Latest / Wellness in Today's World / Ep. 15: Beyond Grit: A New Framework for Resilience
Transcript
- 0:05Welcome to "Wellness in Today's World," the podcast that we talk about psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
- 0:13I'm your host, Debra Kawahara, and with each episode, we have thoughtful conversations about what it really means to live well.
- 0:21Today, I'm joined by Dr.
- 0:23Sherry Hamby, a globally recognized authority on victimization and trauma, who is best known for her work in polyvictimization,
- 0:32resilience, and violence measurement.
- 0:35She is also founder and co-chair of ResilienceCon, a conference that focuses on resilience, and was founding editor of the APA journal, "Psychology of Violence." Drawing
- 0:48on more than her 30 years of studying trauma and resilience, her book, "Stronger Than You Think: Building Lifelong Resilience," will soon be released in May of 2026,
- 1:01and she is here to talk about her work.
- 1:03Welcome, Sherry!
- 1:04I'm so pleased to have you here.
- 1:07Oh, thank you, Debra.
- 1:08I'm so delighted to have gotten your invitation.
- 1:10I'm just so excited that you're here and let's just get started.
- 1:15One of the things that I'd like to do is kind of have you talk about your journey as a psychologist, as a researcher that started in victimization and then led you to
- 1:27resilience.
- 1:28So I'm going to hand it over to you.
- 1:30Yeah, sure.
- 1:31Thank you.
- 1:32So my journey started, I suppose, when I was really a fairly young child because I grew up in a home where both of my parents really struggled with alcoholism and depression.
- 1:45And it was a fairly chaotic family environment.
- 1:49And discovering psychology was really what probably in middle school maybe was a
- 1:54real revelation for me that there were people who worked on these issues and on these problems.
- 2:00And I wanted to be a psychologist from a fairly young age by the time I was 12 or 13 years old.
- 2:07That's what I was really looking to be.
- 2:10And I did get involved with studying victimization pretty soon; I did my dissertation on domestic violence.
- 2:19And I spent really
- 2:2120 years focusing on all different kinds of victimization and trauma, but mostly on rates and risk factors and negative consequences, fairly conventional violence research in that
- 2:35way.
- 2:35But really started to realize that that's not what people wanted to know.
- 2:41And that was part of how I started shifting to focusing more on resilience and healing and providing more
- 2:50information to people about what the pathways to recovery really are.
- 2:54So I know that now it has led you to looking really more specifically at resilience and I know you've created this Resilience Portfolio Model.
- 3:06Talk to me about what the Resilience Portfolio Model is and what components consist of it.
- 3:18In 2010, I went to a conference in Anchorage, Alaska that was run by this group called Family Wellness Warriors that mostly serves Alaskan Native people.
- 3:28They brought me in because they were looking to do a program evaluation and wanted to write some grants.
- 3:34They wanted me to come and see the program.
- 3:36And I really thought that it was going to be like most of the prog- I mean, at that point, I'd been to dozens of these kinds of things.
- 3:42And a lot of them are kind of like school where there's just a lot of lessons about "violence is bad" and, you know, and suggestions and tips for various things.
- 3:53But this one was quite different from that.
- 3:56And it included some small group meetings where we really got into very...
- 4:01I mean, it was just basically like group therapy.
- 4:03It was just hours of group therapy, like alternating between these big sessions where there was just eight of us in this room.
- 4:11And one of the last days of the group, there was this list of adjectives; some of them were supposed to represent surviving or people who were still really caught up in their
- 4:24trauma and "just getting by." That was the term that they used in this program.
- 4:28And then the other
- 4:29list was supposed to represent revival and the people who had basically overcome trauma or were resilient in the language that I might use now.
- 4:41And each of the lists was pairs.
- 4:43So on the bad list, there was "numb" and then the good alternative to that was to be "responsive." And then on the bad list, there was
- 4:52you know, "overly busy" and "controlling," and on the good list, there was "healthy boundaries." So I'm going down the list and I'm sort of nodding through all of it.
- 5:02Near the bottom of the list, there's "vulnerable" and "self-protected" as a set of words on this list.
