In an era when childhood trauma, toxic stress and grit are the leading buzzwords in children’s health circles, “resilience” is often trotted out as the answer to whatever horrible events people — young or old — have endured. Prevention is always king, the thinking goes, but when misery has already come to pass, building up resilience is our best bet for giving trauma victims a chance to move beyond their misfortune and live healthy, productive lives.
Except that the knotty concept of resilience is rarely so simple, the narrative never so pat, as we might be tempted to believe from reading issue briefs or bootstrap stories in the media. That point was driven home repeatedly by psychiatrist Glenda Wrenn and foster youth advocate Johnny Madrid in a panel on the role of resilience at this week’s 2016 National Fellowship. In very different ways, the two speakers emphasized that real stories of resilience are almost always more complex than suggested by popular accounts.
But first, it helps to have a working definition of resilience. Wrenn, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, defines it as “the ability to grow and thrive in the face of challenge as well as bounce back in the face of adversity.”
One of Wrenn’s messages, however, is that resilience isn’t a fixed characteristic of a person. Instead she speaks of “real-time resilience,” which ebbs and flows according to the vagaries of a person’s daily life. “Thinking about how you can acknowledge that reality I think is beneficial to the truth of the story, but also to the person,” she told journalists.
[For more of this story, written by Ryan White, go to http://www.centerforhealthjour...-always-get-it-right]
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