11 Comments

I love this! Like most of your posts and interviews, I see my unorganized thoughts and concerns about American culture distilled and laid out beautifully. Keep it up!

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I am so excited to dig into this book! One of the next ventures I am pursuing is creating groups to support healthcare workers traumatized by their work and the pandemic. I have a feeling this book will fundamentally shift what that looks like.

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Amazing! Thank you for the work you are doing.

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In my experience, a person can be entirely unraveled within from the weight she bears, but if she continues to be able to work productively and to do everything for everyone, she is considered resilient.

The ability to function at that interface doesn't define resilience to me either.

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Just chiming in that I’m grateful for this interview and book. I’m a class I teach to university students, one of my colleagues in child psychology offers a guest lecture about this distinction—resilience not as an individual feature but an outcome of support structures and intersubjectivity—and I’m always amazed at my students’ excitement but also resistance to the ideas. I’m keen to read this book and see how the approaches dovetail.

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How cool! Thanks for sharing this resonance.

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Thank you for sharing this beautiful interview and book. Both resonate with so many important ideas. I really appreciate the focus on highlighting vulnerability and interdependence in relation to resilience and optimistic and pessimistic thinking. 💛

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As mothers, this has a lot to do with us. Modern motherhood especially being isolating and lonely, everyone stuck inside their own homes, parents in a distant state or aging and can't help with grandkids. I also deal with this constantly because my 'paid work' is interrupted, yet people look down on a mom that stays at home/works from home. --

My in-laws especially give us looks if we 'complain' our baby hasn't slept in a week from teething troubles..like she is a luxury purse I swung for last season. For a tiny example of this - my kid had off on Friday from school and all the parents thought it was a half-day. My husband and I are busiest in the mornings, we have meetings, plus an 8-month old. It is the difference between getting 'paid work' done and 'just bein' a mom' today! And that reality is constant! There are no social systems to allow mothers to have a life without breaking down and burning out.

Also, my husband and I have been sober for 5 years and a lot of what you are talking about has that sober-thinking overlap. We need each other! Until we heard other peoples honest post-sober stories, we thought our troubles were our own too. Just gritting our teeth through parenting wasn't working. As people, we need that constant perspective on how human we are..it's really a beautiful thing.

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This resonates so much(!) with my experience, especially of early motherhood. I never do this but I just wrote something on this very topic that might be of interest: https://joannfinkelstein.substack.com/p/rewriting-motherhood

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Thanks Courtney! Fascinating. A welcome reframe that I look forward to delving into! I'm interested to see how Soraya discusses social welfare and community care.

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Great interview. Soraya is brilliant! I've been living under a rock (getting ready to launch my own book that includes a quote by her!) so I'm so glad you brought this book to my attention. Thanks!!

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