- 5:09But I thought that they'd got them backwards because they had "vulnerable" on the good list and "self-protected" on the bad list.
- 5:17And so like a lot of people who are children of alcoholics,
- 5:21that sort of emotional toughness is a real comfort space for me; was pretty adultified as a child.
- 5:27I am very happy telling everybody I'm fine and I don't need anything like that's a very comfortable thing for me to say.
- 5:34And I told them.
- 5:35I said, "You know, it just seems backwards to me." Because we'd really- we wouldn't have necessarily admitted that to anybody, but we'd gotten to know each other.
- 5:42And they really thought that was
- 5:44funny in this sort of loving way of people being on a healing journey together.
- 5:49But it was one of the things that really changed my thinking because I suppose if you had asked me at that time, "Is resilience just about toughness and grit?" If you just asked me
- 6:01that directly, I'd probably have said, "No, well, it's got to be other things too." But I think deeper in my
- 6:07subconscious that I still really thought of it that way.
- 6:10And of course, we really talk about it that way in so many spaces.
- 6:14And that was really what sparked us to develop this Resilience Portfolio Model, and to try to make a clearer and firmer rejection of these old ways of thinking about resilience as
- 6:28toughness or grit or invulnerability.
- 6:31I mean, a lot of stuff you saw in like 20th century research on it.
- 6:35And
- 6:35recognizing more explicitly that it involves a lot of different kinds of assets and resources, including, of course, being willing to be vulnerable and ask for help when you
- 6:45need it.
- 6:46You know, you kind of talked about this conference kind of being that point that kind of led you to this.
- 6:54Given there's been a long kind of history of resilience and how it's been defined; as now you're doing this area of research and this area of expertise.
- 7:10If you were going to put it in everyday language, how would you describe resilience?
- 7:15I think resilience- and most theorists in this field now don't use a personality or individual based model of it.
- 7:25They've almost all moved to a more process-oriented approach.
- 7:29So I would define resilience as the process of harnessing enough assets and resources so that you can overcome trauma, that you can get to a place of thriving even if you've been
- 7:41exposed to trauma.
- 7:43And there were threads of that going back for a long time.
- 7:46Like Suniya Luthar, for example, talked about social support and resilience many decades ago now.
- 7:54But there has been this other thread where there really has been this focus.
- 7:59And unfortunately, if you look at a lot of the measures that are out there for people who do surveys or clinical assessments or things like that,
- 8:08a lot of them are just all about determination, toughness, perseverance, and they're very individualistic.
- 8:15And even within individual traits, they're just all focusing on this very narrow aspect of the ability to self-regulate and not even thinking about other kinds of individual traits
- 8:26like meaning-making that might be involved.
- 8:29You talk about meaning-making and I know that this Resilience Portfolio has four components.
- 8:35Would you mind sharing the four components and kind of describing each one of them for our listeners that might not know about your Resilience Portfolio Model?
- 8:45Sure.
- 8:46So the first component is meaning-making, as you just said.
- 8:50And what we mean by that is connecting to something larger than yourself.
- 8:54Could be a mission like my mission to help reduce the global burden of trauma.
- 9:00Could be a role like parent or teacher.
- 9:03Or it could be a set of beliefs, whether it's spiritual beliefs or cultural beliefs that help you understand your place in the world and how you're contributing to it.
- 9:14And we have found that that is really an essential element of resilience.
- 9:19Then there's also interpersonal strengths, which do include social support from other people, but also all kinds of things about your network, your loving relationships, the
- 9:33time you spend with loved ones.
- 9:35We try to look beyond just family and friends and recognize the role of professionals, whether that's a therapist or another type of healthcare provider, or librarians even, or
- 9:46forest rangers.
- 9:48I mean, really there's just lots of people who contribute to it.
- 9:51There's the environmental domain; that one we have recently added.
- 9:56It took us a long time to sort of look beyond our
- 10:00standard psychology lens and realize the role of the natural and built environment, but we are increasingly realizing how essential regular contact with nature is to sustaining our
- 10:12well-being.
- 10:13To come back to the issue of regulation, we do have that as a component too.
- 10:18And we certainly do think that learning how to manage your emotions and thoughts and behaviors is an important part of living a good life.
