The Resilience Riddle: making sense of stress, trauma and recovery
Sessions: 5
Lecture: 4h 42m
Certificate: 10+ hrs
125 CAD
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. Although it is in our nature to recover from our wounds and be stronger as a result, the unfolding of this potential requires special conditions, which is the central focus of this course. The implications for raising children, including teaching and working with them, are profound.
As is the case with all our courses, this course features lectures by Dr. Neufeld, carefully curated support for enriched study, study aides, the opportunity to ask questions of trained faculty or course facilitators, a year's access to the campus to enable study at one's own pace, and a certificate of attendance upon completion. For more information, consult the 'about our courses' page.
COURSE SUMMARY
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. 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.
In this course, we look at where resilience comes from and how are we to make sense of it? We use fresh understandings of emotion to uncover the roots of resilience in relationship, feelings, play and rest. These pivotal factors are too often 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. This must be where our hope lies.
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.
SAMPLE TOPICS
- a coherent and comprehensive model of threat and recovery
- updating our understanding of what threatens us as humans
- teasing apart resilience as an attribute from resilience as a response
- the canary feelings that manifest well-being and should alert us to trouble
- filling in the missing pieces of the fight-flight response to threat
- understanding how to convey safety to the animating brain
- 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
- the red flags for when the stress response has become stuck
- 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. 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
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. - Chapter 3 – Signs of a Stuck Stress Response (including trauma)
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
Recovery is 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 animating brains interpret 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. - 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.
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Charity & Non-Profit Status
The Neufeld Institute is a registered Canadian charitable organization under the name Neufeld Institute Foundation and is also registered as a NPO in British Columbia. If you would like to make a contribution to us, please go to our donation page.
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