The Forms of Resilience and their Role in People’s Response to

Risk Situations Associated to Terrorism

Lector univ. Ilie Sandina; assist. univ. Ilie Oana-Antonia

Considering resilience the process of successful adaptation to

hardships and the challenge of difficult life situations , the present paper
presents its forms: individual, social, political, focusing especially on the
individual psychological resilience with its five levels: maintaining
emotional , health and well-being state, concentration on the inner world :
abilities of solving the problems; concentration on the outer world: a strong
self; well-developed resilience abilities; talent of transforming bad fortune
into good luck.
Keywords: resilience, resilient personality, trauma, recovery

Starting from the necessity of putting together all of the aspects

specific to resilience, by considering the modality in which the
individual perceptions work in the case of a terrorist attack, Joseph
Henrotin [1] considers that the forms of resilience are:
-individual, understood as the human capacity of overcoming the
psychological trauma produced by an attack or another traumatic
event, with its derived forms (the affections of posttraumatic stress
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-PTSD)
-social, representing the capacity of a society in its ensemble, to
surpass the consequences of an attack and to accomplish the
conservation of culture without producing a state of negative
psychosis that would cause the taste and the satisfaction of victory
at the enemy
-political, that shows the capacity of a society of not
representing its sufferance on political ground and of not taking
part in a crisis of legitimacy sustained by an antipolitical feeling. In
Romania we can estimate that a terrorist attack in the socio-
political context of today’s world could generate a visible
development of the right extreme or of other antiromanian groups,
with most negative effects that are beyond our imagination.
Resilience, looked at through such perspective, surpasses in
many ways the human capacity of individually absorbing the
trauma caused by a terrorist event, and focuses on its
understanding as a central point of a strategy that has as a finality
the articulation of all state activity connected with the internal and
external security.
We can appreciate that resilience is the starting point but also the
final point of the individual and collective reaction at the action of
the factors with negative influence over the people. In figure no. 1,
resilience appears as an answer to the aggressity of external
threats; its capacity and level of function are given by a previous
preparation and a period of recovery.
The diversity of risks and threats pointing at the quality of
resilience can bring diversified answers that extend on a large
scale; this determining new and important transformation in what
the future of the system is concerned, changes regarding its
forming, growth, and consolidation.

Resilience

Prepara
tion Response Recovery
-

Risks

Fig.no.1. The Corelation between the quality of resilience and the action
of the agresion factors
 When you are confronted with an adversity or your life is
destroyed, how would you adjust to it? Some people feel
victimized and blame the others for what is happening to them.
Some stop, resign, feel hopeless and helpless. Others are angry,
loose their control and tend to hurt the close ones.
The few ones left, still, try by their own means to find a way to
adjust face to adversity, and sometimes they succeed to make
things go well. These are the best survivors, people endowed with
an extraordinary capacity to overcome the crisis and the extreme
situations. These are the resilient personalities, stable in stress
situations. They quickly restore their emotional balance, adapt and
overcome successfully the stressing situations which make them
stronger and even succeed to transform the bad fortune into good
luck.
Resilience, at the level of the structures of the health systems has
a specific content, an approach based on concepts as risk,
vulnerability and resilience, which implies the exploitation of the
studies on population groups and on issues as physical health and
mental health.
Enjoying a special attention in the health field, the psychology of
development is the one in charge with the handling of this concept,
by implying the official and unofficial services of violence
prevention.
According to Eurensaft and Tousignant the concept of resilience
represents a change of paradigm: we give up notions as risk,
vulnerability and psychopathology for concentrating our attention
on individual’s capacities and on the connections between him and
his group[2].
People overcome successfully the dramatic, traumatic, risky
situations of life with the condition to have a series of demands
assured: care and help from the others, positive thinking and
success expectancy, the opportunity of taking active part in
activities, positive relations with the people around, clear and
consequent rules of behavior, abilities to handle different life
situations, strong will and motivation for not giving up when faced
to dangerous obstacles and to demonstrate they have the strength to
overcome.
Resilience is essential in today’s world. At the work place, each
person feels the pressure of the necessity of working more at a
higher qualitative level, with a smaller budget. In personal life the
things change so fast that each one has to learn to face the
changes, to handle unexpected situations and to overcome the
adversities.
According to the American Association of Psychology,
resilience is “the process of adapting to adversity, trauma, tragedy
or when faced to significant sources of stress”[3]. Another
definition refers to “the quality which determines a system to come
back to the initial form or to the initial position after a mechanical
intervention or, the recovery from depression, disease, etc” [4].
The wheal of resilience made by N Henderson, fig.2, presents in a
specific order the important moments of the forming and
consolidation of the specific behavior of a resilient person.
If the first step is that of positive expectancies, the last step shows
the attitudinal side concretized by the opportunity of the resilient
person of taking active part in any situation, even a risk one.
The resilience is the process of successful adaptation to the
difficulties or provocations of life situations. The resilient people
overcome successfully the difficulties or the provocations of life’s
challenges. The resilient people overcome adversities reject the
pressions without registering dysfunction or inappropriate
behaviors. Most of the resilient people become stronger, more
confident, wiser and more adaptable as a result of coming through
dramatic situations. The answers differ from one person to the
other, and, also when they come from the same person in different
situations. There is the possibility to form and consolidate
resilience knowing that we are all born with a potential of
developing these abilities.
 Life
abilities
Care and
help from
others

