The Secret Formula for (Psychological) Resilience

[Ego]

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria- ... resilience

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.”

and

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.

[GandK]

Agreed. After losing a child, I have counseled others who have done the same, and framing your thoughts has an enormous impact on how quickly someone is able to heal and how functional they are in their healing process, even when they're in a situation that the whole world would call horrific.

To put it another way:

Let's say you are in a bad car wreck. There is a world of difference, when describing the incident to someone else or even to yourself, between saying "this happened" and saying "this happened to me." Both statements are perfectly accurate, but they reflect completely different mental states.

In the first comment, "this happened," you are an observer of the event... separate from it even if you were severely injured in the crash. That separation means you are capable and have agency, and are therefore mentally able to take action to help yourself heal and maybe to prevent a similar crash from happening to you a second time. No matter how bad your injuries are, the crash will never define you if it's separate from you.

But in the second comment, "this happened to me," you are a victim of the event. You are incapable, on the receiving end of it, the prey of the Universe or of some other human being. In your own mind, you are likely not able to help yourself heal or to help prevent another crash in the future. Without deliberately redirecting your thinking, the crash and the idea that you are an injured party will become part of your identity.

In short, you can tell a whole lot about someone's healing potential by whether or not they are personalizing their life events - not their emotions about the events, but the events themselves - whenever they speak about them.

[jacob]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28philosophy%29

[Slevin]

I feel like the author was a couple stretches of thought away from an independent theory of antifragility. Or he understood the ideas behind antifragility wasn't able to frame it quite right in his papers.
He also has this moment where he just pushes by the idea of Post-Traumatic Growth, instead posing events as "Possibly Traumatic Events". I guess the nitpick here is again the difference between flourishing under these events, and not letting the events break you down further.

I somewhat have this strange urge to go track down these psychologists and give them a copy of Antifragility .

[Dragline]

Believe it or not, there is an app for this developed at MIT Media Lab: http://itskoko.com/

Its all about reframing and cognitive therapy: http://itskoko.com/about

[Ydobon]

@GandK

That's incredibly brave. We lost a child (well, classified as a miscarriage, but far too far along to meet the usual understanding of the word). I find it painful to even discuss with my wife nearly 2 years later, I think I would find it very difficult to discuss the topic with someone else who had felt similar pain.

[7Wannabe5]

There's also such a thing as assigning yourself too much agency in relationship to a traumatic event. For instance, you break up with somebody and then they drive their car into a tree. Something like this happened to me and I was sort of "paralyzed" for a while. Then somebody who didn't know what had happened suggested that I was "feeling sorry for myself", and I saw that this can be true in situations where you are taking on too much personality responsibility for events and the behavior of other people, as well as situations where you are taking on too little personal responsibility for your own behavior or response.