- 10:27But we have a little bit broader basket of what we think are the important regulatory strengths than you would see in some of the older measures or models.
- 10:37So we do include things like one of my favorites is positive emotion regulation, which is basically just the ability to cheer yourself up.
- 10:46It seems like you have widened it with these four dimensions, and to me it really is looking at, like you said, assets, resources, strengths.
- 10:58How would someone apply, or do you have a real life example of applying the...
- 11:05I'm gonna say RPM, it's shorthand for Resilience Portfolio Model.
- 11:10Do you have examples of how RPM has been kind of applied to real life in the community or in mental health?
- 11:19Sure.
- 11:20There is an organization in Sarasota, Florida, called Resilient Retreat.
- 11:27And it was founded by a former student of one of my key collaborators, Vicki Banyard, who is at Rutgers.
- 11:36Her name is Sydney Turner, the former student.
- 11:39And they have developed this whole organization based on their Resilience Portfolio Model.
- 11:46They're a nonprofit and they offer free services to anybody who wants them.
- 11:53And they especially make a very concerted effort to serve the first responder community.
- 11:58They work with a lot of healthcare providers, firefighters, military personnel, people like that.
- 12:05They
- 12:05intentionally make sure that they're covering all four of the domains and the services that they're offering in their program.
- 12:12So they offer a lot of journaling and narrative work, for example, to help with the meaning-making.
- 12:17They have a lot of what I call breath and body work.
- 12:21So it's mindfulness, yoga, exercise, anything like that for regulatory strengths.
- 12:27Because as we know, you can't just
- 12:30directly control your emotions.
- 12:32You can't just say, "I'm going to stop feeling sad now," or "I'm going to stop feeling mad now." That doesn't work.
- 12:38So you have to go about that a little bit more indirect way.
- 12:41Definitely the evidence points that the best way to do that is to practice some form of breath and body work.
- 12:48Probably doesn't matter that much, which kind it is, but something like mindfulness or yoga or exercise.
- 12:54They also run a lot of forest bathing and similar kinds of nature-based interventions.
- 12:59They provide lots of opportunities for people to strengthen their relationships or they do gratitude practices.
- 13:07And it's all very intentionally careful about choosing evidence-based interventions that map onto each of these domains.
- 13:15And it's actually kind of surreal to go down there and hear all these people tossing around, meaning-making strengths and regulatory strengths and things like that.
- 13:24Like the first time I visited it, I was like a little blown away by that.
- 13:29But we are finding that there are other places.
- 13:32I have a former student who works for the VA and she's starting to apply it with veterans.
- 13:38I just read a paper of a
- 13:41team from Singapore who's applying it in their treatment with caregivers for family members with dementia.
- 13:48And so it is starting to get applied.
- 13:51But I think the key thing about all of those applications is that it provides a guideline to make sure that you are meeting a range of people's needs and not just always looking
- 14:03backward and giving people a safe space to share their trauma, which of course is a hugely, hugely important thing to offer.
- 14:10But it can't really, in and of itself, that doesn't get you to a good life.
- 14:15And so just thinking more intentionally about what these other pieces need to be.
- 14:19Yeah, I think one of the things that you talked about and as you were giving examples is it goes beyond the individual base.
- 14:27Like you're looking at environment, you're looking at what other resources or assets can they tap into beyond just kind of your individual skills or coping or whatever.
- 14:42And I think that's one of the strengths of this model.
- 14:45You talked about someone doing something in Singapore and it made me think, what would you say in terms of being able to utilize the model kind of globally?
- 14:56Because I know that has been something you talked about and that it lends itself to being more culturally responsive.
- 15:04Yes, thank you so much for asking that question because I think this is such an important point.
- 15:10You know, early work in psychology, not just in resilience, but in other areas of personality research, for example, you know very well, often went with...
- 15:21I'm trying to think about the nice way to say it, but they were trying, you know, but they just thought there was gonna be these one size fits all,
- 15:28Universal facts, universal ways that we all, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
- 15:36And that has been very much true in resilience too, because they only think that the only thing you need for resilience is toughness or grit, which obviously is pretty culturally
- 15:46congruent with individualistic mainstream society in the US and much of the rest of the global north, but it is not typical of many societies around the world.