Positive Clear rules of

expectancy behaviour

Opportunity of Positive
active relations with
participation people around

Fig no. 2 The Resilience Wheel ( After N. Henderson)

We can analyze the phenomenon of psychological resilience on

different levels, that target on the intensity and width of reality
perception to which we can response adequately.
The five levels of resilience are:
1. Maintaining emotional stability, of good health and of the well-
being state
2. Concentrating on the outer world; a strong sense of self
3. Concentrating on the inner world, a strong sense of self
4. Well developed resilience abilities
5. Talent of transforming bad fortune into good-luck
The first level is essential for maintaining our good health and
our energy level.
The second level refers to our concentration on the elements of
the outer world, on the provocations that we have to face, the
behavior of the people being based on the research and
identification of the problematic aspects of the given situations
more than on solving the emotional problems.
 The third level supposes concentrating on the inner world for
increasing our self-esteem and for developing a positive
conception on ourselves.
The fourth level covers the characteristics and the abilities that
we find at people with superior degrees of resilience.
The fifth level describes what happens if we reach high degrees
of resilience, respectively if the person has the ability of
transforming bad luck into good luck, which means valorizing the
good parts of a situation with apparently no way out.
While some people prove to be more resilient than the others we
can observe that resilience is a dynamic capacity that does not
always appear. In other words, individual resilience demonstrates a
permanent mobility, having in view the fact that less resilient
people have moments when they feel down and can’t adjust to
challenging life situations.
A few examples of resilient people are the following:
-Helen Keller (deaf and blind from birth, has demonstrated a
remarkable resilience and has learned to communicate and live
with passion);
-Nelson Mandela (after living in prison for more than 10 years he
became the president of his country)
-Aung San Suu Kyi (advocate of democracy in Myanmar whose
father has lived all his life under threat and in arrest for many
years)
-Anne Frank (a young Jew, who became famous for a personal
journal in which she has noted the events from the time she was
hiding away from the Jews. After that she was arrested and died in
a concentration camp.)
Many of the people with high resilience did not become famous.
Their lives were more or less characterized by actions, events, and
experiences that do not normally happen in a community.
Very important remains in this respect the action developed
during childhood, this becoming essential for achieving the
psychological support of resilience on the life long term of
everyone’s existence.
Bibliography:

[1]http://www.rmes.be/Resilience_et_antiterorisme_an_Belgique%
5B%5D%20(1=.pdf)
[2]http://autourdelaresilience.blo-gspot.com/2007/03/autor-de-la-
resilience-colloque
[3]The road to Resilience,American Psychological Association,
On-line Internet,www.apa.org
[4]Webster’s Desk Dictionary, Portland House, New York, 1990