Resilience: An Essential Ingredient in Building Health and Well-being

The Trauma Informed Health Care Education and Research (TIHCER) Collaborative presents:

Laurie Leitch, Ph.D. has been a practicing psychotherapist, clinical trainer, consultant, social entrepreneur, and researcher for over 25 years. She is Director of Threshold GlobalWorks (www.thresholdglobalworks.com), dedicated to cultivating and amplifying resilience in individuals and within communities, organizations, and systems. Committed to promoting workplaces and communities in which principled behavior and collaboration are the norm, Leitch’s organization, Threshold GlobalWorks, has developed a neuroscience-based curriculum, Social Resilience Model (SRM) also called Brain Gain Program (BPG) for building an ecology of resilience in adults and children that includes systems-level factors that enhance or deplete resilience. The curriculum has been used in military, medical, educational, corrections and corporate settings nationally and internationally to strengthen resilience by building improved cognitive, emotional, and physical health and promoting collaborative relationships among individuals, across disciplines, and in communities of all sizes. SRM’s model is being used in urban communities which have high rates of violence to amplify community strengths, network diverse groups and enhance safety and sharing of resources. Laurie’s book: Brain Gain: Timely Tools for Tackling Life’s Heavy Lifting was published in March 2023. It is a “how to” book with stories and skills from Laurie’s national and international projects and includes a chapter about how to use the SRM/BPG Skills Card in communities.

This brief session will describe:

1. an exciting approach to building resilience: The Social Resilience Model (SRM), also called Brain Gain Program (BGP), which is a neuroscience-based approach focused on the neurobiological basis of stress, distress, and trauma and, most importantly, resilience;

2. the way SRM/BGP works with the reflexive, defensive ways the body responds to threat and fear;

3. the practical, easily learned SRM/BGP skills that do not require an insight orientation, or even high levels of literacy, as do many cognitively-based approaches;

4. the relevance and use of the model with populations in which there are often high states of dysregulation and reactivity.

The SRM/BGP Skills Card will be used throughout the discussion to highlight the model as well as to illustrate how the skills-based approach can be used in marginalized communities.