Loss Trauma and Humane Resilience Term Paper

Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience

The article focuses on the people who are resilient in the face of loss or potentially traumatic events. The articles notes that almost everyone experiences some type of traumatic event at some point of their life, and then notes that some people deal with these problems effectively and experience very little upheaval. Bonanno notes that resilience is generally seen in children and that most of the adult studies deal with individuals who have developed significant psychological problems. Based on this, resilience in adults is often considered as something rare. Bonanno argues against this, stating that resilience is more common than expected and that there are multiple pathways to resilience.

The next section of the article describes the difference between resilience and recovery. Bonanno notes that recovery is a process where normal functioning gives way to symptoms of depression as the individual deals with the trauma. Most importantly, these depressive symptoms are not a sign that individual does not have resilience. This is true because resilience does not refer to this process, but to the ability to maintain a stable equilibrium during the process. The article goes on to describe how resilient individuals can experience symptoms for short periods of time, but exhibit a stable and healthy level of function over time. After making this distinction between recovery and resilience, Bonanno argues that the failure to make this distinction has led to failures in how people are treated for grief.This issue is dealt with in the next section.

In this next section, Bonanno describes how grief has been traditionally understood as a process where individuals work through their memories and emotions about the loss. The article then notes that despite this generally accepted view, there is little evidence to support it. Bonanno also notes that studies have shown that this process of leading people through memories and emotions may actually be harmful to them. The conclusion is that the traditional way of dealing with grief may only be suitable for a small number of people, with these people being the ones who are highly distressed by grief. These points are emphasized again as Bonanno describe various studies where people who have undergone grief treatment are either not helped by the treatment or are worse off because of the treatment.

The next section of the article focuses on trauma interventions and critical incident debriefing. Bonanno notes that there has been confusion about how to categorize grief, especially with how to decide when grief is a sign of weakness of dysfunction. The most important point made is that people experiencing grief are not subcategorized and that no distinction is made between recovery and resilience. This results in the problem of researchers assuming that resilient individuals need to engage in the same coping processes as those individuals who do not have resilience. This leads to Bonanno noting that practitioners assume that all individuals….....