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Friday, June 4, 2010

Learned resilience.

There have only been a few decades of research on the topic of resilience and most of this has been in the area of pediatrics growing up in hazardous conditions or as survivors of trauma. Much of the research discusses factors of resilience for children as they develop.

What about adults? If an adult is not predisposed to these factors of resilience or did not develop these factors due to trauma(s), can resilience be learned later in life. New research is suggesting that adults can learn new pathways to resilience and in fact many adults can find a multitude of pathways to resilience.

George A. Bonanno, PhD out of Columbia University, has done quite a bit of work on resilience and coping with grief and trauma. His research is pointing to the fact that not only can resilience be learned, it is in fact quite common.

Here is a link to George Bonanno's website at Columbia:

http://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/index.htm?facid=gab38

This leads to the question of best methods to develop or enhance resilience in Care partners of PD, particularly for care partners that have been in the caring role for many years. I believe Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a method that can help enhance resilience in the face of adversity.

What do other Social Workers working in PD find is effective in assisting care partners or PWPs enhance their resilience?

jam

2 comments:

  1. Sarah Schurr, LCSWJuly 7, 2010 at 4:03 PM

    When helping people tap into resilience, I help them remember other times in life where they coped with similar challanges. In giving care, sometimes we call on the resilience they used in days as parents of young children, or as young career people. I guess this is kind of basic to CBT and to Solution Focused work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah Schurr, LCSWJuly 7, 2010 at 4:06 PM

    When helping people tap into resilience, I help them remember other times in life where they coped with similar challanges. In giving care, sometimes we call on the resilience they used in days as parents of young children, or as young career people. I guess this is kind of basic to CBT and to Solution Focused work.

    ReplyDelete