What a Racket

It's the center square on the buzzword bingo card. It's on coffee mugs and conference lanyards and LinkedIn skill sections. It's in every training, every debrief, every organizational wellness initiative that's ever been handed down from someone who will never have to use it.

Resilience. We're going in.

Resources referenced in this episode:

Southwick et al. (2014) — Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338

Papazoglou et al. (2020) — Moral injury and PTSD in law enforcement: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00310

PMC10742391 — Stress, prevention, and resilience among first responders: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10742391/

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Structure & Scars
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Transcript

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Resilience listed as a skill on a professional profile by a psychologist working in first responder behavioral health. Same profile. A post about clinicians who declined to work with police. She called it bias. She told them to check their ethics code. The ethics accusation aimed outward and the resilience claim aimed inward. Those two things are not unrelated. They are the same framework operating in two directions simultaneously. And that framework is doing real harm to the populations it claims to champion. Welcome back. This is Structuring Scars, and I am Nikki Hansler Gordon. If you are new here, welcome. Um this is a podcast for people who are relentlessly committed to destroying the status quo, and I am unapologetically one of them. So we don't do Polite Society's version of a healing journey here. We name things and follow the evidence, and we're going to do it authentically. So let's get into it. So let's start with the word itself, because resilience is one of those terms that's been used so many times in so many contexts by so many people with this vast variety of intentions that it's essentially become an empty vessel. You can pour almost anything into it and watch it strain right out the bottom. Southwick, Bonano, Mastin, Panterbrick, Yehuda. If you know trauma research, you know those names. So in 2014, they convened a multidisciplinary panel at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, specifically to try to nail down what resilience means. Five experts, one word, and they couldn't agree. And it's not because they weren't smart enough, because the construct itself is genuinely contested. Some researchers define it as an outcome. It's a stable trajectory of healthy functioning after adversity. Some define it as a process, and some talk about it as a dynamic, mutable, context-dependent characteristic that shifts across the lifespan. Bonanno himself, who has done more trajectory research on resilience than almost anyone, has noted that the empirical relationships between individual predictors and resilient outcomes are uniformly modest. Meaning, even when we can identify things that correlate with resilient outcomes, we still cannot reliably predict who will be resilient and who won't. That's not a skill, that's a weather system. More recent scholarship has pushed even harder on this. So a 2025 paper calling out what it terms the definitional crisis in resilience research makes the argument that traditional individual-centric models don't just miss the mark. They actively tell an incomplete and at times damaging story. Because when you frame resilience as something the individual has or doesn't have, you implicitly locate the problem and the solution inside the person. And the system walks away clean. So the literature is increasingly clear. Resilience is not a trait you possess, it is an emergent property of a relational and systemic context. It is what happens when it happens because of access to resources, support structure, meaning-making frameworks, and community. Not because you gritted your teeth hard enough. So when somebody lists resilience as a personal skill on a professional profile, what they're actually communicating, whether they know it or not, is the belief that toughness is a characteristic of the individual, which is exactly the belief that has been keeping first responders from getting the care that they deserve for decades. We're going to come back to that. But first, I want to talk about what happens when this mythology doesn't just sit on a LinkedIn page and it gets credentialed. Now there's this pattern that I've been noticing in first responder behavioral health spaces for a long time. And it goes like this Nobody understands us. Which, okay, fair. There's some real historical context and truth in that. Mental health systems were slow to recognize the specific occupational trauma profile of law enforcement, EMS, fire dispatch corrections. The treatment landscape was underdeveloped. Cultural competence was genuinely lacking. So people from inside those worlds got trained as clinicians and stepped into the gap. Also fair, also genuinely valuable. I'm not arguing against first responder-informed clinicians. I'm one of the people working in that space. But here's where the logic curdles because now the same voices saying nobody understands us are also saying, How dare you say you're not equipped to work with us? Pick a lane. You cannot simultaneously argue that this population requires specialized understanding that most clinicians don't have, and condemn clinicians for saying they don't have it. Those are not two positions you get to