I consider it fair and appropriate to start talking about resilience by quoting Viktor Frankl: "If it is not in your hands to change a situation that causes you pain, you can always choose the attitude with which you face that suffering."
Frankl, psychiatrist, Austrian psychotherapist and ideologist of the psychological theory known as Logotherapy, deserves special mention, since it is an example of a resilient attitude and how to rebuild in a traumatic experience.
In autumn of 1942, with his wife and parents, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1944 he was transferred to Auschwitz and later to Kaufering and Türkheim, two concentration camps dependent on that of Dachau. On April 27, 1945 he was released by the US army. Frankl finally survived the Nazi holocaust, but both his wife and his parents died in the concentration camps.
Despite this experience that, today it seems impossible that we have lived so close to our time, Viktor exposes in one of his most famous works "Man in search of meaning" that, even in the most extreme conditions of dehumanization and suffering, man can find a reason to live.
He argues that it is the search for that sense that motivates us and fills us with reasons to live and comments that "whoever has a reason to live can overcome almost any how."
Resilience is not an innate ability or a way of understanding and facing life that appears by surprise, it is not a superpower or an automatic technique that is activated in the face of adversity.
Resilience is an attitude, a capacity that human beings have to face and overcome adverse situations (losses, damage received, extreme poverty, abuse, sexual abuse, excessively stressful or victimizing circumstances, etc.).
It involves learning, a high capacity to adapt to the obstacles in the environment and also requires the ability to recover the vital development that existed before the stress or traumatic circumstance occurred.
Like all reconstruction, it is not an immediate process, this capacity implies suffering, we do not deceive ourselves, but to assume this attitude is the best form of adaptation that the human being knows. It consists of a process of elaboration, not of erasure, involves integrating the loss, not forgetting it.
In the middle of the path towards resilience we contribute and get the best of ourselves, we grow in the face of adversity and it is at the end of it when we can talk about recovery and therefore of happiness. Giving our path of meaning means having all the answers that may arise through evolution and personal development.
We must not forget that we ourselves are responsible for what we do, what we laugh, what we love but also what we suffer and what we cry.
The pillars of resilienceTo understand the personal reconstruction strategies a little better, we quote Wolin and Wolin (1993), authors who expose and describe the seven pillars of resilience:
1. Introspection: Mention asking yourself and giving yourself an honest self-response.
2. Independence: defined as the ability to establish limits between oneself and adverse environments; It refers to the ability to maintain emotional and physical distance, without becoming isolated.
3. The ability to interact: affects the ability to establish intimate and satisfactory ties with other people. Here we would find qualities such as empathy, sociability.
4. Initiative: involves demanding and testing yourself in progressively more demanding tasks. It refers to the ability to take care of problems and exercise control over them.
5. Humor: refers to the fact of finding the comic in the tragedy. Humor helps overcome obstacles and problems, make people laugh and laugh at the absurdity of life (Jauregui, 2007).
6. Creativity: is the ability to create order, beauty and purpose from chaos and disorder. In childhood it is expressed with the creation of games, which are the ways to express loneliness, fear, anger and despair in adverse situations.
7. Morality: refers to moral conscience, the ability to commit according to social values and to discriminate between good and bad.
Being resilient depends to a large extent on these pillars or capacities just mentioned but I would like to conclude this reflection before remembering that; As people we are what we strive to be, we are non-static changing beings, we must take advantage of that plasticity to adapt and mold ourselves to the demands and difficulties.
I define myself as a quite skeptical person with determinism, because I believe that to change you have to believe in change and happiness is true that it is in the small, in the medium and in the great details, but it is not about looking for it by corners, it's about reaching the corners and flooding them with happiness .
Happiness depends on our attitude, therefore, it depends on ourselves and it makes me sad to look around and realize that in the culture we share we are taught to be stressed, to be sad, to be afraid and to suffer anxiety; I believe and consider that there is an underlying social interest that promotes these states of fear and anxiety, but the most important thing and what we have to take into account and remind us daily is that being happy depends only on us, you and me.
“A traumatic experience is always negative, but what happens from it depends on each person. In the hand of man is to choose his option, which can either turn his negative experience into victories, life into an internal triumph, or he can ignore the challenge and limit himself to vegetarian and collapsing. "
Shared by Jose Salido Botas
Source: http://psicopedia.org/
The man in search of Resilience
