Roots and routes to resilience and its role in psychotherapy: a selective, attachment-informed review

ABSTRACT

Developmental research on resilience is summarised and illustrated with a case example. Self-reflection, positive relationships, and agency foster resilience in the face of adversity. Attachment and resilience are related categories. The different patterns of attachment – secure, insecure-organised and insecure-disorganised – are manifest in different patterns of resilience, depending on prevailing environmental conditions. However, the greater the environmental adversity, the less will the resilience factors emerge. Clients tend to present for psychotherapy when resilience strategies have failed. The therapeutic relationship has neurochemical and relational characteristic mirroring the secure mother–infant bond. These foster mentalising, stress innoculation, affect co-regulation, self-esteem, and agency, forming the basis for enduring and more flexible resilience strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• attachment
• psychotherapy
• psychoanalysis
• trauma

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Saman Tavakoli and his colleagues in the Iran Psychotherapy Association for inviting him to give a lecture at their conference on which this paper is based, also to two anonymous reviewers and the editor for very helpful and improving comments. Some of the material in this paper also appears in Holmes and Slade (2017). Its limitations of course rest entirely with the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Another “primitive” autodidact nature poet.

2. c.f. Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonias: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, /Stains the white radiance of Eternity” – that is, life is a specific set of “wavelengths,” in contrast to the chaotic amalgam of white light from which it arose, and to which it must return.

3. “Steeling” is a metaphor taken from material science: subjecting metals to minor stress or heat strengthens it.

4. A metaphor drawn from the sport of “bowls on ice” in which players “curl” the “chuck” by smoothing its passage over the ice, thereby ensuring greatest possible distance of travel.

5. A phenomenon, incidentally, also seen in plant species – “stony ground” leads to early seed-formation compared with those sewn on more fertile soil.

6. An issue over which psychoanalytic candidate John Bowlby and his supervisor Melanie Klein notoriously disagreed (Holmes, 2013).