Resilience-Building in CBT

Some Initial Questions about Personal Strengths

Copyright © Donald Robertson, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Christine Padesky is one of the few CBT authors to have written specifically about the issue of psychological “resilience”.  The word “resilience”, in engineering terms, refers to the properties of a material which recovers its shape after being subjected to stress.  It comes from a Latin expression essentially meaning to “bounce back” or “spring back”.  However, resilience often involves a more gradual “return to form” for many people, a process of getting back on their feet after coping with acute or chronic adversity such as sudden trauma or prolonged stressful situations.  Resilience training often focuses on protecting the individual against being overwhelmed by future adversity by identifying and developing a repertoire of key strengths and strategies.  Padesky and her colleagues provide the following definition,

Resilience describes how people use their strengths to negotiate adversity. (Kuyken, Padesky & Dudley, 2009)

She emphasises that resilience has not been successfully reduced to a single trait.  However, researchers have identified a number of factors that appear to correlate with resilience and to be protective against future mental health problems in response to stressful life events, namely,

1. Intelligence
2. Problem-solving ability
3. Social skills
4. Good self-esteem
5. Supportive family relationships
6. Positive role models
7. Emotional self-regulation

Developing resilience, in Padesky’s approach, begins by considering the typical strengths that might make people resilient in different domains, rating oneself in terms of resilience in each domain, and using this information to begin consider opportunities for resilience-building.

Evaluating your Resilience

Think of three people (or at least one person) who you consider to be particularly resilient (role models).  Describe the key strengths that make them resilient in each of the domains below.

1. Cognitive (Attitudes)
2. Physical
3. Social
4. Behavioural (Skills)
5. Emotional
6. Moral/Spiritual

Now consider three occasions (or at least one) when you’ve demonstrated resilience in the face of challenges. Describe the strengths that made you resilient in each of the domains above.

What other strengths might someone possess in each of the domains above that could contribute to resilience?

Now rate (0-100%) how resilient you currently consider yourself to be in relation to each of these domains.

For each domain, list your reasons for rating yourself higher than 0%.  What specific strengths do you possess?

For each domain, describe how you could realistically increase your resilience closer to 100%.

Develop a realistic plan for building your resilience based on the information above.  What would be the first step?

Developing your Resilience Strategies

Similarly, Padesky refers to the process of constructing a “Personal Model of Resilience” (PMR), which consists of the following steps.

1. What have you achieved already?  Identify a specific area where you’ve already been successful in life, i.e., a problem you’ve solved.
2. What did you have to overcome?  Make a list of specific obstacles, challenges, or setbacks that were overcome by you in solving that problem and achieving your goal succesfully.
3. Specifically, how did you do that?  Identify the specific tactics (including thoughts, actions, and feelings) that helped you to overcome those obstacles and achieve success, describe them in sufficient detail to replicate.
4. What was your main strategy?  Summarise the key resilience strategies employed in a few short phrases.
5. Does that work in other areas?  How can you test whether these strategies also work in relation to currently existing problems?

Further resilience strategies can be identified by considering the range of approaches used by other people in similar situations.