"Resilience" or the concept of "increasing personal resilience" is something we're hearing about more and more in connection with PTSD. For combat veterans and their families, the greater the amount of personal resilience, the more fully they'll be able to "bounce back" from trauma (hence the image of the boomerang, which quickly returns to its source.)
According to the dictionary, "resilience" is "The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy;" and the intrinisic "property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity."
personal and professional activities [their presentation was to clinical caregivers, so that's explains the inclusion of that sentence]; and "connection" (to one's inner self; to others, and to something "larger" (typically spiritual).) A connection with others, in particular, "breaks
Helpful Hints for Personal Resilience:
- Make connections/relationships;
- Avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems;
- Accept that change is inevitable;
- Set goals and actively move toward them;
- Take decisive actions;
- Look at problems as triggers for personal growth;
- Don’t blow things out of proportion;
- Remember and use past coping, success, strengths.
-- Source: APA Task Force on Resilience, 2002, quoted in National Center for PTSD’s "PTSD 101," linked here.
