I have wondered what resilience truly is. Reading Tina Marie Hahn's comments on resilience helped me achieve a better understanding. I agree that resilience is not something we are born with.
We talk about resilience in a couple of ways. When someone has experienced much adversity in their life, and responded somewhat positively, we say they are resilient. They bounce back quicker than most. If we look at kids who come from an impoverished or problem filled background and succeed, we infer resilience as the reason why. And if we look at someone who has sunk to the depths of behavioral despair, and come back from it, we attribute their rehabilitation to resilience.
If we consider resilience as an innate trait we are born with, then many of us are deficient and it feels like we are criticized based on an accident of birth, similar to skin color. We are bad seed because we were not born resilient, and it is natural to seek punishment and possible isolation for us born without resilience.
When we look at resilience in the context of a response system and base it on learning, then it requires having a training opportunity. That training opportunity might be a family of origin, a social support network or a formal training opportunity. In essence it becomes a learned response, a countermeasure, to negative behavioral results.
Reading and thinking about the resilience literature has added some depth to my analysis about the development of negative behaviors in response to ACE’s. I believe the Root Cause of negative behaviors can be found in three places: 1) as a response to developmental trauma (adult or ACE’s); 2) as a consequence of nutritional deficits; and 3) lack of training opportunity on how to respond to one’s potential for bad behavior.
Number 3 is the addition to my thinking. If we are not taught how to respond to a desire to perform a negative act, we may perform it. This training can come from 2 sources that I have identified. It can be a culturally trained response, built into the family of origin, or observed and replicated behavior from another source within the culture. The second source is training. This might be provided in school, from the criminal justice system, or the family and youth services system. There are plenty of possible sources. Most of the time, the training comes after symptom expression (the negative behavior is practiced and the perpetrator is caught). What resilience advocates seem to want is to train before perpetration happens. That’s the right thing to do, in my opinion.
Training should build awareness of why you might practice or perpetrate negative behaviors. It should help you recognize the signs of imminent perpetration and a response to stop it from happening. There are a lot of barriers to creating awareness and response.
I have actually put building knowledge and awareness of the impact of ACE’s, adult onset trauma and nutritional deficits into the Restoration to Health Model I have worked on for the past 5 years. It’s the first step towards achieving wellness. It’s also intended to be taught in a non-blaming environment.
In this model, resilience can be taught and applied. It supports the innate ability of people to learn and train their response system to a level of resisting perpetration of bad behavior. Recognizing signals that the body is activating, applying intervention techniques such as deep breathing, emotional freedom technique, mindfulness or other taught interventions, quiets the activation response. The negative behavior is avoided, and the consequences that follow are no longer possible. That’s real resilience in this model.
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