- 15:59So this has been an important goal of ours.
- 16:02And so far we have collected data in 10 different countries.
- 16:08We are making a real, well, I mean, I wasn't on that team for that Singapore project, for example, but like my lab has collected data in 10 different countries.
- 16:17And we have sponsored work through having some special issues where we are encouraging people from other
- 16:26places and there's going to be a number of countries represented in a special issue on multidimensional approaches to resilience we've got coming out in "Psychological Trauma"
- 16:36in a few months, which will add very much to that.
- 16:39But of course, people in different places, they have different assets and resources available to them.
- 16:47They have different values about what kinds of personal characteristics are more and less important.
- 16:53And there are just so many different pathways to healing.
- 16:57I think it's a very exciting prospect to learn more about all of these pathways to healing.
- 17:04And it's really remarkable that it's something that hasn't been studied more before now in psychology.
- 17:11I'll tell you, offer one example.
- 17:14I've done some work with Kaltrina Kelmendi in Kosovo.
- 17:19As you might know, Kosovo is a fairly young country.
- 17:23It's one of the countries from the former Yugoslavia and it only declared its independence in 2008.
- 17:29And when we started looking into resilience and how people are...
- 17:36they were pretty seriously bombed in the Kosovo war in the late nineties and how people are dealing with this in a post-conflict society.
- 17:45One factor that kept coming up was what we called "nationwide meaning-making." I visited there a couple of times and it's just amazing how often it will come up in casual
- 17:55conversation that they're all working together on this nation-making and nation-building project and it's giving people a sense of purpose.
- 18:03It gives them a sense of solidarity.
- 18:06You know, sometimes it's hard to think about meaning-making in collective ways, but I think it is a great example of collective meaning-making.
- 18:13And it's something that if you were in an older country like the United States or any older country that you're not going to see that in the same way.
- 18:24And so I think there's so many things we can learn about how these strengths manifest in different places by just
- 18:31pausing a little bit and exploring it and asking the questions.
- 18:35Yeah, as you were talking what it made me think about is intergenerational trauma and oftentimes how it is so important for the community to make meaning out of this trauma
- 18:48that the community had to endure.
- 18:51I mean, I'm thinking about the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans And how the redress and reparation process
- 19:01was a way that that community, when they got that apology from the government that this was wrong, this shouldn't have happened, how meaningful that was because it was something
- 19:13they couldn't make sense of, you know, having their rights taken away from them, even though they were citizens, you know?
- 19:21Yes, sure.
- 19:22It's obviously a terrible trauma and tragedy, but I do think we don't pay enough attention often to the processes of collective healing.
- 19:33But they can be so powerful and they have the opportunity to lift so many people up at once instead of this individual model of just working with one person or one family.
- 19:44And these more collective processes can be
- 19:49so incredibly powerful.
- 19:51Even self-care is talked about in terms of not at just the individual level, but maybe at the community level.
- 19:58So I think your model allows for that, and it's more robust in that way.
- 20:04So I wanted to kind of go back, because I know that people, if they're interested in the Resilience Portfolio, how would they
- 20:13go about kind of utilizing the framework or the model to then assess it like if they were working with an individual, family, community, what would it look like in practice?
- 20:25That's a great question.
- 20:30The book has several exercises on that, applied exercises.
- 20:32We have so far tested more than 60 different types of strengths across all of these four domains.
- 20:40For a long time, I really thought that what was going to be the challenge was narrowing that down to a manageable number that somebody might realistically work with in a therapy
- 20:50context or a school context, or even just for your personal life, because we can't all go and try to get better at 60 different things at once, right?
- 21:00But that actually turned out not to be the case.
- 21:03And in fact, probably 50 or so of those
- 21:07didn't turn out to be all that important in terms of the studies that we have done so far.
- 21:13We've done more than 16 studies, as I said, in 10 countries with more than 20,000 participants and qualitative studies, surveys.
- 21:24We've also done several larger scoping reviews so that we're trying to figure out other people's good ideas.
