What is a resilient relationship?

 

A working definition (incomplete):

A resilient relationship is one that can handle adversity, disagreement, misunderstanding, stress, and hurt through healthy conflict and skillful communication. While it can feel uncomfortable to sit in the discomfort of conflict, surface positivity, false harmony, and avoidance don’t create resilient relationships. Like trees planted in shallow soil, these kinds of relationships don’t develop deep roots, and can’t survive emotional storms. In fact, surface positivity, false harmony, and avoiding conflict create emotional storms. Like slowly putting pebbles of unresolved hurts onto a rock pile, the weight of avoidance can make relationships heavy, nurture mistrust, and create resentment. We can end up carrying around all this weight and even bringing it into other relationships.

 

People in resilient relationships move through disagreement to mutual understanding, establish boundaries that create safety, and support each other to meet emotional needs. People in resilient relationships have a shared understanding about protocols-rules of engagement-for healthy conflict. People in resilient relationships also have shared intention towards understanding each other, willingness to see conflict from the other person’s perspective, and internal awareness about what emotions and experiences they bring to a conflict that influence their reactions and perceptions.

 

Resilient relationships, and the skills to nurture them, are created slowly with effort, intention, and practice. Resilient relationships take a lot of humility, compassion, and a willingness to sit in the discomfort of one’s impact. People in resilient relationships can accept that they have made mistakes, caused harm, or gotten stuck in their conditioned emotional responses. People in resilient relationships can accept that their perspective, or feelings, aren’t a complete picture of what’s happening in a conflict. People in resilient relationships can face their hurt feelings and then let them go. People in resilient relationships can offer sincere apology for their impact, regardless of intention, and work with another person’s pain to repair the relationship.

 

Reflective Questions:

  • What, if any, resilient relationships do you have in your life?
  • What, if any, resilient relationships do you have in your ILR work?
  • What are other aspects of resiliency besides those already identified?
  • When is a time when you and another person were able to move through healthy conflict? How did you do it?

 

Why do resilient relationships matter? 

 

In the field of ILR, and in Indigenous communities overall, as practitioners we are going to bump up against other people’s pain, shame, anger, grief, or sadness. We are going to bump up against their coping mechanisms, trauma triggers, and conditioned emotional responses. Equally, people are going to bump up against our own in ways that create conflict, stress, or hurt. Accumulated unresolved conflict, stress, or hurt is toxic. While we can’t necessarily nurture resiliency in every relationship, we can seek to grow it any relationship where the other person is sincerely committed to sharing that intention-and learning the skills-necessary for resiliency.

 

Reflective Questions:

  • Can you think of a moment of conflict, stress, or hurt where having the skills to nurture resilient relationships might have helped you?
  • Can you think of a relationship in the present where you could safely ask another person to share intention with you to learn skills around creating a resilient relationship?