Improving Resilience during Catastrophic Situations - Essay Example

Improving Resilience during Catastrophic Situations Improving Resilience during Catastrophic Situations Resilience can be emotionally defined as the ability of adapting or recovering from crises or stressful situations such as a disaster. The people adopting the resilient mechanism have the capability of adapting to any catastrophic situation with less or no impact. This is compared to people with less or no resilient behaviors since they experience hard time through stress or change of life styles including major or minor effects. Several research studies have found that the individuals with ability to manage minor stress are also capable of handling major crisis affecting their lives. The catastrophic situations includes the events or activities that causes harm, ruin the financial or physical stability of the person, among other issues that results to stressful or traumatic aspect in the person’s emotions. Therefore, the resilience is beneficial to the day today living of the people as well as the major catastrophes that may occur. However, this research paper aims at discussing the various ways or strategies of improving the resilience among the people, in reflection to the catastrophic situation that I previously experienced. This is important to the societal life of people since they adopt the strategic techniques of avoiding the negative impacts such as stress related disorders. There are several factors that influence resilience in the societal livelihood. They include physical and emotional resilience that at some point relate to some traits born in a person. Some people are naturally unaware of surprises or changes in their lives, which can be observed in tends and infancies that one experiences in becoming stable in life. Everybody encounters hardships that challenge him or her in achieving the objectives in life that are stressful in formulating effective strategies to use. Moreover, an individual can control some factors such as the gender, exposure to trauma, and age, since they are related to emotional resilience. I personally involved in a road accident, but was lucky of not sustaining any injury. It was a stressful event that engulfed me emotionally. The best cure of such situation was the emotional recovery, especially attending the counseling centers. This is because one can try other mechanisms such as taking drugs or other consumables, but only manage to treat the affected person for a short time. The events that cause stress or other mental disorders need long time treatment in order to safeguard such event to be forgetful in personal memory. This has aroused the need for a natural treatment of adapting to catastrophic situations using the resilience strategies. The resilience strategies can be achieved in a slow mode until the affected person becomes more adaptable to the any catastrophic situations. This is to avoid the possibilities of sustaining the mental, physical, or social harm from the problems that can be solved by the individual. On my case, I could not use any other treatment approach since there were no physical injury but the accident caused the mental harm. I tried to recall what had happened, and developed fear to drive. My emotions on the road changed and one could observe there is something disturbing my life. This is because I was depressed by the event that made me to do abnormal things such as forgetting easily or having fear when driving on the particular road. According to the observations on the event, there are important characteristics that one needs to adopt in improving the resilience during the catastrophic situations such as the accident I experienced. The emotional resilience differs on its merit depending on the ability of the person in handling stress. Fortunately, the common characteristic that resilient people share during the traumatic events includes optimism, perseverance, and perspective, sense of humor, support, spirituality, emotional awareness, and personal control. On optimism, a person approaches any catastrophic situation in a positive emotion and believes on him or herself to use their own strengths. I had a problem since I approached the accident in a negative mood. In perseverance, an individual works towards achieving personal goals by adopting inner strategies of not giving up to any action, which helps one to continue coping with challenges. The avoidance of giving up is another strategy that one may adopt to improve the resilience during the occurrence of traumatic situation. It motivates a person in continuing with the struggling life without a pause or diversion of the streamlined framework of achieving the life objectives. The perspective trait helps a person to accept the challenges, especially on the mistakes done previously in order to allow an opportunity of making them stronger. This makes the victimized people to tackle the obstacle as challenges continuously, thereby becoming even stronger instead of becoming stressful and pressured. Moreover, the sense of humor makes the person to make the difficulties easier, by approaching them in fanatic mode or laughing at the challenges faced. It does not matter the difficulty of a situation, one approaches it in a favorable mood to express the confidence of success. Another strategic characteristic that one needs to adopt in become a good resilient person is support. One needs to understand the importance and value of support from societal platform and have the abilities of associating with supportive friends and family members. My social support simplified the task of tackling that problematic situation since the surrounding family members and friends assisted to counsel me. Such a technique of seeking assistance from surrounding friends minimizes the chances of developing mental disorders since one only need to share his or her problems with them. In this case, one needs to be free and open in sharing important information affecting the progress of his or her life. Sharing situational experiences with friends can also help them in becoming aware of encountering with such problems in similar situations, thereby becoming