Resilience, Responsibility and Belonging

Dr. Lloyd Sederer has provided another interesting article in the Huffington Post - Resilience and Responsibility -- A  Commentary by Dr. Lloyd Sederer.  Belonging and its relationship to resilience is a thread weaving through the new Belonging - Living Ties website that Al Etmanski is working on.

Here's an excerpt that captures the essence of the article, "The Michael Oher story is remarkable; it also offers important insights into the limits of institutional responses to our basic need for belonging. While we need government to support social safety nets, we also need families and communities to redeem their neighborhoods and the lives in peril on every corner."

I particularly appreciate this following paragraph,"As important a question as is "why do some youth go bad" is "why others, from the same circumstances and horror, find a way to make a life, to respond to hands that reach out to them?" Resilience is what separates the survivors from the casualties. Physics tells us that resilience is a property, the capacity of some material to absorb energy and respond elastically so as to retain its integrity and not become deformed by the impact of the energy. The emotional equivalent is a person's ability to absorb stress and not be broken by it. Michael Oher had resilience, and so do many more in Hurt Villages across this country and world. But resilience must be nurtured. After awhile, the material, human or otherwise, bends and breaks from the forces impacting it. People, not institutions, are what foster resilience. This is why individuals, families and communities, for their neighbors and those across the tracks, need to wonder "what can I do?"

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