Song: I get up again! | APA on Resilience |
Friends,
My mom turned 90 last Tuesday and we are gathering family to celebrate this weekend. What a blessing to have both my parents. And what a blessing to have been raised in a loving, safe environment.
-Elizabeth
Resilience
A church can be, we hope that a church will be, a center for stability, for centeredness, and for resilience in our towns or neighborhoods.
I live in a tight neighborhood in a rural town. We all know each other, our kids hang out together, unrelated adults and kids interact regularly. Primarily white parents in a 99% white town, what we know of the police is that they hand out glow sticks on halloween.
One of our children, 12, had a mental health breakdown and physically attacked an adult, threatened many people, and used horribly violent threats against another child. The police came, got out their tasers, and handcuffed the child. The child, a friend of mine, is now in a locked psychiatric unit for six months of care, treatment, and counseling.
But the trauma to the community is not over.
We thought we were safe, insulated, we thought that violence doesn't happen here. Not only those that experienced the violence, but those who saw it, and those who heard about it feel lost. Those with a past history of violence find their trauma re-activated.
We are afraid.
And so the community is responding with fear. The danger has passed but our trauma response has not. Several are lashing out at the parents, assuming that if they'd only told us, warned us, handled this situation or that differently, this would never have happened.
Of course the parents, like all parents, are not perfect parents. So the accusations and attacks feel based in reality. There is no space for their story, or for the stories of other children with mental health issues, of the children with trauma, the children from the foster care system. There is only space for blame.
We need an enemy to absorb our pain, and we have found one. The problem is it is the wrong enemy. The solutions are the wrong solutions because we are aiming our anxiety at the first person we saw. This not only does not make us safer, it also creates a new stressor for other parents with kids who struggling. No one now would ever tell us if they needed help with their child. No one now would ever share their home-life struggles with our community. We have made it clear that we will blame, without gathering more information, without understanding the state of mental health services in the United States.
Perhaps the opposite of fear is courage. Perhaps the opposite of fear is love. In this circumstance what I hope we can learn to do is to build resilience. People have very different amounts of resilience--it is easily damaged by childhood adverse experiences, and can require extensive healing work. Frankly I have not been resilient in response to this situation--I want to just move out, get away, to give up on creating a healthy community.
But instead I'm called as a Christian to learn how to build resilience. Resilience in our leadership teams will help them to not panic when faced with a few people demanding actions that do not create safety. Then we need to build a wider resilient circle. People who are willing to say "maybe we should wait and think about more options." People who are willing to listen to those who traumatized, to bear their pain, and yet not let fear drive decisions. People who are able to speak out when we are shunning the parents who so obviously need support, not censure.
And this is also the need of the wider community. We need to create a resilience that means we do not deport immigrants because some people are afraid of them. We should not use the death penalty because some people are afraid. We should not persecute trans children because some people are afraid.
What does it take to be a church that teaches resilience? How we can be a place where people feel welcome when problems happen, a place where they are cared for without being evangelized. Can we be a town center for learning to calm our nervous systems, a place with space to step back and consider next steps, can our congregation help others focused on love even when the danger is real?
Violence is real, and must be addressed. With resilience we can take steps that help the safety of the community without attacking those who are struggling.
Is your church a center for resilience? Do your neighbors know this? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening.
Tubthumping a song by Chumbawamba from 1997. "I get knocked down, I get up again!"
Here is advice from the American Psychological Association for building resilience.
Please forward this email to others who might be interested. If you got this from someone else, use the button below to subscribe to the free Act! Be Church Now email newsletter.