hold at the same time. The ethical obligation, when you recognize the limits of your competence, is to say so. That's not bias. That's standard of care. A clinician who looks at a highly specialized population with its own culture, its own language, its own particular configurations of trauma and moral injury, and says, I am not the right fit for this person. That clinician is doing their job. They are not the problem. The problem is a system that has built its infrastructure on the premise that only insiders can do this work and then act surprised when there aren't enough of them to go around. You built the scarcity, you don't get to be outraged by it. This is what I mean when I say the call is coming from inside the house. The complaint that nobody serves this population and the conditions that make it hard to serve them are often being generated by the same people. The gatekeeping is the problem. And the gatekeeping is wearing the face of advocacy. I've watched this in EMS specifically. The insider identity argument gets used to protect a certain kind of provider from scrutiny, to dismiss outside perspectives as uninformed, and to maintain a cultural ecosystem where admitting difficulty is coded as weakness, which, if you'll notice, sounds a lot like the same culture that tells officers and paramedics not to ask for help in the first place. The mirror doesn't lie. So let's talk about what the resilience mythology does functionally, because it's doing a lot of work and almost none of it is therapeutic. When an organization trains its people in resilience, what is usually happening is this: they're teaching individuals to absorb more without breaking. Not to change the conditions that are breaking them, not to examine the systemic factors, the shift structure and mandatory overtime, administrative culture, lack of psychological first aid after critical incidents, or anchors, but we'll get into that. The silence around moral injury that are producing the harm. Just here are some breathing techniques. Go be resilient. The moral injury literature is particularly instructive here. Moral injury and first responders, and there's a growing body of solid research on this, emerges from being placed in situations where what you are required to do violates your own sense of what is morally right. It is distinct from PTSD, though they can co-occur. It presents as loss of meaning, loss of purpose, a deep fracture in the sense of self. And the research shows it significantly predicts PTSD symptomatology above and beyond other trauma exposure. You cannot resilience skill your way out of a moral injury. There is no breathing technique for the part of you that knows you made a choice that cost someone something, or that the institution you serve made a choice that cost you something, and that nobody is ever going to acknowledge it. That requires a different kind of intervention entirely. It requires repair, it requires accountability, and it requires someone willing to sit in the wreckage with you and not tell you to bounce back. Delayed presentation is the other piece of this that the resilience framing actively obscures. We know, and this is not controversial in the trauma literature, that what looks like resilience in the short term is sometimes just delayed onset. The officer who seems fine for 15 years and then retires and falls apart. The paramedic who has accumulated exposure after exposure, call after call, and one day the floor just drops out. We have called that person resilient for 15 years. We were wrong. We were just not paying attention to where the bill was going. The resilience framing doesn't just fail to catch that, it actively makes it harder to catch because it trains the person and the system around them to read still functioning as doing fine. Those are not the same thing. Hello, structural dissociation. So here's an image I keep coming back to. Think about a bag of brand new rubber bands. Someone asks you if you have one. You hand it over, but then you say, Don't use it, because then it won't be brand new anymore. Well, then they use it anyway, and you throw up your hands and go, Well, now great. I have to spend all my time getting it back to where it was when it came out of the bag, which of course is never going to happen, especially since the rubber band keeps getting used. That is exactly what resilience mythology does. The rubber band's job is to stretch. A rubber band that has never been stretched is not more functional, it's just unused. The goal was never to keep it at factory settings. The goal was always to understand what it's being asked to hold, whether that's appropriate to its capacity, and what kind of conditions let it do that work over time without snapping. Instead, we keep trying to return it to the beginning, pre-exposure, pre-call, pre-career, while ignoring the actual conditions of its use. We want the pencil bundling rubber band to hold together a three-foot stack of file folders, and then we act surprised when it fails. And when it does, we don't look at the stack, we look at the rubber band. What the resilience industry produces instead is what I'd call a staccato cadence. This arrhythmic, performance-focused drumbeat of optimization and return to baseline that nobody can quite get the footwork to. The choreography keeps changing, the standard keeps moving, and the science that would actually tell us what needs to happen, relational, systemic, organizational, gets ignored because it isn't nearly as marketable as the mythology. You