Resilience: Growing and Finding Meaning from Trauma

Solution Preview

Allow me to walk you through some of the terms you are using first.

Traumatic event: In the context of psychology, a traumatic event is sudden, frightening, and confusing, Confusion comes from the sudden change in one's worldview. '

A possible mock client would be someone who was physically attacked by a coworker. Prior to the event, the individual has a sense of safety and trust in the world, and/or they are confident in the steps they rake to say safe. In just a few seconds, that belief is shattered. The flight or fight response puts the person in a high state of arousal during the attack, forming a "flashbulb memory" which is very vivid. That flashbulb memory intrudes on the traumatized person's dreams and waking life. The person can become easily startled, irritable, depressed, anxious, and withdrawn

Resilience: Resilience is the capacity to positively adapt to excessive negative circumstance while maintaining a stable level of functioning. It is the ability to recover. The patterns of recovery are called resilience trajectories. Trajectory is the path from first response to the trauma to the highest degree of recovery. One trajectory would be to be hit very hard at the beginning, and to never fully recover. Another trajectory would be to not to be very troubled at the beginning, and to take a long time to recover. Another trajectory would to be a severe reaction to the initial trauma and a relatively fast recovery to a coping point that is actually higher than it was before the trauma. (That's when whatever didn't kill the person made them stronger.)

For the third item, describe how the client interpreted the event, is important. Humans do not like to believe they were powerless, so they often interpret an event as their own failure to be in control. The think about what they did wrong. This is why victims blame themselves and why people have survivor guilt when others are hurt and they are not. Other interpretations are that no one can be trusted, that someone or some entity failed to protect the person, or ...