to things that should change systemically, but we don't change them because we’re resilient so we just move on?
Dec 2022 | Collective Action Magazine
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