I’m a proud member of the Pathways to Resilience First Spouse Steering Committee, Still, I must confess, it took me a while to warm up to the word “resilience.” At first, it struck me kind of like the old directive to, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and it seems to me that the bootstraps idea most often has been promoted by people in positions of privilege as a way of judging others — as if only individual action, and not societal conditions, make a difference in life outcomes. But, I have grown to appreciate resilience as a concept encompassing both our capacity as individuals and our collective responsibility.

Social determinants are exactly what the words say: determined by society. They are the result of decisions in the past, perpetuated in the present. Beyond our fascination with measuring social determinants, we have to commit to making different decisions toward greater equity and a more promising future. Children grow, families function, and community dynamics develop in a context. Many of the structures that set that context today are unresponsive to what families and communities need to thrive.

Among other things, we have to recognize that hope is a basic need.

As a child, I was shy and sensitive. I was also very fortunate. I had good health and married, economically secure parents who were not violent and who wanted me to succeed.

When I was about 10 years old, I saw my father badly injured in an accident at home. It wasn’t life threatening, but at the time, it sure seemed like it was. Lots of blood, lots of panic; and in that strange way that a young mind can assume omnipotence, I felt the accident had been my fault, that I had done something wrong, and that’s why it happened.

For years after, I was afraid of making a mistake. My response was to go into hyper-achievement mode, an expression of distress that, absent good information, can be very hard to recognize. And no matter how much I managed to achieve, I never felt good enough. Every failure, or even sub-optimal achievement, was devastating. That re-traumatization continued until, as a sophomore in college, I could no longer sit through a class, could no longer do my homework, could no longer get myself out to practice for a sport and team I loved.

Mine, by any objective standard, was a minor trigger of a trauma. But my life was completely upended. Not so much by what happened, but by a lack of information about how to understand and respond to my experience of what happened. I don’t know what my life would have been like without that too-long-unaddressed trauma. But I have little doubt that had my family not had health insurance, had my parents been incarcerated or unemployed, had the context I lived in been more inclined to judge me and less inclined to give me a second chance, I would not have recovered to grow beyond many so impacts of that early trauma.

Some things do still linger. I’m 61 years old and when I see the list of health consequences of chronic stress –  hypertension, cardiovascular concerns, gastrointestinal problems, sleep disorders, autoimmune issues – I recognize myself. I’m lucky those things are not suicide, addiction, incarceration, or death before middle age. I mention such tangible consequences of unaddressed trauma only to emphasize, based on both research and direct experience, that this stuff is not theoretical, not abstract, not academic.

What we can do to recognize, to mitigate, and to prevent adversity and trauma, is just as real and consequential. We’ve come a long way in promoting awareness of trauma as a public health threat we can treat and beat so that we can now also focus on strength-based and prevention strategies, and on building hope and capacity for resilience. We’ve come a long way, and we’re just getting started.

About Tracey Quillen Carney

Tracey Quillen Carney is the First Lady of Delaware and Chair of the Pathways to Resilience Steering Committee. Her focus as First Lady is to support efforts that, in a foundational way, help give children a chance to succeed. With funding and operational support from Casey Family Programs, she coordinates those efforts under the umbrella of the First Chance Delaware initiative. First Chance has three pillars — ending childhood hunger; promoting early language experiences toward healthy brain development and school readiness; and advancing effective prevention of and early intervention in response to childhood trauma. To learn more about First Lady Quillen Carney’s priorities, read her full biography and watch a video about her work in Delaware.