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How People Learn to Become Resilient

newyorker.com

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Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#4
post #2

The idea is to practice variations of the skill you want to master instead of practicing same repetitions over and over. Actual paper is unfortunately behind paywall: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982215...

http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2045379445/2056784269/mmc...

Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#5
> The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects.

Sounds like the complete opposite of what some people seem to promote.

Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#6
The idea that resilience can be learned also implies that resilience can be spread through social groups -- if you spend more time around resilient people who view potentially traumatic events in a more positive light, it may lead you to do the same.

I certainly found this to be true after hurricane katrina; talking to people who had been through other large-scale disasters helped me re-frame the events as a learning experience, and I've subsequently found myself more resilient in the face of other (unrelated) negative events in my life.

Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#8

Most of this was known to the likes of Diogenes, Rufus, Epictetus, and Aurelius. All that is required to have a good guess at this at least is close observation of our fellows.

a lot of the subject of this article - "why do some children from awful backgrounds succeed and why do others fail?" is still a very open problem.

Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#9
post #8

Most of this was known to the likes of Diogenes, Rufus, Epictetus, and Aurelius. All that is required to have a good guess at this at least is close observation of our fellows.

a lot of the subject of this article - "why do some children from awful backgrounds succeed and why do others fail?" is still a very open problem.

Same can be said about children from good backgrounds. What makes Donald Trump's kids 'successful'? I know some extremely privileged people in the early 20s that could do anything, are very attractive, have no worries but live a life of complete chaos. I know others who were smart and super wealthy, but stumbled and couldn't recover emotionally/mentally.

I personally think it has a lot to do with stoicism and those who look for solutions vs those who just try to cope.

Re: How People Learn to Become Resilient

#10
The thing I've found most frustrating about the framing and discussion around these things in a clinical setting (in my limited experience, with people who were probably not trained specifically in these concepts) is that it's basically not allowed to say that your understanding doesn't fit on the "locus of control" spectrum (for example, if you reject mind-body dualism, without which the assumed concepts of "internal" and "external" are somewhat absurd). According to the worksheet, I must have some kind of one-dimensional "core belief" about the power of self versus environment. Some of the concepts and research around this seem promising, but in my experience as a patient/client, the practice leaves a lot to be desired.

More broadly, I've been frustrated by a lot of the clinical psychology that focuses on highly stereotyped beliefs. Too much of it reads like just-so stories; Alice looks at Bob's behavior and then treats her own speculations about Bob's beliefs as though they're actual observations.

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