Chapter 6. The Mechanism of Dissociation (1) Resilience--- Capacity not to Dissociate (12)

I would like to make my position clear. I am not saying that trauma can promote our emotional development. Trauma by definition leaves us indefinite or long-term deleterious effect. However, if we try to eliminate any experiences which might bring some potentially traumatic effect, that might deprive us of a chance to have any painful but potentially development-promoting experiences. As I implied in my notion of “negative trauma” (Okano, 1995), sufficient amount of physical and emotional stimulus is needed for our healthy development and the lack of stimulus has negative effect just as trauma does. In that sense, resilience could be defined as a capacity to turn stress into a positive stimulus. Without resilience, any ordinary stressful experience might potentially turn into trauma.
Okano, K (1995) Traumatic Mental Disorders. Iwasaki Gakujutsu Shuppan. (Japanese)
So far we examined several studies regarding resilience. It might be clear to the readers that resilience is not a static and objectively measured capacity that we possess. It is rather a capacity to dynamically interact with the environment. It constantly repairs any cracks and openings that are created in our daily interaction with the surround.
Resilience can be compared to our mechanism of protection against cancer. It is reported that in our body, ten billion cells have some mutation on a daily basis. However, due to our immunological mechanism they were eliminated from our system before any one of them grow into a tumor. In a sense we are experiencing a constant fluctuation between health and sickness, and due to our resilience, a change which has a potential of developing into serious illness are kept within the fluctuation.
Resilience and its therapeutic implication
Before I close this chapter, I would like to briefly mention some therapeutic implications of resilience. To understand resilience is to have a new look at how the treatment should go. Everyone of us has resilience and deals with daily stress without necessarily developing mental illness and requiring specialist’s treatment. Resilience therefore smoothens our natural healing process.
What many of us as treaters often ask ourselves is whether we are doing right treatment for our patients. This can be related to our guilt that we experience when facing our traumatized patient. However, treatment should also consist of not disturbing our patients’ handling problems on their own. What we learned about CISD was that treaters should be very careful interfering with traumatized people when they are on their own private healing stage. Perhaps there is tremendous individual variety in their self-healing process that treaters should be highly respectful of.
I always remember what one of the Japanese chess (“shogi”) master mentioned in his essay. When he loses a game in a big tournament, all he does is to never to talk to anyone, but go straight home and crawl into his bed, and cry all night. Then his all right next morning. This is his own way of exerting his resilience to handle mishaps in his life. Perhaps no psychiatric intervention could work better than his unique healing remedy.