I re-read a 2020 critique of resilience from Zembylas yesterday, and in it there is a quote from Webster and Rivers 2018 piece: "Even when resilience is presented ‘as a means to tackle social injustice and inequalities,’ we should be suspicious because ‘the focus nonetheless remains on adapting the individual to cope with outside pressures in order to negate their effects, rather than seeking to eradicate these pressures in the first place’ (Webster and Rivers 2018, 4)."

I have remained suspicious to the extent reasonable, and I won't shed my suspicion completely, but I think the Community Resiliency Model, as designed, as intended, and even as taught appropriately answers this potential criticism.

In its official teaching materials, CRM explicitly names racism and poverty as contributors to trauma. They explicitly bring in intersectionality. One of the hero stories shared in trainings and Elaine Miller-Caras' book (the official book for CRM) is that of a Ukrainian woman who uses the CRM skills to regulate her system (she goes from sleepless nights to sleep, for example). She does not use the skills so she can cope with the war. After good sleep, she finds within her the strength to declare that she will fight for her country and even lay down her life if necessary.

It seems to me at this point that the Webster and Rivers critique is generally correct: in the reviews of literature I've seen, many of the resilience-building programs seem more like coping mechanisms designed to help the individual succeed. This success can come in spite of a precarious world (that is more precarious every day in no small part thanks to Trump and his loyal judges and congresspeople). There is not necessarily a focus on political action to change conditions.

For example, in a review of resilience in higher education studies by Brewer et al., resilience programs include mindfulness training, yoga, and "psychoeducation." I don't know the details on all these studies, but Brewer et al. point out that few of the interventions involved colleges and universities changing any policies. That is, they supplied a training to students but did little to make the university any less harmful or stressful.

It's possible, however, that the trainings in these reviews frame their interventions in a way that acknowledges a need to create stronger social safety nets, radically re-orient society to stop cooking the planet, and to use a more regulated nervous system to be kind and gentle rather than cruel and xenophobic.

I acknowledge in my CRM trainings that we explicitly learn wellness skills in order to live more fully and resist and change conditions that require us to be so resilient.

Zembylas does not reject resilience as fully as Webster and Rivers seem to. He proposes that resilience be used for resistance and drastic change. He briefly describes some educational abolitionist ideas that could be implemented in higher education policy.

All this speaks more to the possibilities of education than anything else. CRM and other resilience programs that encourage kindness, resistance, and or fighting the good fight against Russia--programs that encourage people to be the ones they have been waiting for--are countercultural. It's so easy to use wellness skills as a way to get a leg up on your competition. Athletes are using wellness skills. Aaron Rogers even did a darkness retreat. Whether or not resilience interventions have the desired outcomes is difficult to ascertain. So I'll keep reading about how researchers try to do that.