Chapter 6. The Mechanism of Dissociation (1) Resilience--- Capacity not to Dissociate (4)

Another question
I believe that the initial question by the young psychiatrist is paired with another important one. “Why some people have gone through serious traumatic experience without exhibiting any trauma-related symptoms?” This is also a question that goes through many clinicians’ mind. I believe we could address this question with a notion of resilience. In reality, overt traumatic event might not cause PTSD whereas apparently minute incident can mean a serious trauma for some individual. In other case, serious stress might make people’s mind tougher and stronger. Whether or not we develop PTSD or other trauma-related disorder in the face of traumatic stress has high individual variation, including the level of resilience that an individual has.
The notion of resilience
Resilience originally used in a scientific context means “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity”. Currently it is also used in a more general context, as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”: (Oxford Dictionary)
When used in the psychiatric literatures, resilience is defined differently from authors. Among them, Bonnano (2004) defines resilience as “the ability to maintain a stable equilibrium” when people face extremely adverse situations.
The study of resilience started already in the 1970s. Initially resilience tended to be considered as some inborn talent or ability （Baldwin, A.L.et al, 1993）. Earlier studies included how children in adverse conditions such as having a schizophrenic mother managed to adapt to the situations. What these studies indicated was that reaction to adverse life situations has high individual variations and many factors such as work efficiency, social relationship and marital status are involved. As it often applies to other notions, resilience was initially considered as consisting of a single factor, just like the so-called “g factor” for the intelligence (Spearman、1904）, then it turned out that it is a mixture of many factors and conditions (Garmezy, 1970, Zigler & Glick,1986).