Is resilience just repression in a fancier coat?

We talk about resilience a lot in the workplace.

It’s a quality we’re told we need more of. The ability to bounce back, push through, stay strong under pressure. But I’ve started to wonder - when does resilience stop being healthy, and start becoming something else entirely?

Something more like… repression?

For a long time, I saw myself as resilient. I could take the knocks, dust myself off, and keep going. But more recently, I’ve noticed that what I sometimes called resilience was actually avoidance. I wasn’t really processing difficult things. I was pushing them down, numbing, and calling it strength.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Resilience in the workplace is often held up as the answer to burnout, stress, and toxic workloads. When people are struggling, we send them on a resilience course. But we rarely stop to ask: Should they have to be this resilient in the first place? Is the issue really the individual, or is it the culture they’re working in?

When we treat resilience as the goal, we risk ignoring what’s really going on beneath the surface. People start surviving instead of thriving. And over time, that takes a toll - mentally, emotionally, and physically.

There’s a Brené Brown story I love. She talks about giving up drinking and feeling like a tortoise in a briar patch - raw, vulnerable, no shell. She told her therapist she needed to grow a new shell. And the therapist said, “Maybe you need to get out of the briar patch.” That really stayed with me.

Because sometimes it’s not about building tougher armour. It’s about changing the environment that’s wounding us in the first place.

As leaders and wellbeing professionals, this is where we need to focus. Not on teaching people to tolerate the intolerable, but on creating psychologically safe workplaces where people don’t have to be so relentlessly resilient just to survive.

So what does real resilience look like?

For me, it’s not about pushing through. It’s about recognising when I need to rest. When I need to ask for help. When I need to say no. And when I need to step out of the briar patch altogether.

Let’s stop treating resilience as the goal, and start treating emotional wellbeing at work as the foundation.

#Wellbeing #MentalHealth #Resilience #EmployeeWellbeing