A reflection on evolution, resistance, and revolution

Re-reading Daring Greatly (Brown 2012) to write a book review for Typeface Books, I was struck with how close the term evolution is to revolution and what this means for society. Reading through a lens of resistance to the status quo who tells us what we can read as psychoeducation, I am interested in how people resist shame and shame triggers/shields and how individuals are shamed by wider institutions that are invested in maintaining the status quo.

Reading the term evolution created an internal process of Socratic questioning: What is the distance between resistance and evolution? What is the distance between resistance and revolution? Can you have one without the other? Can it be measured in a political, cultural or social sense? Is resistance part of evolution?

A major problem for me is that my research poses more questions than answers. Every time I think I have my thesis chapters nailed down, up comes an interesting new idea and I mentally add another chapter. Only, I have 100,000 words and my head only has room for 10 chapters at 10,000 words each.

Reflecting on this disruptive dilemma over the weekend juxtaposed with comments made by one of the examiners at Confirmation of Candidature that the term resistance was rather hard, I am toying with the idea of using the word "disruptive" in front of each chapter title. Example, instead of a boring title like Bibliotherapy, it becomes Disruptive Bibliotherapy, providing license to read dangerously and to step outside the realms of bibliotherapy as a tool of psychoeducation: a revolution of those with lived experience embedding recovery into the Focused Psychological Strategies.

In all of this Socratic questioning I have again realised the importance of theoretic deconstruction and the time thinking takes. Doing a PhD sounds glamorous and action packed, but it is an equal amount of thinking, sifting, deciding and rejecting.

To reach evolution of chapters I have had to resist some of the interesting points I would love to follow up, the unread books and papers calling my name, and revolt against my own expectations of doing things in a certain way because that is the way everyone else does it. Worst; that is what society, and the academy, expects of us.

Viva La Revolucion: I am staying with my previously structured chapters and placing the word disruptive in front of my chapter titles. One glance at my white board notes lets me know that it is a natural path for me to travel down. This is evidenced by my scribbles to follow up like:

• Theory of disruptive economic behaviours and triple bottom lines
• Disrupting the derisory against Brene Brown
• Discipline of Lived Experience disrupts psychoeducation.
• Nursing disrupted medicine.

In the words of my Army Officer father, a very long time ago, I don't have a diplomatic bone in my body so why would I start watering down and limiting what I really want to show through research - that evolution occurs for the popular classes when resistance disrupts the status quo to the point of a passive revolution.

👵🏼 Megan Bayliss

👩🏼‍🎓 PhD Candidate: social and cultural resistance to the status quo.

References

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: how the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. New York, NY, Gotham Books.