Not long after my husband, Keith, died suddenly in April 2000, I overheard one of his family members tell someone that she didn’t feel sorry for me and my young children. “This will make them stronger,” she asserted. 

Seventeen years later, her words taunted me as I shuffled across the sizzling parking lot of a suburban shopping center on my way to a therapist’s office. Stronger. What a joke; I could barely walk.

Once inside, I slumped into an oversized chair and wearily told my new therapist, Elizabeth, my problem was that I sucked at life and the visit would be a waste of time for both of us. 

The only reason I was there was because one of my adult daughters had threatened to call 911 if I didn’t get help for myself. She’d become alarmed after she couldn’t reach me and had stopped by my house, where she discovered me flat on my back on my sofa. I hadn’t bathed or changed my clothes in weeks. 

Assuming Elizabeth would show me the door so she could move on to a more worthwhile patient, I was surprised when she instead asked me to elaborate. After listening for nearly an hour, she said, “What you’re suffering from has nothing to do with being bad at life. It’s called resilience fatigue.”

I’d never heard of it, but I knew all about resilience. Its necessity had been drummed into my head since I was a kid. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps ....” “When the going gets tough ....” “If at first you don’t succeed ....” As I saw it, resilience was the crux of my problem. If I wasn’t so weak and lazy, I could allow adversity to transform me into a deeper, tougher individual.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Elizabeth told me.

***

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences.” 

“Adapting” is the key word. If stressful events never let up, there’s no time to adapt. Resilience fatigue or toxic stress is about prolonged, excessive and unmanaged intense stress that leads to a sense of being constantly overwhelmed. Without sufficient coping mechanisms, the body’s stress response becomes overworked. This, in turn, can lead to an imbalance in our physiological systems and affect everything from mood to the immune system.

That sounded like me.

I’d been living in a near-constant state of anxiety mixed with dread since April 2000. I’d grown so accustomed to the feeling of impending doom — the racing heart, the perpetual tightness across my shoulders — that I thought it was normal.

Apparently it’s not.

Keith’s death would have been challenging enough on its own, but overnight I also became a single mother of three. Worse still, I was pregnant with our fourth child.

And that was just the beginning.

Keith had minimal life insurance. I’d been a stay-at-home mother for almost a decade while we continually moved for his job as he climbed the corporate ladder. Even before I buried him, the realization that I’d have to find both work and child care ASAP filled me with terror. A family of five had to have health insurance. We’d been insured through Keith’s employer, and I couldn’t afford to pay for it outright.

Finding work took precedence over everything, including grieving my husband and bonding with the baby born three weeks after he died.

I’d always assumed the capacity for resilience was limitless and also hardwired into human beings like the fight-or-flight response, but during my counseling sessions, I learned otherwise. It’s not innate; rather, it’s learned and comes not just from individual effort but also from available support and resources.

The times I attempted to discuss my fears or concerns with others, they dismissed them: “You’re young, you’ll bounce back ....” “God never gives you more than you can handle ....” “In a few years you’ll remarry and hopefully the next guy will be rich ....” This was what passed for support in my world. 

Still, I believed grit and determination would not only save me but someday I’d look back on those terrible days and be thankful for what I’d gone through while reflecting on how far I’d come. 

For a hot minute, that seemed to be the case. After an obsessive job search, I found a position in an auto insurance call center with top-notch benefits. My parents, who’d recently retired and had moved nearby, agreed to watch my kids and not charge me. I began humming the song “I Will Survive.”

Unfortunately, the job turned into a trap. Callers were frequently angry; they swore and shouted at me all day. There was little room for advancement unless I could put in overtime or travel, which was impossible given my situation. I’d leave work depressed and drained and come home to a messy house full of bickering kids and memories of the life I used to love. 

I also began flashing back to the morning I found Keith dead in our bed. As time passed, I thought about him more instead of less, and I couldn’t understand why the last day of his life played on a constant loop in my head, as if I could change the outcome if I relived it enough times.

When I mentioned this to a relative, she chastised me. “You need to focus on all the good things you still have, not on the bad.”

Of course I was grateful for what I had, despite the fact that my finances were eroding at a frighteningly rapid pace. Despite the fact that I’d gone from enjoying a vibrant, hope-filled life with a man I loved to living like a cloistered nun. Despite the fact that one day my future had beckoned like the yellow brick road and the next there was a ROAD PERMANENTLY CLOSED sign blocking the entrance.

Most of all I was grateful for my parents.

In their mid-60s, they were now practically raising a toddler and an infant. I was tired all the time and so were they. Our relationship deteriorated even as I suffered crushing guilt over what they were doing for me.

