Overview of Resiliency
Duncan Westwood, PhD, 20 Nov 09
Greatest commandment invites us to love God, neighbor, self with heart, soul, mind, strength. Pagans said, “God is in awe of all that you do, Abraham”—the first resilient expatriate.
Resiliency is an open construct, where words can be added to fit your personal, familial, and cultural walls. Paradise Road, a movie, shows the concept at work in a WWII Japanese prison camp; the interned choir of women ceased to sing when half their members died and remaining members were too weak to sing. “The more they hate me, the more I feel impelled to love them…”
Resilience is a dynamic and ordinary (or extra-ordinary) process of attunement, adjustment & adaptation across the expatriate journey; it includes a positive adaptive outcome despite experience of adversity. What began as a quest to understand the extraordinary has revealed the power of the ordinary. Resilience does not come from rare and special qualities but from everyday magic of ordinary, normative resources attained through our minds and bodies, our children, our families and their relationships within community.
Resilience is:
an attunement to a higher sense of meaning;
adjustment of self and significant others to hardship and trauma;
process of adaption to people and place over one’s life cycle;
negotiating transitions from one life stage to another as movements involving interaction between a changing individual and a changing context;
allowing for many diverse roles that do not necessarily proceed in a given sequence.
Expats face a double-edged challenge to their mental and physical health: stressors are not only new and unfamiliar, but the coping resources that worked at home may not do so abroad.
for ex, Eric Lyttle, in the movie Chariots of Fire, was an ordinary and humble man who was willing to clean toilets in a Chinese prison camp; a man who was also able and willing to run in the 1924 Olympics in his own ungainly way because God made him fast and took pleasure in his fastness.
Resilience exists in the relationship between a limited person who is rooted in significant present and past adversity and risk that has to be overcome.
Vocational, violent, and vicarious trauma are “V3 trauma” across all expatriate cultures.
It has been argued that understanding how individuals develop transitions and choices is the crux of understanding risk and resilience across the life span. Past and present adversity: transitory, persistent, and chronically hard environments: each is harder form of adversity than the prior one and results in poorer long term adaptation.
Buddhist monk research show that one can move activation within prefrontal cortex from left to right, from stressed (left prefrontal cortex) to peaceful and pleasant cortical activation (right prefrontal cortex), with just a short period of “compassionate meditation.”
Resiliency assessment requires measures and benchmarks the define personal resiliency as:
multi-dimensional,
across a wide age range,
multiple domains
across multiple populations and circumstances.
Agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, sociability are five attributes out of 31 within the resiliency research.
Ultimately the resiliency of another human being remains beyond the abilities of scholars to describe or define. Just as each symphony creates a particular and a special sound, so too is the marvelous, complex interweaving of each person’s bounded resources and limitations.
