News From the Cause
PTSD Patients Build Resiliency at Navy Medicine’s OASIS (DOD LIVE)
August 15, 2011
As the founding director of the Overcoming Adversity and Stress Injury Support (OASIS) program, I have been thinking a lot about individual resilience lately. Last week, OASIS celebrated one year of treating patients and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we have done so far and what we continue to do, but the concept of resiliency still remains at the forefront of my mind daily.
It is a commonly discussed term but not well defined, and many experts will disagree on exactly how to measure it. For me it is simply the ability to pick oneself up and keep going after taking a hit.
I take care of a lot of service members who define resilience as “strength” which is true, but it is also an elastic strength, not a rigid one. Sometimes in the military we are told that there is one right way to do things, but when people later find that the “one way” doesn’t work for all situations, they feel trapped and unable to develop a new approach and adapt to an unexpected problem. Coping with and recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be like that. People can get “stuck.”
Resilience is thought by many to be a “trait,” that is, it is something you are born with, sort of like curly hair, or eye color. Experts have spent many years pondering what makes one individual break under stress while another thrives. They do research into what makes a good Marine tick, or what kind of personality makes for a good aviator.
However, the presumption that resilience is somehow born into us, causes us to miss some important aspects of the virtue. Resilience, the ability to recover and bounce back, is not like eye color or curly hair. It changes over time and there are things we can do to increase or decrease it. Therefore, I find it more helpful to think about resilience as a “state” rather than a “trait.”
If you think back across your life it is easy to remember situations in which you triumphed or excelled in difficult situations and exceeded even your own expectations. It is also easy to remember times when you have been humbled by defeat or failure in circumstances that you didn’t think should be that challenging. This is an example how resilience changes over time, and at times we are more or less resilient than others. The goal is to increase the amount of time we spend in a high resiliency state instead of a low resiliency state.
The good news here is that increasing or decreasing resilience is not rocket science. It comes back to common sense things.Click here to view more
