Courage

When life seems like a huge mountain to climb, what gets you to the summit and beyond? Resilience? Willpower? Strength of character?

There’s an idea out there that resilience is something ‘inside a person’ – a supply of energy that you can draw from when life gets rough. Social media is full of psychological tricks that promise greater resilience – the mental equivalent of lifting weights, to make your mind as strong as your body. Influencers tell us that resilience is all about being self-reliant: it’s the capacity of one person to deploy their inner resources – physical and mental – to push through life’s challenges.

It’s not like that in the real world. Research shows that usually, it’s not fearless willpower that gets us through tough times… what actually gets us through the darkness is having supportive, reliable people to help us out. Historian Rutger Bregman has written about humanity’s ability to thrive when people work together – that in fact, kindness is what makes us human. The idea of the lone hunter, surviving by himself in the wilderness, is a myth. But stick with me on this...

Because seeking help is easier said than done. We all know, instinctively, that asking for help sometimes feels like a show of weakness: it's too readily associated with seeming like a victim, at another person’s mercy. Kindness is sometimes seen as an exercise of power, the receiver unequal to the giver.

Asking for help means trusting someone; and let’s be honest, that’s not straightforward is it? Trust often gets exploited by authorities or by people who are entrusted to look after others. This happens to more folk than we like to admit. For lots of people, putting your faith in someone just leads to feeling vulnerable, or ignored, or ridiculed, or shamed. Like a child.

So when preppers create a world for themselves in which they are completely self-sufficient… or when someone keeps turning down support, time after time... or when I hear that inner voice in my own mind saying “I should have held it together, I should have coped better”… it makes sense; I really GET it. You gotta look strong, so that “neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you”. But this only goes so far: you’re definitely surviving, but maybe not thriving.

I’m not going to say “all you’ve got to do is ask for help” because you’ve probably been there, done that, and felt let down or weakened in the process. If you’re just trying your damnedest to be self-reliant, that’s not the problem. The problem is that notions of ‘resilience’ and ‘help’ are often badly presented. They need to be reframed. Here’s how.

The word ‘resilience’ literally means ‘springing back into shape’. But I’m pretty sure that nobody pings back into their old shape after traumatic events, especially if they keep happening. Resilience is an unfair expectation: we are all altered by hurt. True strength of character is about being changed by experiences but still being able to give to the world or receive from the world. This involves trust in others, and trust takes courage.

There’s a grand word: courage. It doesn’t mean the same as resilience at all. ‘Courage’ comes from the word ‘core’ and means ‘the core of a person – their heart’. Courage is allowing the heart of you to be witnessed by a fellow human, so you're heard and respected… to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, as equals. Courage is not about seeking dependence on others; nor is it depending only on yourself. Courage is believing someone is right by your side and gets you, someone who trusts your wisdom and sees what you’re striving for – that’s what good help looks like.

Life has put a few mountains in your way. How can you get over those challenges? How can someone else, like a counsellor, help you? Think of it like this: you’re the expedition leader – you decide which route to use and what to explore; the counsellor is the mountain guide, the one who knows the terrain, who accompanies you on your adventure. For me, trust is not blindly following another person and being let down in the process – in the counselling context, your trust grows when someone’s willing to follow you.

I’ll give the last word to an old friend in Halifax, many years ago. He used to say to folks, “You’re real, you are”. It was his highest compliment. To him, a ‘real’ person was genuine, down-to-earth, flawed, and someone he could be real with too. So yep, when I need help, that’s the kind of person I look for.

What about you? What do you reckon?

I wrote this article for people of any gender, but (speaking as a man myself) I hope it will resonate with men, or with people who have a man in their life. The BACP* has recently set up a media campaign – ‘Outside View’ – that’s aimed at men who are thinking about their mental well-being – if you want to find out more, go to:

https://outside-view.co.uk/

References:

*BACP = British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy

Rutger Bregman – ‘Humankind – a Hopeful History’ (2019)

Rudyard Kipling – ‘If’ (1910)