1) What is resilience?
The process of overcoming adversity.
Resilience is more than positive thinking or finding the silver lining in clouds. Denial is a powerful defense mechanism, but resilient people don't pretend everything is all right. They seize the initiative and do what they can to help themselves and others. When there is hardship, a resilient person will create new meaning from the experience. This means reframing the event -- making the mental shift that allows you to see yourself not as a victim but as a survivor. "Resilience is people having appropriate, immediate reactions to traumas, but then going on with their lives and living more assertively and more purposefully," explains explains Kempler.
2)Who is resilient?
Everyone
Resilience is a human quality. Every one of us will deal with terrible crises, such as the death of a parent. And each of us has it in us to put our worlds back together again. This does not mean that resilient people don't need help from other people. The ability to draw strength from relationships is one aspect of resilience.
Like other human strengths, some people are more resilient than others. But resilience increases in people who work to integrate their traumatic experiences into their lives. They do this by using these experiences to define their problems, strengths, and possibilities.
3)Who tends to be most resilient?
Children.
"So much is made of children's vulnerability, and that is true," says Kempler. "But a point is missed in that often what is traumatic is the sense that our world is coming apart. Something is happening that is completely impossible; the world we took for granted is gone... But young children do not as yet have such fully formed impressions of the world. They can certainly be frightened and feel insecure, but it is not quite on that 'This is not supposed to be happening' level that adults experience."
4)Who tends to be least resilient?
People who are self-focused
Egocentric or self-focused people are more likely to take things personally. And the extent to which people take things personally affects their ability to be resilient. This, explains Kempler, is why people who survive natural disasters tend to recover more quickly than those who survive attacks directed against them personally or as members of a group.
"The person who has the capacity to say this is not directed personally at me has a much better chance of remaining resilient," Kempler says. "They are saying, 'This is not directed at me, this is not my fault. There is nothing about me that deserves this trauma.' It is the kind of meaning we put on events that protects our resilience, that makes us capable of being resilient, that lets us cope and adapt."
5)Which of these attributes is associated with resilience?
Independence and a reliance on relationships
Morality and a sense of humor
Recognizing one's inner wounds and taking charge of them
Wolin identifies seven strengths that together make up resilience:
Independence: Keeping emotional and physical distance from sources of trauma.
Relationships: The ability to attract, connect with, and form meaningful attachments to others.
Insight: Asking yourself hard questions -- about your strengths and weaknesses, for example, or about the role you play in your own problems -- and giving yourself honest answers.
Initiative: Taking charge of your problems.
Morality/spirituality: A firm sense of values and one's own self-worth.
Creativity: Giving meaning to your troubling experiences and painful feelings.
Humor: Finding the comic in the tragic.
6)Resilient people:
Seek help from reliable people in times of stress.
It's not that resilient people don't feel stress, or that they're better trained to deal with it (although more resilient people may be more likely than others to learn stress management). Resilient people recognize that bad things happen to good people, so they aren't overwhelmed by stress when they experience setbacks.
Resilient people have confidence in their ability to deal with bad situations. But they also recruit and form bonds with responsible, helpful adults -- and learn from their support how to withstand pain and disappointment.
"If you lose your job, and you become frightened for the future and you don't believe that things will get any better and you don't have any control, you are making that experience more stressful," Kempler says. "If you say, "Yes, I have lost my job but things haven't always gone my way -- and there are people I can turn to to help me.' That makes it less stressful, and it supports your active response."
7)Are there some experiences for which it is most crucial to be resilient?
Any event traumatic to us, no matter how trivial it may appear to others.
Resilience can indeed help us overcome serious abuses, tragedies, and ordeals we suffered as children or suffer as adults. But seemingly small things can contain a world of trauma. For example, it may seem odd for a boy to be traumatized when his parents fail to show up for his graduation. But that relatively small event may represent a whole childhood of neglect.
"We think of a traumatic event as something obviously horrible, like seeing a loved one killed before our eyes," says Kempler. "But in truth, the real source of trauma is in how a person experiences an event, and the meaning a person puts upon it. And context is important. If a child's sense of security is based on trusting the parent, and the parent does something to shake that foundation, that experience is quite important, even though it is not traumatic in and of itself."
8)When is a traumatic event most likely to rob us of our resilience?
Events connected to an older trauma we were not able to handle at the time.
All traumatic events challenge our resilience. But some come in under our radar.
"A traumatic event robs you of your resilience if it connects with an older trauma, a trauma you were not able to handle, that you didn't have the strength or the ego or the cognitive capacity to deal with," says Kempler. "Then it exists in you like a little poisonous capsule. When that is activated by current adult trauma, that is what robs you of your resilience because it is unconscious and you didn't know it was there."
This is where insight contributes to resilience. Recognizing and naming our trauma is the first step in activating our resiliency. This does not mean falling into what Wolin calls the "victim trap" -- seeing yourself as irreparably damaged and blaming your parents or others. It means seeing your pain as a signal to go out in search of your resilience to exercise the strengths that make us resilient.
9)When something brings back a painful memory, resilient people:
You answered: Shift from seeing themselves as victims to seeing themselves as survivors
Resilient people use their insight to recognize the experiences that caused them emotional and/or physical damage. These experiences, Wolin notes, bring up feelings of grief, anger, loss, fear, and shame.
It's true that these feelings may never go away completely. Ignoring them, nursing them, or pretending they aren't there doesn't help.
"Step back from yourself far enough so that your injuries diminish within a bigger picture that also includes your strengths," Steven and Sybil Wolin write. "Make a mental shift from dwelling on your damage to recognizing the challenges you met and the times you bounced back."
"The meaning that one finds in being a survivor can be enhancing," Kempler says. "You think, 'They threw everything they had at me and I'm still here.' So instead of being traumatic, it adds to my resilience."
Source: www.webmd.com
No comments:
Post a Comment