Last month, I gave a talk to Connecting Climate Minds in Sub-Saharan Africa about organizing community networks to prevent and heal the mental health and psychosocial problems generated by the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis. Participants got excited about the proposal because they said the crisis is generating pervasive social, psychological, emotional, and behavioral problems throughout their region.
The stories they shared mirror what is occurring in the U.S. and worldwide. I pointed to the need to build population-level mental wellness and resilience but emphasized that traditional concepts of resilience will not be helpful. Instead, I urged them to focus on what I call “transformational resilience.”
Why Transformational Resilience Is Needed
The C-E-B crisis will worsen for decades. Building human resilience for the crisis requires far more than toughness, withstanding impacts, or “bouncing back” to previous conditions after adversities, which is what many people think resilience involves.
One reason is that focusing on the ability to bounce back assumes that adversities end, giving people time to recover and return to previous conditions. However, the relentless accumulation of toxic stresses, emergencies, and disasters generated by the C-E-B crisis will increasingly leave people with little or no time to recover and return to pre-crisis status.
In addition, many people, including marginalized and low-income populations and those who experienced childhood abuse or ongoing racism, sexism, and other systemic oppressions, don’t want to return to previous conditions. They want to increase their sense of health, safety, and well-being substantially above pre-adversity levels.
Further, current ways of living often contribute to the C-E-B crisis. This includes today’s massive amounts of resource extraction, consumption, waste, use of fossil fuels, and other practices. Resuming these habits after adversities will only worsen the crisis.
The suffering caused by the C-E-B crisis can either defeat or empower us. It will defeat us if we refuse to acknowledge reality, insist on maintaining business-as-usual, and reject ideas and actions that can reduce the crisis to manageable levels.
The C-E-B crisis can empower us if we recognize the assumptions, beliefs, and practices that created the calamity and use this awareness as a powerful catalyst to learn, grow, and find new sources of meaning, purpose, and acting in life.
This is what transformational resilience involves. It is the ability of people to use hardships generated by the C-E-B crisis as catalysts to transform their thinking and actions and establish far more healthy, safe, just, decarbonized, and ecologically regenerative conditions than previously existed.
Transformational resilience is a process, not a specific endpoint. The dynamics it embodies are an adaptation of what in psychology is often called “post-traumatic growth” or “adversity-based growth.”
When applied to the C-E-B crisis, I believe transformational resilience is a much more appropriate term. That’s because it speaks to the fundamental changes in thinking and practices needed to prevent and heal widespread mental health and psychosocial struggles as people transform their communities into socially, economically, and ecologically regenerative systems.
Transformation resilience involves three interactive phases that can be called the “transformational resilience cycle.”
The cycle begins when an event or series of events damage or destroy the things people value or harm those they care about. The shocks overwhelm their ability to make sense of what occurred and shatter deeply held assumptions and beliefs about the way the world works and how they should think and act in life.
Most people will go to great lengths to quickly regain control during a crisis and return to their previous ways of thinking and acting.
If and when that fails, as it often will as the C-E-B crisis worsens, they enter a period of disarray. They become disoriented and distressed because their self-identity and the sense of meaning and purpose that guides their lives are in turmoil.
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Some people are so overwhelmed by the disarray that they go numb and disconnect from reality. This is called dissociation.
Others try to anesthetize themselves to the distress they feel and end up misusing drugs, alcohol, or other substances that hurt them, their families, and the community.
Still others blame and attack someone else for upsetting their lives, such as their significant other and children, or people who look, think, or act differently.
The refusal of many people to acknowledge current reality and adopt new perspectives and behaviors is also destroying the Earth’s climate, ecological systems, and biodiversity that all life depends on.
The good news, however, is that when people realize they cannot maintain previous ways of thinking and acting, many come to accept that reality has changed. They make the choice to use the disarray as a stimulus to learn new things about the world and themselves. When this occurs, they enter the transformation phase.
The Transformational Resilience Cycle
Source: Bob Doppelt
The transformation phase motivates people to begin to see reality more clearly. The limits of their previous ways of thinking and acting become evident, and they enter a period of learning and innovation that leads to new ways of perceiving and engaging with the world.
This opens the door to new beneficial pathways in their lives. They often discover skills and strengths they never thought they had, find a deeper appreciation of life, and develop stronger relationships with others. Many people become more empathetic and more generous, which leads to greater happiness. They also experience greater emotional stability and unearth other qualities that give their lives new meaning and direction.
These capacities help people who have engaged in the transformation process buffer themselves from and push back against traumatic stresses and remain socially, psychologically, emotionally, and behaviorally resilient during adversities. Many are also motivated to help reduce the C-E-B crisis to manageable levels, and assist others do so as well.
If and when reality changes again, and new crises occur, the transformational resilience cycle will begin once more.
As I shared with the group in Sub-Saharan Africa, the impacts of the C-E-B crisis will, in different times, ways, and magnitudes, create chaos in almost everyone’s life. Rather than fighting hard to maintain previous (often unhealthy) conditions, we will all benefit by engaging in the transformational resilience cycle. The new meaning, purpose, and actions that emerge can stimulate the creation of substantially healthier, safer, just, decarbonized, and ecologically regenerative conditions.