armed on the strategies used to be successful. The other characteristic of becoming a good resilient individual is the emotional awareness where every person needs to understand his or her feeling and the reasons behind their emotions. For example, if the financial constraints make a person to have sleepless nights, then one needs to start seeking the ways to solve the issue or adopt other mechanisms to settle the matter or adapt to the situation. The strategies might include cutting the budget or seeking other financial sources to safe the situation. The personal control is where a person believes on controlling their own personal matters and become independent from external forces. This sense of believe motivates an individual in tackling the obstacles that he or she encounters in achieving the life objectives. Therefore, having a personal attribute of courage and strength to solve a problematic situation improves the resilience during the catastrophic situation. This is because a person perceives the situation as his or her responsibility of meeting challenges in the daily hustle. Another way to improve resilience during catastrophic situations is developing the right attitude, where an individual respond to life’s challenges with actions. This helps them to avoid fear, blame, becoming mentality victim, or feeling pity by developing the positive talking techniques. As discussed by Schaffer (2000), one can also improve resilience by becoming self-motivated of being strong and having hopes of becoming even stronger in future. Moreover, exercising to become resilience has been correlated to its stronger levels, especially for the health benefits or due to emotional impacts. The habit of conducting a regular exercise is also beneficial to the lifestyle of an individual since one can adopt the various ways to cope with any situation that may occur. In other words, exercising provides a person with a practical experience of tackling any impending situation, as it offers a clear scope of what might happen in a particular occurrence. Unfortunately, the notion of becoming resilient does not eliminate the scope of experiencing pain and stress in life, but helps in solving and recovering the problems if they occur or become prepared in case they arouse. The occurrence of catastrophic situation causes people to feel sad, grief, and other emotions after loss and adversity. However, the effort to improve the resilience lies in a fundamental framework that deals with effects and emotions of pain and stressful events. In this case, one need to adopt the ability to manage strong impulses and feeling that may cause the occurrence of negative events such as war, committing suicide, job acquittal, or marriage break up, among other related impacts. Good resilient person can avoid such impacts since he or she could manage the impulse feelings such as anger or lack of self-control. Another strategy that one needs to adopt in improving the resilience is becoming flexible and compliant to the existing situation. One needs to adapt to the situational conditions by rapidly adjusting the usual norms for conformity to the changed environment (Gonzales, 2011). Some situations can force an individual to comply with the conditions, especially if a person makes it complex to change according to the situation. For example, if the drought engulfs a community, a person needs to adapt to the current situation by eating the available food. Otherwise, a person can die waiting for the usual meals or the favorite food, thereby one need to be flexible in such circumstances and move on with life. Creativity is another way people can improve resilience during catastrophic situation. Creativity is the development of new and innovative ideas that helps to solve the underlying issue. It helps in formulating helpful mechanism to alienate a person from any problematic situation including the psychological disorders. The talent of developing creative ideas arms a person with techniques of approaching a particular situation if it occurs. This assists in adopting systematic or organized methodologies of reconciling the behavioral attitudes, beliefs, and psychological cohesion of the person in any catastrophic situation. Another way of improving the resilience is by having the strong role models in life. The mentorship for a person is crucial in improving the resilience since it determines the way a person develops his or her traits. Having the strong mentor helps a person to develop a strong sense of belonging and feelings, which makes a person to have courage in life. In this case, a person feels stronger even if several issues in life engulf him or her. However, this strategy aims at changing one character of feeling insecure because of life challenges to becoming stronger and confident in tackling every hindrance. The notion of feeling safe also helps a person to improve resilience during problematic situation. Such strategy helped me not to give up in facing other challenges when driving since there is a sense of security, which motivates one to adapt to the occurred situation. The safety feelings can also improved by having secure friends, shelter, and safe food consumptions. This aspect makes the person stronger in terms of safety, thereby risking every fruitful activity in order to achieve the life goals. The society also needs to adopt situational preparedness, especially by keeping a forecast on the trends of events happening in the current world (Gasparini et al., 2012). For example, there are greater possibilities of forecasting the outcome of political war after political competitions, which can lead to armed conflicts, mass displacements and murders. Famine can also be predicted after the rain fails to fall in the agricultural regions. Such predictions can give the people the time to prepare themselves in order to be psychologically aware, although there some other traumatic events with no indication to happen. They include earthquake, floods, terror attacks, or hijackings among others. Fortunately, there are several policies and agencies adopted around the global boundaries that provide relevant precautions to be taken in order to avoid such