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.

The author and Keith on their wedding day, March 4, 1989.

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 realisation 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 counselling sessions, I learned otherwise. It’s not innate; rather, it’s learned and comes not........

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