Innovative Approaches to Individual and Community Resilience

From Theory to Practice

Darlyne G. Nemeth, Traci W. Olivier

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128039137
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Resilience is a biopsychosocial phenomenon—it encompasses personal, interpersonal, and community experiences. Innovative Approaches to Individual and Community Resilience reviews the current research and details differing levels and approaches to resilience. On a microlevel, this book specifies how to develop appropriate coping strategies, maintain cognitive flexibility, and identify, label, and share feelings before acting upon them. On a macrolevel, it defines and explores environmental resilience, social resilience, community resilience, and family resilience. It focuses on the importance offamily, community, and spiritual bonds, in order to share experiences and enhance posttraumatic healing. The need to be firmly grounded in today, while learning from yesterday, in order to cope with the requirements of tomorrow is the primary emphasis of thisbook.

• 2018 PROSE Awards - Winner, Award for Applied Social Work, Nursing and Allied Health: Association of American Publishers
• Explores aspects of resilience within the individual, community, and environment
• Outlines critical factors that allow people to not just survive, but to thrive
• Addresses the crucial role of the family in the development of resilience
• Reflects upon the helping professional's need to achieve and maintain resilience

Chapter 1

Resilience

Defined and Explored

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the concept of resilience. Various aspects, perspectives, and definitions of resilience are highlighted and explored. We advocate resilience as a concept that can be learned by “ordinary people.” Therefore, on individual and community levels, it is important that we understand how to foster our own resilience in order to teach others how to develop theirs. Within this concept, learning to effectively recognize, label, and share emotions is of the utmost significance. We outline a developmental model of resilience and discuss the implications of attachment theory. We believe that, in today’s society, people have become too disconnected, often succumbing to artificial attachments rather than true relationships. Therefore, we perceive connectedness as a key factor in the successful development of resilience, and we believe that individuals must work to maintain and/or reclaim relatedness. Lastly, we discuss the importance of resilience in both the work and home settings.

Keywords

Resilience; perspective; attachment; teaching resilience

Contents

Resilience Can Be Taught 2

Four Types of People 2

Multiple Perspectives 3

Four Needed Community Interventions 7

Adversity and Adjustment 7

Attachment and Resilience 8

Artificial Attachment 9

Connectedness and Resilience 10

Recognizing, Labeling, and Sharing Feelings 11

Reclaiming Relatedness 11

A False Sense of Resilience 12

A Developmental Model of Resilience 13

Humanization and Resilience 14

Resilience in the Workplace 16

Resilience for the Homeplace 17

Teaching Resilience Rather Than Aggression 18

Thoughts of Resilience, Culture, and Structure 18

Developing Definitions of Resilience 19

References 20

The concept of resilience is an ancient one, dating as far back as the 17th century. It stems from the Latin words, “resiliens” or “resiliere,” which mean “to rebound, recoil” (Online Etymology Dictionary). Nearly four centuries later, resilience has become a mainstream idea, with the use of the word being quite varied and diverse. Current definitions outline resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” (Resilience, n.d.). In discussing the “resilient mindset,” Goldstein and Brooks (2013) describe such a perspective as allowing individuals “to deal more effectively with stress and pressure, to cope with everyday challenges, to bounce back from disappointments, adversity, and trauma, to develop clear and realistic goals, to solve problems, to relate comfortably with others, and to treat oneself and others with respect” (p. 3).

Resilience Can Be Taught

Resilience is a trait that can be taught. As Spencer points out, “resilience is not a rare ability; in reality, it is found in the average individual and it can be learned and developed by virtually anyone” (2015, p. 27). In his letters to a former SEAL comrade, Eric Greitens constructs the following summary of resilience, its importance, and why it is so difficult for some people to find it:

Resilience is the key to a well-lived life. If you want to be happy, you need resilience, if you want to be successful, you need resilience. You need resilience because you can’t have happiness, success, or anything else worth having without meeting hardship along the way.

To master a skill, to build an enterprise, to pursue any worthy endeavor—simply to live a good life—requires that we confront pain, hardship, and fear. What is the difference between those who are defeated by hardship and those who are sharpened by it? Between those who are broken by pain and those who are made wiser by it?

To move through pain to wisdom, through fear to courage, through suffering to strength, requires resilience.

The benefits of struggling—of being challenged, afraid, pained, confused—are so precious that if they could be bottled, people would pay dearly for them.

But they can’t be bottled. And if you want the wisdom, the strength, the clarity, the courage that can come from struggle, the price is clear: you have to endure the struggle first (2015, p. 8).

