PTSD Professional Perspective: PTSD and Resiliency
Friday, August 27th, 2010 • PTSD Guest Post: Professional Perspective •
You all know I believe each of us has deep healing potential. You also know I believe our biggest job in PTSD recovery is learning to tap that potential. Today, Marriage and Family therapist Louis Heit talks about another innate tool we have in recovery: resilience.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Resiliency
Whether or not an individual develops PTSD is a matter of the resiliency features the individual has prior to experiencing the traumatic event. Resilience can be thought of as an individual’s capacity for adapting and accommodating, in a constructive manner, to an adverse event, his or her ability to “bounce back”. It involves a number of personality features and dimensions, often referred to as resiliency factors. These resiliency factors include such dimensions as emotional regulation styles, stress tolerance abilities, self-image, degrees of self-reliance, and locus of control (the sense of whether one has influence over experiences). Of particular, perhaps central, importance is the personal meaning the individual attaches to the traumatic event, the label the individual places on the event to make sense of it and to integrate it through the individual’s unique belief system about how the world works.
This helps to explain why individuals react to the same occurrence so differently. Humans have sets of internal impressions and representations, about themselves, and about the people and world around them, that act to filter experiences and allow the individual to make decisions about responding to events. These impressions and representations include beliefs, values, expectations, assumptions, conclusions, judgments, and other thought processes and ideas that form each individual’s unique understanding of the things that happen to him or her. These issues can also become central during intervention, when building a traumatized individual’s coping strategies often involves strengthening, or even initiating, psychological and emotional resiliency skills.
In traumatic experience recovery, the work in part involves first, activating existing resilience resources, and then second, to develop additional internal resources to broaden and strengthen the individual’s overall trauma response. It’s important to note here that, while there is a wealth of work and changes a trauma survivor can and should do on his or her own, the value of allowing oneself to work with another, trusted individual cannot be over-emphasized.
While this is typically a professional, such as a social worker, psychotherapist, or psychologist, it can also take the form of a best friend, a confidant, a spiritual leader such as a priest or rabbi, support groups, or others that the individual has a strong relationship with. The ability and willingness to share one’s experiences, to trust another with sensitive, personal, and painful feelings and emotions, and to think out loud with the benefit of another’s objectivity, and especially without fear of judgment, is of itself a crucial resilience resource. Attempting to work out the recovery alone, “toughing it out”, carries a substantially higher risk of failure, continued suffering, and even a worsening of symptoms and impairments.
Louis Heit is licensed in California as both a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), and as a Clinical Social Worker (LCSW). He has worked in a wide variety of mental health, psychiatric, and social service settings for more than twenty years, with extensive experience in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mood disorders, chemical dependencies, marital and family discord, and child and adolescent behavior disorders.
In addition to his work in providing group, family, and individual psychotherapy, he works as a clinical supervisor and training therapist for several clinical programs, and is an instructor for social work and marriage and family therapy graduate study programs at several area universities.
www.wellspringtherapycenter.com
The opinions in this post are solely those of the author. To contribute to ‘Professional Perspective’ contact Michele.
Tags: post traumatic stress disorder, ptsd, resilience, trauma
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What are the resiliency features an individual has prior to experiencing the traumatic events, when a child is abused by her parents from the age of three and then the rest of her whole childhood?.
Hello,
First, my apologies for not responding sooner, I just today learned of your question.
As for the resiliency features an individual might have had prior to experiencing trauma, in this case a young child, there is a wide range of such characteristics, and we always need to be careful of making generalizations, so it would be better to take a look at the specific individual. That being said, some of the resiliency characteristics that a young child might have could include a sense of curiousity, strong development of speech skills, the ability to socially engage others, warmth and acceptance of others, a tendency to easily be soothed or comforted, or the ability to keep oneself occupied. This is of course, not meant to be a definitive list, rather several examples of the kind of features that could represent a child’s innate strengths. These strenghts could then become factors in how that individual begins the process of recovery from a traumatic experience.
When the question of trauma recovery is raised, it becomes useful to look at the kinds of personality features that represent strengths and internal resources, as a kind of starting point for developing ways for that individual to address the trauma, how the trauma has affected her (or him)