Reclaiming your Story of Resilience

The Vulnerable Humanitarian Circle of Practice is happening again next week. In our last session we explored the concept of resilience – why it is not always a popular term, and the ways it can ignore the systemic struggles that cause burnout. But this time we are going to remember why your own story of resilience matters.

We are going to put aside our problems with this word for a moment.Yes, maybe we need a new word ultimately! But for now, it has its helpful uses and here is an opportunity for you to reclaim it for yourself.

Click on the video below to find out more!

Can you remember a moment in your life that served as a turning point? A crisis, a loss or a challenge that may have taken you into the shadows but eventually helped you see the light?

Perhaps it was what motivated you to do the work you are doing. Or it set you on a path of healing that has given you greater depth of understanding and love for humanity and the planet.

We are going to explore these stories (with paper and colouring pens handy!!) – not from a place of returning to your trauma and suffering, but from a place of recognition and celebration of all that you have overcome to get here.

These real life stories are incredibly inspiring (no doubt you have read a few yourself) – and it is important to remember your own, because this can help you shift your focus from all that is ‘less than’, ‘not good enough’ or a ‘failure’ in your life or work to what gives you purpose and what makes you grateful and proud. So needed in the humanitarian and human rights sphere, where we can be so hung up on where we have fallen short.

There are two important points in my life, that have informed who I am today, that I would like to share here. One was my childhood. Whilst it was in many ways very privileged – a middle class upbringing in one of London’s wealthiest suburbs – I felt alone and unloved for much of the time. I was bullied at three different schools in the confusing, complex acts of exclusion, diminishing and mockery that children can engage in, consciously or unconsciously. I went home to an unhappy household, with a parent struggling with addiction and therefore often unavailable for me. This experience, as painful as it was at the time, I can confidently see now was what set me on a path of standing up for those who feel marginalised, unseen or misunderstood. It also helped me stand up more for myself – reminding me to love and reparent myself, particularly in those times in my adulthood when I have felt alone.

Another moment I can share here is from 2012 not long after I returned from living and working in the West Bank in Palestine, when I felt lonely, disillusioned, hopeless and very, very sad. When I look at it now with some distance I can see I was going through burnout and probably vicarious trauma from the work I had been doing for 10 years in conflict and crisis settings.Yet as hard as that time was, it was also a rites of passage. It was my initiation into my healing journey, and it was what prompted me to explore burnout in the aid sector and how we can show up with more care and connection to our imperfections and vulnerabilities and our need to rest; to remember joy and to celebrate our accomplishments.

What moments in your life count in your story of resilience?

Let’s explore this together, and get back in touch with all that makes us human and whole, and that gives us motivation and purpose in the work we do. The session will include space for journaling and drawing your story - there is no obligation to share anything, but all that you do share is very welcome. Register here.