One of the traps and seductions of the social media world is the idea that everyone else leads an extraordinary life and you don’t. The parade of extraordinary experiences is so often a narcissistic quest for ‘look at me’, ‘I was there’. And whilst I’m happy for the escape of a Taylor Swift concert or the high of a holiday to some exotic location, its actually more important how we settle down to the everyday. The norm is not the high and the high cannot be sustained.
Indeed, wanting to be in the high is not healthy, mentally or socially. In the everyday someone has to do the dishes, clean and make the bed, do the shopping, prepare meals, wash clothes etc.
Wanting to sustain the high of an event or experience is actually not good for you. It’s nice to be entertained but it cannot be sustained. The real question for any desire to sustain a high is: what do you do on Monday? How do you engage with the people who didn’t have that experience or event?
The quest to live in the high, is the same psychological dynamic that feeds addiction. To break down this delusion one needs social trust and relationships to bring you back ‘down to earth’. This is where the real need for resilience resides.
Unfortunately, most of the resilience literature and genre is lost in the same fixation on highs and lows. Most of the discourse on resilience is about coming down off eustress or rising up from distress. Even worse, such discourse often focuses on individualist strategies and brain-centrism. The reality is, the effectiveness of resilience depends on social meaning and relationships.
All the evidence shows that resilience is only as good as the structure and strength of the community in which one is situated.
When I have been involved in a major crisis of loss and suffering, it is rare that people go to clinical psychologists or EAP services for support. Most people in a crisis seek support in those with whom they share the everyday, families and friends. When risk goes wrong, people rarely seek support in a clinical professional, they seek help in a trusted friend.
This is why the nurturing of social relationships and community is so important. When you fall from a high or find yourself in a black hole, it is those who know you trust and know in the everyday, that you seek help. For example, during the Beaconsfield crisis we flew in 12 clinical psychologists to support people yet, the majority of people in distress didn’t use this service, they went to trusted family, friends and clergy for their support.
I find it interesting when people in safety confuse the entertainment of an event for substance. Listening to entertaining speakers and getting a ‘buzz’ from marketing doesn’t help do safety on a Monday. Indeed, without a substantially practical method, Safety goes back to the same old checklists, systems and regulation that it was stuck in last week.
Our next free book is due for release in April-May just before the SPoR conference in Canberra (https://spor.com.au/canberra-convention/). The book is on Everyday Social Resilience and is one of the modules being studied at the conference. It is co-written with Gabrielle Carlton who has been focusing on upskilling communities in resilience in her work for over 10 years.
The critical questions of the book are: How resilient are you and your community/family when risk goes wrong? What methods are you using to build resilience in your community in case risk goes wrong? What methods do you use to ‘upskill’ and ‘upbuild’ people in safety so they can be helpers? When people need help, resilience and support in times of distress, do they come to you? Do you know what to do to support others and can you do it ethically with competence? When people are in a state of loss, are you a helper or a hindrance? Do you know the difference between hype and helping? Are you a ‘skilled helper’ (Egan) in a skilled community?
We will announce the release of the book on this blog.
In a SPoR conference, we try to hose down the hype and focus on the substance. When we talk about ‘doing’ it includes a method to do it. We seek no sponsorship and do workshops in a local community centre so that the focus is on an ethic of risk, social meaning, upskilling in method and personhood.
If you are interested in coming to such a conference then you can email: admin@spor.com.au
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below