- 21:31And that really left us so far with this fairly small set of
- 21:36maybe six or seven strengths that we think seem to be the absolute most important ones for overcoming trauma.
- 21:44And so in the book, I just walk with people and invite them to think about it.
- 21:49So for example, in the meaning-making domain, thinking about things like sense of purpose and hope and their cultural traditions and practices and whether they have a spiritual or
- 22:02religious faith.
- 22:03And you don't have to have all of those.
- 22:06Again, thinking about it being more adaptable to different individuals or different communities, obviously we're all going to have different combinations of those, but
- 22:16helping people think about where they sort of stand across all those four things.
- 22:21And then that invites them to think maybe is meaning-making what I need more of in my life?
- 22:26And then there's also several exercises.
- 22:29So if you want to beef up your meaning-making, try these different journaling exercises or try getting involved with volunteering or mentoring or other things that we know develop
- 22:39meaning-making.
- 22:40And then for each of the domains, I sort of walk through the same thing and invite them to do that.
- 22:45And I think anybody can do that because we really miss a lot when we only focus on what the symptoms are.
- 22:53So if you take somebody who's depressed, for example, not all people are depressed for the same reasons.
- 22:58Somebody might be socially isolated.
- 23:02Another person might just feel alienated and lack meaning-making in their life.
- 23:07Somebody else might be really dysregulated.
- 23:11And of course there could be combinations of those.
- 23:14But I think sometimes we think that there's going to only be a treatment for a depression.
- 23:20I don't know if it gets always that way in practice, but when we talk about our models and we look at our manuals, it can be very one size fits all.
- 23:28And this gives them an opportunity to sort of start at the beginning of the process and go, here are the things that we know you need to have a little bit of each of.
- 23:39Where do you think you're strong?
- 23:40Where do you think you need beefing up?
- 23:43Maybe somebody who has depression has got really great family support, but another person doesn't.
- 23:50So trying to move forward in that way with a more customized approach to thinking about where they need to put their energies in terms of harnessing more assets and resources.
- 24:02You know, for those of you that are listening and may not be researchers, I'm going to kind of get technical in terms of measurement because I know that is something that you
- 24:13really have, you know, gained expertise in.
- 24:17And I know whenever we're doing research, for those of you that may not conduct research,
- 24:22it becomes difficult because concepts are messy when we start trying to figure out how are we going to measure this or how are we going to put it in a way that we can figure out
- 24:36what's going on.
- 24:38Because in real life things are complicated, they're complex, and we know that humans and behavior are very dynamic
- 24:50and looks different for everyone.
- 24:52What has been the hardest part about translating the model into something that you can then measure?
- 24:59Sure, yeah, that's a great question.
- 25:02Well, as I said before, I was involved more on the violence side of things for a long time.
- 25:07And I was really heavily involved on developing measures and surveys when I was doing that sort of work too.
- 25:15And of course, as
- 25:17academics are wont to do, we used to argue about measurement all the time in those fields.
- 25:23I mean, they still argue about measurement all the time.
- 25:26Like what's really domestic violence?
- 25:27What's really bullying?
- 25:29I mean, there's constantly arguing about that.
- 25:31I guess when I tried to shift into this strengths-based work, I was expecting it to be somewhat the same, but I have honestly found that it
- 25:43was quite a bit muddier.
- 25:44People argue about what bullying is and people argue about what domestic violence is and how you're supposed- the best way to measure it.
- 25:50But if you look at a bullying questionnaire, there's not going to be any questions on domestic violence on it.
- 25:55I mean, they all come at interactions between kids in different ways, but it is clearly like peer-on-peer aggression that they're focusing on.
- 26:04But if you go into the positive psychology world, and apologies to all the positive psychologists out there, this is my personal take on it.
- 26:12And you look at something like, well, especially like resilience, that are coping or emotion regulation.
- 26:20There is a lot of kitchen-sinking in a lot of those measures and they'll put coping items on the emotion regulation questionnaire and emotion regulation items on the coping
- 26:29questionnaire.
- 26:30You know, and then both of those are in the resilience questionnaires and then they'll run this study and they'll like, well, resilience is correlated with emotion regulation.
- 26:37And I'm like, you have almost identical items on both of these measures.
