Resilience Forms And Their Role In People

The Forms of Resilience and their Role in People’s Response to Risk Situations Associated to Terrorism Lector univ. Ilie Sandina; assist. univ. Ilie Oana-Antonia Considering resilience the process of successful adaptation to hardships and the challenge of difficult life situations , the present paper presents its forms: individual, social, political, focusing especially on the individual psychological resilience with its five levels: maintaining emotional , health and well-being state, concentration on the inner world : abilities of solving the problems; concentration on the outer world: a strong self; well-developed resilience abilities; talent of transforming bad fortune into good luck.

Keywords: resilience, resilient personality, trauma, recovery Starting from the necessity of putting together all of the aspects specific to resilience, by considering the modality in which the individual perceptions work in the case of a terrorist attack, Joseph Henrotin [1] considers that the forms of resilience are: -individual, understood as the human capacity of overcoming the psychological trauma produced by an attack or another traumatic event, with its derived forms (the affections of posttraumatic stress - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-PTSD) -social, representing the capacity of a society in its ensemble, to surpass the consequences of an attack and to accomplish the conservation of culture without producing a state of negative psychosis that would cause the taste and the satisfaction of victory at the enemy -political, that shows the capacity of a society of not representing its sufferance on political ground and of not taking part in a crisis of legitimacy sustained by an antipolitical feeling. In Romania we can estimate that a terrorist attack in the sociopolitical context of today’s world could generate a visible development of the right extreme or of other antiromanian groups, with most negative effects that are beyond our imagination. Resilience, looked at through such perspective, surpasses in many ways the human capacity of individually absorbing the

trauma caused by a terrorist event, and focuses on its understanding as a central point of a strategy that has as a finality the articulation of all state activity connected with the internal and external security. We can appreciate that resilience is the starting point but also the final point of the individual and collective reaction at the action of the factors with negative influence over the people. In figure no. 1, resilience appears as an answer to the aggressity of external threats; its capacity and level of function are given by a previous preparation and a period of recovery. The diversity of risks and threats pointing at the quality of resilience can bring diversified answers that extend on a large scale; this determining new and important transformation in what the future of the system is concerned, changes regarding its forming, growth, and consolidation.

Resilience

Prepara tion -

Response

Recovery

Risks

Fig.no.1. The Corelation between the quality of resilience and the action of the agresion factors

When you are confronted with an adversity or your life is destroyed, how would you adjust to it? Some people feel victimized and blame the others for what is happening to them. Some stop, resign, feel hopeless and helpless. Others are angry, loose their control and tend to hurt the close ones. The few ones left, still, try by their own means to find a way to adjust face to adversity, and sometimes they succeed to make things go well. These are the best survivors, people endowed with an extraordinary capacity to overcome the crisis and the extreme situations. These are the resilient personalities, stable in stress situations. They quickly restore their emotional balance, adapt and overcome successfully the stressing situations which make them stronger and even succeed to transform the bad fortune into good luck. Resilience, at the level of the structures of the health systems has a specific content, an approach based on concepts as risk, vulnerability and resilience, which implies the exploitation of the studies on population groups and on issues as physical health and mental health. Enjoying a special attention in the health field, the psychology of development is the one in charge with the handling of this concept, by implying the official and unofficial services of violence prevention. According to Eurensaft and Tousignant the concept of resilience represents a change of paradigm: we give up notions as risk, vulnerability and psychopathology for concentrating our attention on individual’s capacities and on the connections between him and his group[2]. People overcome successfully the dramatic, traumatic, risky situations of life with the condition to have a series of demands assured: care and help from the others, positive thinking and success expectancy, the opportunity of taking active part in activities, positive relations with the people around, clear and consequent rules of behavior, abilities to handle different life situations, strong will and motivation for not giving up when faced

to dangerous obstacles and to demonstrate they have the strength to overcome. Resilience is essential in today’s world. At the work place, each person feels the pressure of the necessity of working more at a higher qualitative level, with a smaller budget. In personal life the things change so fast that each one has to learn to face the changes, to handle unexpected situations and to overcome the adversities. According to the American Association of Psychology, resilience is “the process of adapting to adversity, trauma, tragedy or when faced to significant sources of stress”[3]. Another definition refers to “the quality which determines a system to come back to the initial form or to the initial position after a mechanical intervention or, the recovery from depression, disease, etc” [4]. The wheal of resilience made by N Henderson, fig.2, presents in a specific order the important moments of the forming and consolidation of the specific behavior of a resilient person. If the first step is that of positive expectancies, the last step shows the attitudinal side concretized by the opportunity of the resilient person of taking active part in any situation, even a risk one. The resilience is the process of successful adaptation to the difficulties or provocations of life situations. The resilient people overcome successfully the difficulties or the provocations of life’s challenges. The resilient people overcome adversities reject the pressions without registering dysfunction or inappropriate behaviors. Most of the resilient people become stronger, more confident, wiser and more adaptable as a result of coming through dramatic situations. The answers differ from one person to the other, and, also when they come from the same person in different situations. There is the possibility to form and consolidate resilience knowing that we are all born with a potential of developing these abilities.

Life abilities

Positive expectancy

Care and help from others Clear rules of behaviour

Opportunity of Positive active relations with participation people around

Fig no. 2 The Resilience Wheel ( After N. Henderson) We can analyze the phenomenon of psychological resilience on different levels, that target on the intensity and width of reality perception to which we can response adequately. The five levels of resilience are: 1. Maintaining emotional stability, of good health and of the wellbeing state 2. Concentrating on the outer world; a strong sense of self 3. Concentrating on the inner world, a strong sense of self 4. Well developed resilience abilities 5. Talent of transforming bad fortune into good-luck The first level is essential for maintaining our good health and our energy level. The second level refers to our concentration on the elements of the outer world, on the provocations that we have to face, the behavior of the people being based on the research and identification of the problematic aspects of the given situations more than on solving the emotional problems.

The third level supposes concentrating on the inner world for increasing our self-esteem and for developing a positive conception on ourselves. The fourth level covers the characteristics and the abilities that we find at people with superior degrees of resilience. The fifth level describes what happens if we reach high degrees of resilience, respectively if the person has the ability of transforming bad luck into good luck, which means valorizing the good parts of a situation with apparently no way out. While some people prove to be more resilient than the others we can observe that resilience is a dynamic capacity that does not always appear. In other words, individual resilience demonstrates a permanent mobility, having in view the fact that less resilient people have moments when they feel down and can’t adjust to challenging life situations. A few examples of resilient people are the following: -Helen Keller (deaf and blind from birth, has demonstrated a remarkable resilience and has learned to communicate and live with passion); -Nelson Mandela (after living in prison for more than 10 years he became the president of his country) -Aung San Suu Kyi (advocate of democracy in Myanmar whose father has lived all his life under threat and in arrest for many years) -Anne Frank (a young Jew, who became famous for a personal journal in which she has noted the events from the time she was hiding away from the Jews. After that she was arrested and died in a concentration camp.) Many of the people with high resilience did not become famous. Their lives were more or less characterized by actions, events, and experiences that do not normally happen in a community. Very important remains in this respect the action developed during childhood, this becoming essential for achieving the psychological support of resilience on the life long term of everyone’s existence.

Bibliography: [1]http://www.rmes.be/Resilience_et_antiterorisme_an_Belgique% 5B%5D%20(1=.pdf) [2]http://autourdelaresilience.blo-gspot.com/2007/03/autor-de-laresilience-colloque [3]The road to Resilience,American Psychological Association, On-line Internet,www.apa.org [4]Webster’s Desk Dictionary, Portland House, New York, 1990