Resilience is a remarkable construct – an overarching metaphor that touches on the arenas of stress, neural plasticity, emotional health, recovery, healing, mental illness, adaptation, defendedness, and therapy. It is relevant to everyone in most every role and regardless of age: teachers, therapists, youth workers, parents, support workers, etc. Fresh understandings are coming to the fore as we glean more working knowledge of the brain as well as the nature of emotion. The implications for working with children are profound, never mind the implications for dealing with stress in our own lives and in the lives of our loved ones.
Course Description
One of the most challenging and crucial questions of our time is why some bounce back from adversity, seemingly unscathed, while others fall apart and become emotionally distraught and dysfunctional. Once upon a time and not too long ago, the dominant idea regarding stress is that it is what happened to us that told the story. Sexual abuse had its consequences. Trauma had its crippling effects. Divorce had its fallout. Stress, if sufficient enough, would lead to our undoing. The corollary to this idea is that good experiences (or the absence of adversity) would ultimately lead to emotional health and well-being. It turns out that neither hypothesis holds water. There are too many exceptions to create a rule in either case.
What has become apparent is that it is not what happens to us - good or bad - that explains how we are ultimately affected, but rather something about ourselves that sets the stage for the story that unfolds. But what is this something? Do some have this prerequisite ‘something’ and others not? Or does everyone possess this ‘something’ but it somehow needs to be activated for the potential to be realized?
The pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together and the answer is in this remarkable human attribute called ‘resilience’ or the ability to bounce back. Resilience is the ultimate good news story - that stress in itself is not the enemy and that we need not be brought down by the circumstances in our lives. After years of mistaken focus on the stress part of the equation, the focus is now on uncovering the keys that can unlock the amazing human potential to grow through adversity, to thrive under duress, and to bounce back from trauma.
Resilience is probably the most important topic of our time. It holds the answers to emotional health and well-being, to mental illness, to healing and recovery, to prevention, to addiction, and much more. Resilience is not only the best overall prevention but also the best focus for intervention. Resilience should be everyone’s concern, not only the medical and helping professionals, but also educators, parents, and society at large. Resilience is about ourselves and those we are responsible for.
The implications are profound. Instead of treating trauma, disorder and illness, we should be focused on restoring the capacity for resilience. Instead of worrying about what will befall ourselves, or our children, nurturing resilience becomes our best insurance for their well-being in a world that we cannot control.
So where does resilience come from and how are we to make sense of it? The answers lie surprisingly in fresh understandings of emotion, relationship, feelings, play and rest. These pivotal factors have unfortunately been eclipsed by the current prevailing focus on symptoms, syndromes and stress, as well as problem behaviour and dysfunction. The incredible story of emotional health and well-being is not about what has happened to us but rather about what hasn’t happened within us.
Suitability/Applicability
The focus, as always with Dr. Neufeld, is our children, with parents and teachers being supported as their best answers. This being said, the material applies to all those who want to help others get better or to get better themselves. As such, it is highly recommended for all helping professionals: therapists, social workers, psychologists, counsellors, family workers, physicians and nurses.
Formats & Fees
This course is available in the ONLINE CAMPUS COURSE format. See Course Format Options for format delivery, access, and content details.
ONLINE CAMPUS COURSE FORMAT - $150
Tuition includes a four-month Virtual Campus study pass. See More On Online Campus Courses for further information on our two campus course formats (Self-Paced Study and Scheduled Online Class). Visit the course details page to register. If there is an upcoming Scheduled Online Class it will be posted directly above the Self-Paced Study button on the left-hand side.
Topics/Objectives
- why solving the riddle of resilience is more important than ever
- a coherent and comprehensive model of threat and recovery
- updating our understanding of what threatens us as humans
- teasing apart emotion from feeling to parallel how the brain really works
- teasing apart resilience as an attribute from resilience as a response
- the canary feelings that manifest well-being
- filling in the missing pieces of the fight-flight response to threat
- understanding how to convey safety to the animating brain
- why the prevailing methods of delivering safety do not work
- why the direct approach in resilience and recovery does not work
- the two states deemed safe by the animating brain and how to provide them
- the two kinds of strength – of defense and of becoming
- that safety is not a function of reality, perception or feeling
- the red flags for when the stress response has become stuck
- the surprising role of emotional playgrounds in recovery and resilience- redefining trauma in terms of what's missing instead of what's happened
- distilling to the essence the road to recovery and resilience
Course Outline
The story of resilience is told in four consecutive 'chapters' with each chapter setting the stage for the next. Each of these session involves about an hour of presentation by Dr. Neufeld plus an additional hour of dialogue with him moderated by Heather Ferguson as well as other Faculty of the Neufeld Institute. The fifth and last session features a dialogue between three of the Neufeld Institute faculty and serves to flesh out the material presented.
Chapter 1 – The Surprising Wisdom of the Stress Response
Although stress has traditionally been viewed as the adversary and our nemesis as it were, a more nuanced understanding reveals the wisdom of the stress response in creating the conditions for emotions to work in distressing situations, unencumbered by having to deal with tender feelings of vulnerability. The stress response brilliantly provides the strength required to function in highly distressing circumstances but there is a cost. In this session we update understandings of what truly threatens as humans and so set the stage for creating a comprehensive model of recovery and resilience.
Chapter 2 – The Resilience Response as Nature's Answer to the Stress Response
Everything in our being seeks for equilibrium or homeostasis. The stress response is of course a deviation from that equilibrium, but for good reason. What the stress response should call forth is a natural correction, namely the resilience response. The resilience response is best understood as the reversal of the stress response and so insights about resilience are thus rooted in insights regarding the stress response. Correspondingly, insights about safety must be rooted in accurate understanding of what threatens us. The implications are profound and reveal where we have been missing the mark. Trauma is best understood not in terms of what has happened to us, but rather in terms of what has not happened within us in response.
Chapter 3 – Signs of a Stuck Stress Response (including trauma)
Before focusing on prevention and intervention, we take this session to walk around the challenge of assessing what's wrong. We outline a five-point assessment that can be followed informally or formalized into a clinical protocol if one is a helping professional. Because what we don't see is so much harder to assess than what we do see, the most significant red flags for a stuck stress response are also explored. Being able to accurately read a stuck stress response provides the context for reversing this condition.
Chapter 4 – Recovering the Resilience Response
The challenge of helping children and adults get better is made more difficult by the fact that the resilience response cannot be recovered directly. Recovery is a certainly a distinctive of life and thus part of our human potential, but the path to resilience and well-being is anything but straightforward. The riddle resolves itself when we understand what our brains have been programmed by evolution to deem as SAFE. In this session we discuss the challenges of delivering this kind of safety to our charges, whether they be our children, our students or our clients. Once again, the implications are profound, for those we seek to help as well as for ourselves. Also discussed is how the resilience response itself needs some added support in today's society.
Session 5 – Review and Reflections
Three faculty members of the Neufeld Institute reflect on the material presented by Dr. Neufeld, bringing in questions from the initial group of participants, and share stories that illustrate the concepts presented.