Lessons from the Resilience Experts
By Rocky Reichman
My time with the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma (ICTP for short) taught me a lot about the nature of trauma and resilience: what we know, what we can do, and what we shouldn’t do. So in what follows, you will find a list of bite size lessons I learned about resilience. My hope is they will help you, too. Like everything on this website, this is not meant to be a diagnosis of any kind, but just some helpful tips I learned that may be of use to others.
- Resilience is not the same as Post-Traumatic Growth: Resilience is about maintaining normal life under stress, or bouncing back after falling down Post Traumatic Growth (PTG), on the other hand, goes a step further. PTG occurs when people don’t just bounce back, but learn something, and grow, from the experience. This growth can occur in a plethora of fashions, from being more immune to a particular type of stressor to gaining a deeper appreciation for life.
- PTG (Post-Traumatic Growth) is not always good: This may be a punch in the face from those who believe in not only surviving adversity, but thriving on it, but in fact it is not. It is good to thrive, but not to push for it. Our first focus should be on resilience. Here’s why:
Resilience is natural, and research estimates that around 85% of people are resilient, at least in the face of PTSD and trauma. PTG, on the other hand, is not common. Unfortunately, people who have overcome adversity may only perceive that they have grown, but in reality have not. In the course, Dr. Ruthy Pat-Horenczyk advised that therapists shouldn’t push for people to grow after adversity. They should instead focus on resilience, and getting them back to their normal level of functioning first. Then you can try to shoot for PTG. If you do it before building resilience, it may put extra unnecessary pressure on the victim.
On a side note, one may notice that at Watch Me Bounce, we maintains the mission to help people be more resilient in life. We do talk about “thriving” on adversity in our mission statement, but our one-liner clearly emphasizes resilience over PTG for the above reasons.
- Trauma is never good: This is probably another shock. This is despite what we see in superhero movies like Batman and Spiderman, both protagonists who suffered great traumas but used it to transform them This point from Dr. Pat-Horenczyk needs to be hammered home: trauma is never good. Sometimes challenges hit us, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap that we need adversity to thrive. We can grow and achieve our goals, without ever needing a tragedy to push us forward. Once trauma hit, however, we should make use of the adversity as an opportunity to build resilience and maybe even grow.
- Resilience is not rocket science: building resilience may sound complicated, but it’s really not. It all comes down to taking deep breaths, regulating ourselves, finding our strengths and meaning, and building social support. For more, see the Building Resilience Intervention model developed by Dr. Naomi Baum, director of the Resilience Unit at the ICTP (http://traumaweb.org/content.asp?PageId=477&lang=En).
- Resilience should lie in the hands of the community: also a nugget of wisdom from Dr. Baum. Resilience should exclusively be built in the clinician’s office. It can be built in the community too, by teachers, parents, peers and community leaders. You don’t have to be a therapist to teach people resilience. You can teach it by building it in our own children.
- All children need is one person to believe in them: this one, I believe, needs no further explanation.
- Don’t lie to children: If everything is not alright, do not deny the problem and say “everything is fine.” Rather, explain to them in simple, mediated terms that sometimes everything is not alright, but that there can be hope too. Otherwise, the children will find out, and may not trust you in the future.
- The caregiver matters: More than anything else, evidence shows that the greatest predictor in whether a child will be resilient vs. developing symptoms post-traumatic distress following trauma is the state of his caregivers, not the event. This bears repeating: The resilience of the child’s caregiver matters more than the objective event itself in determining whether a child will endure it resiliently. What this means is that caregivers and parents play a crucial role in maintaining and building resilience in children. If they have issues with regulating their emotions, or suffer from PTSD, then their children may develop PTSD as well, even if the child was never exposed to the traumatic event him or herself. On the other hand, however, if parents maintain resilience in the face of trauma, their children have much better chance at staying resilient too. To promote this point, the ICTP has launched Parents Place in Sderot, a clinic that helps both children and their caregivers by working on the dyadic relationship (dyad = two) between the caregiver and the child together, instead of only helping the child . Read more here: http://traumaweb.org/content.asp?PageId=415&lang=En.
- Social Support matters: caregivers aside, social support was found to be the strongest protective factor, or something that prevents or reduces the negative impact of trauma. This goes for any age group, from soldiers to cancer patients. Their greatest aspect is social support—from their friends, their families, and anyone willing to sit or stand by them and offer help. Social support is so powerful that it has even been shown that it can change the trajectory of post-traumatic adaptation.
- You are a “Survivor,” not a “Victim.” According to Rachel Yehuda, a well known researcher in the field of trauma and PTSD, resilient people avoid over-defining themselves as “victims,” and learn to see themselves as survivors instead. I think this message pertains to everyday life too: at some point, in almost every situation, you need to think of yourself as a survivor of trauma, not victim. This puts control of your fate back in your hands, and can even serve to change the story. Trauma has a lot to do with narrative, and how you process and integrate that narrative into the rest of your life experiences. So keep away from over-defining yourself by the traumatic event.
- Be flexible in your coping mechanism: George Bonnano, a psychologist at Columbia University Teacher’s College, has conducted research on what makes people resilient. His findings? That flexibility plays a key role. How flexible you are in how you cope matters a lot when you face adversity. So if the only way you de-stress is by doing one thing, like dancing or taking deep breaths, develop or find more coping mechanism. In case the adversity prevents you from usinga specific coping mechanism, you want to be ready with backup strategies for dealing with the stressor.
- People have different ways of coping: Everybody’s different. Some may cope through their belief systems, and use strengths such as optimism and willpower. Other may be more cognitive in their coping style, and change how they think about the adversity, other may use their imagination or affect (emotional) strengths, and still others may find strength in physical activities, such as dance or yoga.
