Resilience

Sometimes I do requests. (I agreed to a brief one)

Resilience is a word as we know that is used in common everyday language. It also refers to a specific psychological concept. One definition I found was:

The ability to maintain or regain mental health despite experiencing adversity.


How some people can with stand adversity without developing negative physical or mental health outcomes. Desensitisation is one part of resilience but it includes much more. For example the ability to self soothe. A person who can self soothe is going to be more resilient than the person who can not.



The concept of resilience is of particular importance in the training of military personnel. Part of their training is to desensitise them so they become more resilient. To do that they must be abused or assaulted in some form which is how they will naturally desensitise.

But desensitisation is a tricky little sucker because you have to do it in the right amount. Look at this graph



As desensitisation increases so does resilience but a point is reached at the top of the graph where further desensitisation results in a drop in resilience. When you have too much desensitisation for too long, one ends up with PTSD which we know can happen to combat veterans. They fail to resensitize on the return home.

On the other side is being hypersensitized when one has not desensitised enough and thus the resilience is down again. In the previous post this is where I would put many Australian children because they are overly protected from things like the Gaddafi death video.

Graffiti