I recently attended a Mental Health Update workshop entitled: Uncovering Strengths and Building Resilience with CBT: A four Step Model. I wasn’t sure what to expect as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is not an area I have worked in. I think the workshop description outlines it better than I could:
Resilient people face and manage positive and negative life events. They persist in the face of obstacles and when necessary, accept circumstances that cannot be changed. Resilience provides a buffer to protect us from psychological and physical health consequences during difficult times. Clearly, resilience is a desirable quality and yet all of us experience fluctuations in resiliency throughout our lifetime. Some people never develop resilience. Others are quite resilience but don’t recognise it; they may avoid challenges they could easily surmount. Sometimes resilience is worn down by multiple stressors and challenges.
As with a lot of psychology it seems very obvious when people say it, but it is not until it is clearly thought through and stylishly presented that it really does seem like something anyone could have said. That is exactly what happened during this workshop. The approach covered integrated knowledge from resilience research and traditional CBT approaches. If this is an area you practice in I would recommend Christine Padesky book (and if it’s run again the workshop), as it was clearly delivered, making it appear simple to apply the developed models. I will definitely be feeding and sharing the references and resources with my clinical psychology colleagues. This may not be an approach we use, but as with all good ideas their are elements that I am sure I can and will use, especially in designing future research projects.