- 26:42So of course there's going to be a correlation because you've just basically asked the same question twice.
- 26:48We've spent a huge, huge amount of time and resources and personpower
- 26:54unpacking those concepts and doing a lot of qualitative work, a lot of interviews, a lot of focus groups, talking to people and trying to really understand what the boundaries
- 27:06around some of these things are.
- 27:08It's just been fun because I love doing that sort of work, but I had not gone into the nitty-gritty of that.
- 27:15I, of course, read some of that positive psychology work, but I hadn't really gone into the nitty-gritty of it before I started doing this resilience work and that has been a big
- 27:24surprise to me.
- 27:26Yeah, it sounds like the untangling of the different things, even though they're interrelated, which for those of you that don't know, correlated, that's essentially what
- 27:39it means.
- 27:40It just means that if it's a high correlation, it's highly related to each other.
- 27:45If it's low, they pretty much don't have anything to do with each other.
- 27:49So, but it sounds like the untangling sounds like,
- 27:53for lack of a better way of describing it, like a ball of yarn that's all tangled up and you're having to kind of undo it.
- 28:01Yes, and that has been a multi-step process and we have been revising our own measures, but we have a set now that we're feeling pretty happy with that we've put a lot of energy
- 28:14into.
- 28:15So if you were to look forward or I guess in the direction of resilience research, where would you say it's headed like five, 10 years from now?
- 28:26Where would you see it headed towards?
- 28:29My personal dream, if I had a magic wand, I would stop people from using these resilience measures that are just unspecified combinations of questions that are mostly about
- 28:43determination.
- 28:44Some of the resilience measures out there, they'll have like six questions on determination and grit, and then they'll have like
- 28:51two on social support and one on meaning-making or something like that.
- 28:56And these are these completely...
- 28:58I mean, it's basically a totally untested idea about what resilience takes, that resilience is seven parts regulation and two parts interpersonal and one part
- 29:08meaning-making, but that's not the right recipe.
- 29:11I can tell you, having done all of these studies now that that's the wrong recipe for resilience.
- 29:17So I really hope people will stop using measures like that and do a better job of breaking things down.
- 29:24And I also think that's so important for intervention considerations too, because you can't just tell people, "Well, you should be more resilient" and then not even really know
- 29:36what that means because you have this jumbled measure that is based on...
- 29:40But if instead you have a measure of meaning-making and even a measure of emotion regulation, you have a measure of social support,
- 29:46then it's so much easier to translate that into practice and go, "Your programs need to help people beef up these three things specifically." And when we already know a bunch of
- 29:58interventions that beef up those kinds of things.
- 30:00So I'm hoping that we're going to continue making progress on that.
- 30:05And also we're still excited.
- 30:07Like I said, we're trying to do a lot of global work and...
- 30:11I could just do it all day long, interview people and ask them about their journeys and what's helped them overcome.
- 30:17And unfortunately, I don't get to do that all day long, but I hope that we will also continue to do more listening to survivors.
- 30:27I'm absolutely convinced that there is tons of wisdom out there
- 30:33about what it takes to overcome trauma and all the different pathways that people might take to still end up in a good place.
- 30:41And we just really have barely started to tap into all of that wisdom that's sitting out there in our communities.
- 30:47As you were talking, it made me think, like, I know recently there's been some questions about science and research, and really, this is a tool that we use to figure out things.
- 31:02It's to help us know about things and know that we have some way instead of just throwing stuff together.
- 31:10And so I'm putting a plug in for our science and our research.
- 31:15And yeah, it's a process.
- 31:17We don't know everything, you know, and as we go, we learn more and more and more.
- 31:22And we learn about the things that maybe we thought were right, but then things kind of show us, oh no, we need to tweak this a little bit.
- 31:30And so I'm putting my plug in for science and research because it really does help us to understand things.
- 31:38Oh yeah, I will absolutely join you on that.
- 31:42There's no question and hopefully we will know a lot more about it in five or 10 years than we know now.
- 31:47The wonderful thing about science is that's almost surely going to come to pass.
- 31:52One of the main reasons I wrote the book is because we have learned so much about this in the last 10 or 15 years.