catastrophic situations. The ability to assist others also improves the resilience aspect of an individual. This is because it helps one to adopt other traits such as forgiveness, friendliness, and trust among the associating individuals. Such associations improve the societal maturity of the person, as the interacting folks share creative ideas on problem solving skills. Moreover, the involvement in social interactions also ensure the personal competitiveness that makes the victimized people to think critically in simplistic and experienced interpretations for self-protection (Garbarino, 1999). The prompt response to any events is a tactic that can be adopted by people in improving the resilience during the catastrophic situations. One needs to have the knowledge of disaster management, especially when one is at risky situation. There is need for such individuals to have the ability of rapid response in the best way possible to avoid the arousal of bad feelings or attitude that can cause the mental harm. According to the Engle et al. (1996), the displaced disabled people are more likely to die, as compared to the able ones. This is because they were left behind when their families flee their villages, resulting to desperation, hunger, or attack by enemies. In this case, it gives a clear notion that rapid response is important in solving a harmful situation, especially in formulating the mental or physical solutions. In order to improve the resilience among the people, the society needs to refrain from family negligence, community discrimination, age discrimination, gender and economic discrimination, racism, tribalism, and political oppressions. Such factors contribute to the psychological and mental feelings towards the affected person, thereby making it hard for improvement of resilience. Instead, it adds stress to the victimized people in the efforts of imagining their future life, especially if a catastrophic situation occurs. The significance of personal relationships also plays an important role in shaping the resilience capabilities because they ensure the social approval, peer friendship, and acceptance in the community at large. This is through the vital factors that structure the well-being of an individual that makes them experienced to adversity since they are much mediated by their exposure to the social world. The level of experience gained from the exposure into social world is mostly strengthened by the constraints encountered in the social networks (Mann, 2001). Therefore, the exposure of people to the social metrics creates a sense of informing the individuals on the best ways of reacting to the problematic situations. In other words, a person is capable of gaining the response tactics from other people through sharing of ideas in the social world such as meeting rooms, counseling centers, and in competitions such as sports, among others (Clough & Strycharczyk, 2012). In competitions such as sports or exams, the activities involved help the participants to sharpen their skills in approaching the difficulty situations at ease and in systematic manner. Another way of improving resilience during the problematic situation is training people in becoming resilient and copes to painful and unpredictable events. In some communities, people are encouraged to participate in activities that cause moderate or no risk to safety or health with an aim of gaining physical strength, discipline, confidence, and endurance. This is because the resilience is not only important to sickness, health, or behavioral reactions, but also to the values and beliefs across the cultural diversities. In other words, the resilience can help maintain the behavioral and cultural discipline of the people by improving the strength of cultural practices. Similarly, the religion affiliations provide a spiritual mentorship that guides the individual on how to act in reaction to a catastrophic event. It gives the prohibitive aspects such as policies or theoretical guidelines, which criminalizes some actions resulting from anger or related reactions. In other words, the religion also plays an important part in determining the activities done by person affected in a catastrophic situation. Therefore, redefinition of such theological guidelines can assist in improving the resilience of a person in a catastrophic situation. In conclusion, improving resilience during catastrophic situations can help reduce the patients being affected by mental disorders. However, this paper has discussed the best ways to improve the resilience in problematic situations in reflection of the road accident that I experienced. They include spirituality, optimism, seeking social support, perseverance, and internal locust of control. Others include sense of humor, perspectives, equality, and ability to respond rapidly to traumatic events. Assisting others is also a fundamental contribution to improvement of resilience, as well as using personal relationships and creativity. In addition, the situational preparedness and becoming flexible or compliant to situational changes also improve the individual’s resilience. References Clough, P., & Strycharczyk, D. (2012).Developing Mental Toughness Improving Performance, Wellbeing and Positive Behaviour in Others. London: Kogan Page. Engle, P., Castle, S., & Menon, P. (1996). Child development: Vulnerability and resilience. Social Science and Medicine, 43(5), 621–635. Garbarino, J. (1999). What children can tell us about the trauma of forced migration. Seminar presented at the Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford. Gasparini, P., Manfredi, G., & Zschau, J. (2011). Earthquake early warning as a tool for improving society’s resilience and crisis response. Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, 31(2), 267-270. Gonzales, L. (2012). Surviving survival: the art and science of resilience. New York: W.W. Norton. Mann, G. (2001). Networks of support: A literature review of care issues for separated children. Stockholm: Save the Children Sweden. Schaffer, H. R. (2000). The early experience assumption: Past, present, and future. International Journal of Behavioural Development, 24(1), 5–14. Read More