Crisis and adversity forge the strongest bonds

“My friend, office parties, church picnics, and family holidays are great. However they don’t have the desired effect of creating a team atmosphere and bonding the different individuals to one another. It usually takes a crisis for that. Hardship. Shared pain.” 
—Anonymous

I simply googled “how bonds strengthen in adversity” and came up with the above written only a few hundred miles from where I live.

You can’t manufacture intimacy; but intimacy, of real tried and tested trust and mateship, comes into its own when individuals suffer together, when they’re called upon, often against their will, to share experiences of adversity, and to overcome together.

Those we go into battle with, those we stood back-to-back with when the pressure rose, those who had our back as we had theirs; these are the ones we develop bonds with that tie us together as one.

Since joining the fire and emergency services as an employee, I’ve been fascinated about the bonds between certain individuals and groups.  During the Wooroloo bushfires where 86 homes were razed yet many more were valiantly saved, and after Tropical Cyclone Seroja—which to this day still has people deployed to it—there were bonds built and strengthened within those communities and between those communities and those who responded and helped clean up.

As people suffer together, bonds form and people merge.  Like superglue.

There’s something about work that is inherently heroic in an environment where you do it together and can’t get out of it—mutual crisis, shared pain, united test, joint goal... risk of catastrophic failure... collective success against the odds.

And even in cataclysmic loss, together there’s shared empathy, which overwhelms our capacity to fake it.  Makes us raw together and permission to be ourselves because we’ve been seen at our weakest and yet accepted.

Life is beautiful when we break the shackles of our fear of being vulnerable.

When we’re no longer afraid of showing others who we really are.

It’s only when we step into the Arena with another or others, where the stakes for failure are enormous, that we realise we can’t get through without sticking together and finding a way through.

I’ll never forget doing a Working Together course in December 1993 where for four full days and nights we were placed in impossible situations as teams of six.  Each and every time we overcame the impossible odds to overcome together, and something forged within us that helped us drop the façade with each other to just be our best selves.

Think about your own life; the bonds of strength that exist in many of your relationships that together with individuals or others you’ve been through trial and snare, and come out of it to tell of a story or a season of triumph through anguish.

Here is a quote to finish I’m sure you’ve read:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, April 23, 1910

Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash