Abstract
Marie’s husband went hiking four years ago and vanished without a trace. Marie has come to believe now, four years after his disappearance, that she will never know where her husband is, or whether he is dead or alive. Some days she thinks he is dead; other days she thinks he started a new life somewhere else. It goes like that, back and forth. She wonders when it will be over. Never? All she knows for sure is this: She is not waiting anymore for him to come back. She is finally moving forward with her life despite not knowing.
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Notes
- 1.
Family Relations (April 2007), 56(2).
- 2.
Bonanno defined resilience as “the ability of adults in otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, such as the death of a close relation or a violent or life-threatening situation, to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning” (2004, p. 20). Bonanno (2004) confirms Walsh’s earlier (1998) premise that resilience is more than the absence of psychopathology. Even during times of adversity, it means continuous healthy functioning with regenerative growth and positive emotions (Bonanno et al. 2001).
- 3.
The focus on pathology was perhaps influenced by Bowlby (1980), who saw positive emotion after loss as denial. Previous researchers found that 65% of self-identified grief therapists believed that the absence of grieving was pathological (Middleton, Moylan, Raphael, Burnett, & Martinek, 1993; Osterweis, Solomon, Green, & Institute of Medicine, Committee for the Study of Health Consequences of the Stress of Bereavement, 1984). The update is this: There is no basis for the assumption that the absence of grief is pathological or that its absence is always followed by delayed grief reactions. In fact, there is solid evidence that resilience to loss is enhanced by positive emotion (Bonanno, 2004; Bonnano & Keltner, 1997; Wortman & Silver, 1989). What these researchers found, however, is that those who did well after loss were ready to accept the death, believed in a just world (Boss, 2002), and had instrumental support. Although immediately after loss, there were some emotional pangs, intrusive thoughts, and ruminations, they did not, in resilient people, endure or interfere with daily functioning and affect (Bonanno, 2004; Bonanno, Wortman, & Nesse, 2004). What this tells us is that Bowlby was wrong. Some people—resilient people—experience loss and trauma without disabling negative emotions.
- 4.
The capacity of rituals to express powerful contradictions simultaneously makes them especially relevant to the mourning process (Imber-Black, 2004).
- 5.
For more on this topic, please see Chap. 26.
- 6.
This was evident for families of the missing after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the South Asian tsunami, and more recently in East Timor and Nepal as discovered by field workers for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (Bhawan & Baneshwor, 2009; International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 2010; Robins, 2010).
- 7.
This shift to a resilience focus continues today with a research emphasis on assets, compensatory factors, protective factors, and competence in developmental tasks (Wright & Masten, 2005). Contemporary psychologists have studied how people stay resilient across the life span with risk factors such as poverty, homelessness, divorce, physical illness, and mental illness (Cowan, 1991; Hauser, 1999; Hauser, DiPlacido, Jacobson, Willet, & Cole, 1993; Masten, 2001). For example, in Hauser’s (1999) longitudinal study of clinical and nonclinical adolescents (now mature adults), he found that attributing a positive meaning to the earlier experience of institutionalization accounted for the adult health and resilience.
- 8.
Family Relations, April 2007, 56(2).
- 9.
Although therapies that build resilience can be called “strength-based approaches,” they are not synonymous with solution-focused therapies.
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Boss, P. (2013). Resilience as Tolerance for Ambiguity. In: Becvar, D. (eds) Handbook of Family Resilience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3917-2_17
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