can't sell a breathing app for systemic reform. You can't keynote a conference on the radical idea that the organization should stop overloading its people and then wondering why they're breaking. So let's return to where we started because listing resilience as a skill on a professional profile might seem like a small thing, but it's not. So when a clinician deploys the resilience mythology, it gets laundered. It picks up the authority of the profession, and that makes it more dangerous, not less. The retired officer who went back to school to help their people is operating from a real place. That motivation is legitimate. But the dual identity, I am one of you, and I am also the expert, is a setup for a specific kind of blind spot. Because insider identity does not automatically confer clinical objectivity. In some cases, it actively undermines it. The same experiences that create cultural fluency can also create cultural capture, where the clinician's own identification with the population makes it hard to challenge the beliefs that are keeping that population sick. And if that clinician has also internalized the resilience mythology as a personal identity, if I am resilient is load-bearing in their own sense of self, then recommending that their clients do something different requires them to first be willing to examine what that word has been doing in their own story. That is hard work. Not everyone is willing to do it. And the credential does not require it of you. The ethics argument gets used as a deflection here, too. So when a clinician tells other clinicians to check their ethics for declining to work with law enforcement, what's actually being demanded is not ethical examination. It is professional compliance with a preferred narrative. Real ethical practice would look like acknowledging the scope of competence question as legitimate, examining the structural conditions that created it, and working towards solutions that expand access without shaming clinicians for honest self-assessment. That's a harder conversation to have on social media, but it's the one that would really actually help someone. So if resilience isn't a skill, if it's not a trait you can list and train or deploy, what is it? Well, the research is really consistent on this, even when it disagrees on everything else. And that's the conditions that produce what we're calling resilient outcomes are relational and systemic. They have to do with access to support, to meaning making, to people who will not require you to perform wellness you don't have. And it also requires chronic, consistent, and habitual relational repair. When the rupture has occurred, it needs to be tended as a wound. Okay. It has to do with that organizational culture. Whether the institution you work for treats acknowledgement of difficulty as information to act on or as evidence of weakness to manage. They have to do with post-incident support structures that are not performative, with sleep, with not putting people back on the line the day after something that should have taken them off of it. None of that is individual. All of it is systemic. And all of it requires the institution to accept responsibility for the conditions it creates. There needs to be humility and reflection as part of the core values of the institutional framework. That is exactly what the individual resilience frame lets the institution avoid doing. I'm going to be really precise about this. I am not saying first responders are fragile. Not in the least. Not anywhere even close. I am not saying they don't demonstrate extraordinary capacity under extraordinary conditions. They do. I have worked with enough of them to know that the gap between what they carry and what they're given to carry it with is one of the more consequential failures in our entire system of care. What I am saying is that the capacity they demonstrate is relational in origin. It comes from training that builds trust, from partners who have your back, from units that function as communities, from leadership that treats the human beings and the organization as the asset they actually are. Asset, not commodity. When those conditions are present, people do remarkable things. When those conditions are absent, no amount of personal resilience will bridge the gap. And calling it resilience when someone keeps showing up in the absence of those conditions is not a compliment. It's a failure to see what's actually happening. The next time someone tells you that resilience is something you build or strengthen or possess as a professional quality, I want you to reflect on one question. Who benefits from that framing? Because it is almost never the person being asked to be resilient. It is the organization that doesn't have to change its structure, the culture that doesn't have to examine its silence, and the credentialed expert who doesn't have to look too closely at what their own story has been built on. You do not owe anyone your collapse, but you also do not owe anyone a performance of strength you are not feeling. The work of actual recovery from occupational trauma, from moral injury, from all the things this job extracts from a person over time, that work is relational. It happens in relationship. It happens when someone decides that the mythology is less important than the truth. That's what we're here for. Remember to make your healing as loud as the hell that earns you those scars. I'm Nikki Hensler Gordon. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time.