Nearly every day presents a fresh round of overwhelming and troubling news, whether wildfires or hurricane winds wipe out entire neighborhoods or dehumanizing talk and actions threaten communities of people. Any time we open social media, the sights, sounds, and worries of disaster come alive.
Misinformation, rumors, and intentionally confusing or overwhelming information drain energy and motivation for individuals, affected communities, and those who want to help. What’s worse, there is a tactic in the world called resilience targeting, which is an intentional use of chaos to overwhelm people.
What is resilience targeting?
Resilience targeting is an attack on individual and community resilience during disasters through misinformation, confusion, and efforts to overwhelm, in order to prevent communities from recovering and keep them vulnerable.
The term originally appeared in an article written by Dr. Chad Briggs of the University of Alaska Anchorage, on hybrid warfare strategies.1 Briggs explains that misinformation, combined with the destruction of infrastructure, the economy, and social structures, often inflicts overwhelming harm on community resilience.
What does resilience targeting mean for you?
If you are facing a massive threat to your livelihood, your community, and the people you care about, certain experiences make it all worse, and harder to cope:
- Threat of further instability and unpredictability
- Cynicism that comes with misinformation
- Loss of trust with neighbors
All of these undermine individual and community resilience, leaving everyone feeling more vulnerable and unstable. Climate disasters, including Hurricane Helene’s destruction in North Carolina and the wildfires in Los Angeles, provide grim demonstrations of the damage misinformation inflicts on resilience through social media.
Recent dramatic government policy changes and abrupt reversals, such as those impacting immigrant communities (ten million people), as well as recipients of Medicaid (ninety million people, or 1 in 4 Americans), have left a huge population vulnerable to the instability of rumors and disinformation. Many believe they cannot leave their homes for groceries or medical care, and many others believed that they had lost access to life saving health care, such as cancer treatment. This fear and instability cause damage to community resilience and individual mental health.
What is a psychological go-bag?
The “go-bag” concept comes from disaster preparedness training: the backpack you have ready to go with important documents, medications, cash, and items you can grab and go in the middle of the night when you need to jump out of bed and leave. The “psychological go-bag” is an imaginary bag with coping skills to help you be more confident during overwhelming experiences. The concept is inspired by Skills for Psychological Recovery (SPR), a disaster psychology program designed by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. They describe SPR as a “secondary prevention model relying on skills that people find helpful in a post-disaster situation, rather than a formal mental health treatment.” 2
Here are eight suggestions for putting together a psychological go-bag, so you know that no matter what happens, you carry ways to cope in your mind and heart:
- Find inspiration in a story of hope and motivation. Try a biography of a person you look up to. For example, Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a new biography of the poet and activist Audre Lorde, Survival is a Promise. It’s a powerful story of an activist, feminist and poet who fought racism, oppression, and cancer. Keep such stories in mind as inspiration.
- Take stock of your psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. What are your psychological strengths and talents? Are you funny? Creative? Organized? Charming? Where are your psychological vulnerabilities? Do you already deal with anxiety? Is it difficult to think clearly when you’re under stress? Come up with an approach that accentuates your strengths and attends to your vulnerabilities. Plan ahead for ways to cope with your anxiety, just as you can plan to rely on your humor or creativity to help yourself and others.
- Open up to the collective of care. My colleague, psychologist Xi Liu, offers a powerful tool that has been important for them: remember that you aren’t the only one who cares about what’s happening, that you need to connect with other folks and communities who care too, keep yourself from feeling lonely and isolated in the struggle. When you are overwhelmed by a firehouse of bad news on many fronts, it’s good to connect with people working in other areas of the struggle, so you have a larger collective sense of shared care.
- Focus on next steps, don’t overwhelm yourself with everything at once. Unless you have a magic wand, you can’t fix everything at once, and worrying about everything at once is guaranteed to cause anxiety. Don’t forget to take it a step at a time.
- Spirituality. Deepen your awareness and connection to spirituality however you find it. That may be a religious or ritual practice, it may be forest bathing, or the Tarot. Now is the time to value practices that connect you with the mystery of being alive.
- Connect with community and joy. If you don’t have strong links with community, start to deepen them now. Maybe it’s a mutual aid group. Consider a how-to book on mutual aid, such as Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade. Maybe it’s an online mediation group. Maybe it’s a book club. Find your people. Alice Wong’s new edited collection of essays, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care and Desire offers powerful reflections on community resilience.
- Display photos of loved ones, ancestors, and inspiring figures in your home and workspace. You may want to put together a collection of photos of loved ones in a place you see every day. These are your reasons to keep going. Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing by Daniel Foor offers practical perspectives and inspirational exercises on working with ancestors
- Take breaks from it all. For the times when it’s all too much, have some go-to ways of taking your mind away from it all— which don’t have involve substance use. That may be a hobby, like cooking or drawing, or it may be reading novels or poetry. It may feel like a guilty pleasure, but an important aspect of staying resilient is knowing when to tune out.
In the face of upheaval, your state of psychological readiness—an inventory of your own skills, strengths, and vulnerabilities— is key to getting through it and having enough bandwidth to help your friends, loved ones, and community. The trick is to start getting that psychological go-bag together now, so that you’re ready to start using it when you need it.
