 |
| By Safe Call Now®'s Dr, Laura Brodie |
Resiliency is defined as: a quality in objects to hold or
recover their shape, or in people to stay intact. This is a kind of strength.
If you bend a fork and it bends right back — that's resiliency. A car that is
in an accident and only has a few scratches has resiliency: it holds up and
keeps its shape.
Today we do not study those who make it through a crisis and
take the lessons learned to guide and teach them. We focus instead on the broken and make many
a victim rather than a survivor. Who is we?
The mental health community. We
have gone way too far in debilitating people in their pain and done little to
teach them to work through the trauma and get to the other side. We have a rich
knowledge of human resiliency but in today’s victim culture we do not share the
wisdom gained from those before us.
I am a student of Viktor Frankl. He was a psychiatrist in pre-WWII who was
captured, imprisoned and spent time in four concentration camps. He began to
become curious about why it was certain people gave up and died and others
fought to the bitter end for their life. What he found was an individual must
have meaning in one’s life to make it through life’s traumas. Frankl gained his
meaning from having written a book before he was captured but finding it was
not published before he was incarcerated. He felt the need to survive to
rewrite the book and publish it, even after his wife and parents were sent to
the showers. He wrote on scraps of paper and anything he could get his hands on
to reproduce his work. His focus was in surviving and sometimes that’s all we
can do to get through the storm.
