It was a sunny day, four years ago now, when 12 boys cycled through rice paddies with their
football coach near their home in Chiang Rai, Thailand to reach their regular playground, the
Tham Luang cave. They walked in with just torches to explore for an hour.
The 13 boys famously did not emerge until two weeks later. Flash floods trapped them deep
underground. Yet despite their lack of food, drink, light, oxygen and any obvious source of
hope, the story appeared to have a happy ending.
First the local community came together, then global expertise flocked, and eventually rescuers
helped all 13 return safely from their fortnight in the dark underground.
Four years on, were they still unscathed, or facing lingering trauma? Dr Mark
Berelowitz, consultant child psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital was involved in the boys’
recovery via one of his former colleagues who became Thailand’s minister of education. This
autumn, he flew to Thailand to visit some of the boys, wondering if later signs of post-traumatic
stress disorder had emerged.
In fact, the experience didn’t derail them, but almost positively shaped them, Berelowitz
reports. “They say that they no longer ‘sweat the small stuff’ - they’re not bothered if someone
pushes in front of them, or they’re struggling with another problem. But the experience doesn’t
haunt them. They were, and remain, resilient.”
How? Why? And what can we learn from these 13 boys as we talk of resilience in tackling our
own difficult life circumstances? That’s what Berelowitz ponders alongside Rabbi Miriam
Berger, principal rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue, and Patrick Moriarty, outgoing
headteacher of JCoSS Jewish secondary school and a Church of England priest. The trio have
come together to form Wellspring, a centre to help people in life-changing moments.
Was it thousands of years of Thai culture that gave these 13 boys a resilient mentality? Or would
13 JCoss or JFS kids who diverted from getting a milkshake at Brent Cross to become trapped
in some as yet unknown north west London cave system have the same outcome?
Berelowitz’s work found the boys’ community spirit, and fixation on continuously looking out
for each other, helped them survive. “They used distraction techniques - when one felt down,
another said, ‘think about your dog, or your bike, or your family’. When one started crying,
another held his hand and cried too. They’d comfort each other. There was no formal plan,
that behaviour just came naturally to them; they spent a lot of time comforting each other. I
came away with the idea of community compassion.”
As community leaders, Berger and Moriarty couldn’t respond to someone struggling with an
illness, or bereavement, or divorce, or even a significant life transition such as retirement, with
the aphorism “just be glad you’re not stuck in a cave.”
But both point out that any aspect of life - however awful at the time - can either define
someone’s life, or be one chapter of it.
Wellspring will be a place where treatments, therapies, a sense of community and the ritual of
immersion in a mikvah will help people at difficult or transitioning times in life to both grapple
with their predicament and to move on - not from it, but with it, as the Thai boys have
experienced.
“Wellspring will be a place where a person who has been through cancer treatment, for example,
finds the opportunity to say, ‘why me? It’s so unfair’, and to find support,” says Berger, “but it
will also be a place to say, ‘and now what? How do I move into a place where I’m working with
the illness and the time I have?
“A bereavement, likewise, can also be the end of the surviving partner’s life - or it can be a
transition. The Wellspring movement wants to help people move towards the second
possibility.”
It feels almost dangerous to ask - but do the trio believe our society’s fresh emphasis on mental
health could be in danger of going too far, if it means people over-introspect on their feelings
and trauma rather than thrusting themselves into daily life around them?
Berelowitz talks of his work with some families involved in the Grenfell Tower fire. “A couple
said they didn’t want to go to the memorial services, or get involved with the campaigning
organisations; they wanted, they said, ‘to move on with our lives’. Not everyone in their
community approves, but it helped them cope. They don’t want to be identified as ‘Grenfell
children’, but want to be known for other stuff.
“Being fueled by grim, PTSD-triggering stuff can itself fuel a mindset.”
This is not to denigrate any survivors’ response to any trauma - but to point out that there’s no
one-size-fits-all solution to a response. Sometimes, the ‘it is what it is’ mindset helps,” Moriarty
believes.
“A ‘this too will pass’ thesis, however bad a circumstance, can reassure us that the most
terrifying situations, or ones we struggle with most, are only for a finite time, even if they leave
their marks, scars, wounds for ever.”
It’s not just ‘recovery’ - of getting out of a dangerous cave - in life, but also moving on: “I’d love
to see someone going through retirement to use Wellspring,” Berger asserts. “I think there are
too many - mostly men - who retire but have no sense of identity to take them beyond their job.
We want to help people open a new chapter, ritualising it as both an ending but also a
beginning.”
Moriarty, who is fast approaching his own retirement from a headteacher role he has held for
over a decade, will be preempting this on a personal basis: “I want to come up with a ritual
process for six weeks’ time,” he says. “Not a retirement party, which only marks an ending, but
a celebration of what’s coming next. Retirement is just one example of where we could help
people move forward using ritual, rather than recover from anything.”
Berger talks of a friend who was born with no legs. “He can,” she adds, “move around much
more freely without prosthetic legs, and does so at home, but society isn’t built for an adult man
who is half of the usual size.” For daily tasks like pressing the button to cross a road, he needs
his prosthetic legs to raise him up to the size society needs him to be.
“He says he would be wasting his life if he filled it with anger that society cannot accommodate
him in his true self. But society would be failing if it allowed people to only function on its
terms. We need to both encourage people to raise themselves up, and for society to lower its
height to help people cope with their anger and pain.
“That’s what we want Wellspring to help people to do, whatever the difficult situation, or
transition in life, they are facing: to be a place to help people cope, and also to help society
realise it needs to change.” It will help people pursue their fullest possibilities.
The boys in the cave were clear from the outset that ‘no one gets left behind’. That’s the aim
too, with Wellspring.
- Rabbi Miriam Berger