[BLANK_AUDIO [MUSIC] The concept of resilience has recently gathered interest in healthcare with the recognition of its contributions to promoting recovery. Resilience has been defined as an essential attribute, assisting us to adapt to challenging or traumatic physical, social, and emotional events. Precursors to the concept of resilience is a sense of mastery and effective coping skills. In fact, the word resilience originates from the Latin root, resilire, meaning to rebound. Therefore, resilience is the ability to bounce back from the traumatic or stressful experiences and adapt flexibly to the changing demands. With resilience, we can transcend adversity, transforming it into an opportunity for personal growth and allowing us to move on. In general, it's the capacity for flexible and resourceful adaption to external and internal stresses. So what defines resilient behaviors? The notion of hope, self-efficacy, and coping essential. Resilience is composed of self-confidence, curiosity, self-discipline, and self-esteem, and control. Subsequently, resilient individuals display an optimistic, energetic, and enthusiastic approach to life, and are open to new challenges. They are active, positive copers who don't avoid the difficult parts of recovery. Resilience has been shown to protect individuals against breakdown following traumatic events, and might help alleviate feelings of helplessness when faced with adversity. Interestingly, people are not born resilient. Instead, resilience is learnt, gained through exposure to adversity. This implies that resilience develops over time as a positive process and not just a personal trait. So it can be seen as an adaptive state that can be nurtured throughout one's life. Importantly, the development of resilience is based on the relationships that is shared between the individual, their environment, and experiences. Consequently, resilience has the capacities to sustain people through difficult and challenging environments. It is more common than we previously thought, suggesting there are many varied pathways to resilience. We now know that traumatic events can often have profound effects on our self, body, mind, and spirit. This can change the way we feel about ourselves and others, having longer term effects such as in a severe burn injury or a spinal cord injury. Traumatic experiences like bullying, harassment, or abuse can harm our sense of self and trust in others. Recovery from such events can take some time, whether we need to endure long periods of hospitalization and rehabilitation to recover from the injury. Or we need to recover from an altered body image, a psychological blow, and perhaps a loss of function and independence. This can influence our quality of life. Acceptance of an abrupt injury or traumatic event remains challenging for the injured person and their families and carers, with the potential to create a spiral of trauma. So mitigating these knock on effects by promoting resiliency and its benefits is vitally important. So when we bounce back after stress and trauma, we can return to a more comfortable level of psychological and social functioning. And sometimes we can become stronger. With resilience, we can resist the breakdown of our sense of self after trauma and engage in a restorative or transformative process of integration. Like an old oak tree, we are stronger after the tough winters in a process called post-traumatic growth. There is now research that demonstrates resilience can improve with intervention. Here we have so far focused on the more explicit use of the term resilience and its measurement. Resilience plays a vital role in the recovery of all sorts of traumatic events across the life span. It is reassuring that we have evidence that people bounce back even after extremely traumatic events. For example, in the aftermath of September 11th, resilience to post-traumatic stress disorders was high. Those who were physically injured or actually presented in the towers had higher levels of post-traumatic stress and less resilience. So the intimacy of the insult is relevant in determining the impact and meaning of an event for us. Those exposed to traumatic events up close and personal have a more challenging task to resist traumatic breakdown or achieve post-traumatic recovery and personal growth. However, past successful navigation of trauma can provide the templates for positive adjustment and resilience. We can turn our past traumas into strong strategies and safeguard against post-traumatic breakdown in future traumas. This is part of the learning we try to scaffold in our children and young people to stress-proof them, and help our young saplings grow to be strong old oak trees. When stressed, it helps to build and manage stress successfully, building up their resilience incrementally. And if they are exposed to more traumatic events, we step in and find how to support them in ways that grow their own sense of self, sense of mastery. We help the broken bones, hearts, minds, and spirits restore. One's supports are also important, positive social and emotional supports from family, peers, and community, or a religious or spiritual source. In severe burn injuries, for example, we are finding the power of peer support. This is an important innovation in the recovery of mental health. If I know what's it's like to struggle to recover from my own lived experience, I can support you on your journey. This is covered in the talk on recovery. So we can help each other grow resilience and have the experience of bouncing back. I can be stronger again and my relationships and community can support me. We grow resilience in these kind of respectful, caring, and connective relationships that help individuals, families, and communities bounce back. [MUSIC]
