Perception is key to
resilience: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as a chance to learn
and grow?
Whether
you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular
psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to
never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are.
It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental
threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you
surmount?
Environmental threats can come in various guises. Some are the result
of low socioeconomic status and challenging home conditions. (Those are the
threats studied in Garmezy’s work.) Often, such threats—parents with
psychological or other problems; exposure to violence or poor treatment; being
a child of problematic divorce—are chronic. Other threats are acute:
experiencing or witnessing a traumatic violent encounter, for example, or being
in an accident. What matters is the intensity and the duration of the stressor.
In the case of acute stressors, the intensity is usually high. The stress
resulting from chronic adversity, might be lower—but it “exerts repeated and
cumulative impact on resources and adaptation and persists for many months and
typically considerably longer.”
protective factors: the elements
of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite
the challenges they faced.
Several elements predicted resilience. Some
elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a
supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But
another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how
the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children
tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and
independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social
orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever
skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the
resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”:
they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their
achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of
their own fates.
One of the central elements of resilience,
is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity
to learn and grow? Events are not
traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,To call something a ‘traumatic event’
belies that fact. There has been coined a different term: PTE, or potentially
traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is
straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem
from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person
experiencing it.
Frame adversity as a challenge, and you
become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and
grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event
becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be
negatively affected.
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