Yet I was certain I could turn everything around. So I prayed daily for acceptance of my situation. “The Secret” became my Bible, and I spewed positive affirmations morning, noon and night. I tried to banish negative thoughts from my head and focus on future abundance, not what I’d lost. 

Nothing changed. Eventually I went through bankruptcy followed by foreclosure. I was fired from my job for not being able to keep up with the ever-changing metrics. When I discovered my oldest daughter was using heroin, I thought life could not get any worse.

I was wrong. 

My father developed Alzheimer’s disease, and I moved in with my parents to help care for him. Two years after he died, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I took care of her until the end. 

By then my daughter was no longer using heroin, which was an unexpected miracle.

But at that point my younger daughter was in trouble for school truancy and drug use. Eventually she was removed from my home by Franklin County Children Services after her high school filed a criminal complaint with the local juvenile court and a judge ruled that she be placed in foster care at a local psychiatric residential treatment facility. It was a good thing I was unemployed, as my days became a merry-go-round of mandatory meetings with social workers, psychiatrists, counselors and a court-appointed guardian. They picked apart my life and told me everything I was doing wrong as a parent but offered nothing in terms of concrete solutions or support. 

My daughter was gone for over two years. Upon her return, she told me she’d been sexually assaulted while she was at the treatment facility. Guilt for what she’d been through vied with an impotent sense of rage deep inside me. The feelings were so inflammatory that sometimes I was sure I’d self-combust. 

In the midst of my ongoing crises, I met a man in a writers’ group I’d joined in an attempt to get away from my life. Jim became a bright beacon in my otherwise dreary existence, so much so that I dared to envision a future with him. But three months after my mother passed, he died by suicide in my car. My younger son, who’d adored Jim, was so traumatized he had to be hospitalized after he became suicidal. My older son ghosted me for several years, deeming me a toxic mother.

I could no longer deny that my life had become a not-so-funny running joke, with me as the punchline. Sometimes I imagined my husband disgustedly shaking his head as he watched his family fall apart. 

Just thinking about it exhausted me. One day I lay down on my living room sofa and couldn’t find the strength to rise again. I prayed for death as I thought about how I’d failed everyone, including myself.

Elizabeth helped me to reframe my viewpoint.

“Your husband died, then you had a baby. You had to hit the ground running with no time to grieve him or help your children. Your life became a runaway train that took 17 years to crash,” she said.

She put me in touch with a psychiatric nurse who prescribed a combination of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. She also utilized cognitive therapy, including EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). Slowly I began to feel better.

Of course you can’t always control what life throws at you, but Elizabeth pointed out that my path might have taken a different turn if I hadn’t been forced into a race against time to secure health insurance and child care, those fickle twins that dictate life for so many Americans.

Still, I had trouble letting go of the conviction that I’d traded in resilience for lethargy. All my life I’d heard that adversity builds character and that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Elizabeth shook her head. “Those are dangerous generalizations and they’re mostly false. Beliefs like that allow us to minimize other peoples’ suffering without feeling guilt.” 

A growing body of research shows that despite the widespread belief that negative life events result in “post-traumatic growth” or positive personality change, “the only type of growth that seems to arise consistently is deepened relationships,” according to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Our relationships with loved ones often become more meaningful during times of struggle.

“But that requires having supportive relationships in the first place,” Elizabeth said. “Other than your parents, who were tossed out of the frying pan into the fire with you, you’ve been going it alone all this time. What would you say to that relative who told you Keith’s death would make you stronger if you saw her today?”

I didn’t hesitate. “I’d say, ‘You have no idea how badly I wish you’d been right.’”

Seven years on, my own mental health is in a much better place, and my children are thriving. We’re closer than we’ve ever been, and all four are involved in healthy relationships and working at jobs they enjoy. My older daughter became a psychiatric nurse and the younger one is pursuing a nursing degree in the same field. 

After my oldest child went through a divorce a few years ago, I began watching my two young grandchildren while she worked, paying it forward the way my parents did for me.

I understand the urge to offer platitudes to someone who’s experienced a loss or tragedy. The right words can be difficult to find. But it’s better to say nothing than to imply they’ll somehow benefit or be improved as a result of their misfortune.

Suffering hasn’t made me stronger, but it certainly has taught me about the kind of person I want to be. Now I’m able to offer more than platitudes to others going through difficult times because I can share my experience along with empathy. Pain does not build resilience; lending support does, even if it’s only a sympathetic ear. 

I’m grateful that today I can be that support for my family.

Margaret Jan Feike’s personal essays concerning subjects such as addiction, mental health, and grief have been published by Salon, McSweeney’s, Modern Loss, and other venues. She resides in central Ohio with her younger two children and a herd of cats and recently completed her first novel.

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