Four Types of People

In discussing resilience, we believe that there are four types of people in the world. First, there are those who have learned how to be resilient and actively engage in the processes and behaviors that foster continued resilience. These are the people who not only survive, but thrive. Second, there are those who generally know how to be resilient but have difficulty implementing the behaviors in a practical manner. Therefore, they do not receive the benefit of their knowledge. Third, there are individuals who know how to become resilient but choose not to engage in the behaviors and processes that would help them to thrive in life. They choose, in the words of Greitens, not to endure the struggle. Finally, there are those who simply do not know how to be resilient.

This book is dedicated to the second and fourth types of people—to those who do not know how to implement resilience in their day-to-day lives, and to those who simply lack an understanding of how to become resilient. Helping people to learn about and develop this meaningful ability is the focus of this book.

Multiple Perspectives

First, we must understand the many ways in which the word resilience is utilized. With this in mind, perspective, or context, is important. Therefore, the following ideas and definitions are offered to highlight the variety of ways in which resilience has been described by others (in alphabetical order):

• Community Perspective: One of the most important community resilience factors is “fostering community cohesion and support” (Berger, 2016, p. 5). Berger continues by explaining that “community cohesion, sense of belonging, as well as trust in the government and local leadership, predicts the probability of developing stress-related symptomatology following exposure to political violence,” and that “an important factor… is the community’s ability to create a shared meaningful narrative that allows that traumatized community to transform a traumatic experience into a renewal and rebuilding story” (p. 6). Furthermore, as Shaw, McClean, Taylor, Swartout, and Querna note, “The full utility of resilience is often not realized when only conceptualized at the individual level, without attention to its role at the community or system level in trying to promote well-being through research or intervention” (2016, p. 35).

• Cultural Perspective: Dr. Panter-Brick describes, “For me, what makes some families more resilient than others is their ability to hang on to a sense of hope that gives meaning and order to suffering in life and helps to articulate a coherent narrative to link the future to the past and present. That hope or ‘meaning-making’ is the essence of a cultural perspective on resilience (Panter-Brick & Eggerman, 2012)” (Southwick, Bonanno, Masten, Panter-Brick, & Yehuda, 2014, p. 6).

• Ecological Perspective: C.S. Holling, Canadian ecologist, argues that there are two different ways to look at natural systems—as either stable or as resilient. This perspective implies that resilience is inherently linked to change. Holling refers to the view of systems termed resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationship between populations or state variables” (Rodin, 2014, p. 48).

• Economic Perspective: Rose and Liao (2005) described economic resilience as the “inherent ability and adaptive response that enables firms and regions to avoid maximum potential losses” (p. 76).

• Emotional Resilience: Jane McGonigal, game designer, outlined four types of resilience during her 2012 TED talk, one of which was emotional resilience. In a blog post, Howe Wallace, Chief Executive Officer of PalletOne, expanded upon the concept of emotional resilience by explaining that individuals who are emotionally resilient “engage in regular reflection on things beautiful, fanciful, visionary” (2015, para. 3). Furthermore, “Emotional resilience exercises our capability to imagine, dream, plan, and create. It fortifies the soul. Emotional resilience allows us to find positive things even when circumstances stay grim” (para. 3).

• Engineering Perspective: Youn, Hu, and Wang (2011) describe engineering resilience as “the degree of a passive survival rate (or reliability) plus a proactive survival rate (or restoration). Mathematically, the resilience measure can be defined as the addition of reliability and restoration…” (p. 101011–3).

• Mental Resilience: Wallace (2015) describes mental resilience by stating, “You are mentally resilient if you test your brain. Do puzzles. Play board games. Try new hobbies. Read new books. Stay engaged in work. Grow a garden. In short, mentally resilient folks stay challenged” (para. 3).

• Organizational Perspective: The resilience of an organization can be defined as the inherent ability to keep or recover the steady state, thereby allowing it to continue normal operations after a disruptive event or in the presence of continuous stress (Sheffi, 2005, as cited in Hosseini, Barker, & Ramirez-Marquez, 2016, p. 48). Others have defined organizational resilience as “the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful” (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 3418) or “to convey the properties of being adapted to the requirements of the environment, or otherwise being able to manage the variability of challenging circumstances the environment throws up” (McDonald, 2010, p. 156). Sheffi further defined resilience for companies as “the company’s ability to, and speed at which they can, return to their normal performance level (e.g., inventory, capacity, service rate) [followed by a] disruptive event” (as cited in Hosseini et al., 2016, p. 48). Furthermore, “a resilient organization is a hopeful system because hope is a confidence grounded in a realistic appraisal of the challenges in one’s environment and one’s capabilities for navigating around them (Groopman, 2004). Hope helps insulate from the vagaries of unexpected events by instilling a belief in the value of constantly updating and refining one’s appraisal of the environment and in the organization’s ability to use this knowledge effectively in the face of unexpected events” (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 3420).

• Physical Resilience: McGonigal (2012) and Wallace (2015) also discussed the physica...