- 32:01It's always a challenge to get that kind of information out of the ivory tower and into the hands of people who can really use it.
- 32:10But I felt that we were at a place where we just know so much more than we do about compared to traditional cognitive behavioral therapies or things like that from the 20th
- 32:21century.
- 32:22Nobody really should be offering the kinds of things that I was taught when I was in graduate school in the eighties and nineties.
- 32:28Sure, they're better than nothing, but we can do a lot better than that.
- 32:33And I really am hoping that this book is going to help spread the word with that and help make people realize that even if you've been exposed to very high doses of trauma, that
- 32:45you can still put together the pieces of a good life.
- 32:47How hopeful is that?
- 32:49Now I know one of the projects that you have worked on is this ResilienceCon.
- 32:55You know, you're the founder, you're a co-chair.
- 32:59Kind of tell me, how did that evolve and become what it is today?
- 33:05You're asking me all these questions that are making me say bad things about our field.
- 33:12But if you really want to know the truth, Debra, I was just very frustrated with the conference experience because I feel like most conferences, they bring all of these great
- 33:28minds together and then...
- 33:31It hasn't changed in over a hundred years that there's, you know, we give these talks, there's almost no time for interaction.
- 33:39And then we just all go back home and I don't understand why conferences are set up that way when there are so many alternatives.
- 33:49And so I started off with just literally Googling "boring conferences" and "what to do about boring conferences."
- 33:59Thank
- 34:00I, I go to a lot of conferences and I, I just, I just feel like there could be so much more to them.
- 34:08And also there just didn't seem to be a space to present more strengths-based work.
- 34:14Of course, I go to a lot of conferences that are very oriented towards violence and trauma.
- 34:19And most of them, even today are still very oriented towards,
- 34:24like I said, the type of work I was doing earlier in my career; we're focusing on rates and risk factors like substance misuse and things like that and negative consequences.
- 34:36So PTSD or health consequences or depression or suicidality, all those kinds of things.
- 34:43And I wanted a space where we could really focus on healing and encourage people to
- 34:48put more protective factors in their measures and more positive outcomes in their measures.
- 34:54So thinking about wellbeing and not just the absence of symptoms.
- 34:58And also we've worked really hard to make it less boring and to make it more interactive.
- 35:05So we have a bunch of different formats for that.
- 35:10But one of the ones is, I don't know you've ever heard of PechaKucha, but we have something similar, we call it a 20 by 20,
- 35:18where the slides are on automatic advance.
- 35:21It's 20 slides on 20 second automatic advance.
- 35:25So you have to keep up with the slideshow instead of you clicking along.
- 35:29And that means that you really have to have your talk organized.
- 35:33You really have to be ready and you really have to think about exactly what it is you want to communicate.
- 35:39I personally, I love those.
- 35:41I think that they tend to produce much stronger presentations.
- 35:44I'm sure we've all
- 35:45sat in meetings or conferences or classrooms or other places where somebody launches into something and then they spend almost all the time on the very first thing they said they
- 35:57were going to cover and then rush through all the rest of it in the last five minutes.
- 36:01And so we have been working on ways to try to keep that from happening.
- 36:05I know that that's something that you have put your heart and soul into when bringing together people that are interested in resilience all together.
- 36:14you want to?
- 36:14love it.
- 36:15It's my favorite.
- 36:16I mean, I'm totally biased, of course, but it's my favorite conference of the year.
- 36:20I just always feel so refreshed and rejuvenated and so hopeful at the end of it.
- 36:25And it's a great experience.
- 36:27As we're ending, what would you say if you were sitting on the other side and listening to you, what would you say would be key takeaways that you would really want people to, after
- 36:41listening to this, that is really important in terms of resilience and the Resilience Portfolio Model?
- 36:48I think the key takeaway is that the good stuff counts more than the bad stuff.
- 36:55I've had quite a few different traumatic experiences over my lifespan.
- 37:00Like most of us, we now know that that's the norm and not the exception.
- 37:05But even if you've been exposed to quite a lot of trauma, you can still put together enough good things in your life that you can really
- 37:12achieve a state of well-being after.
- 37:15And of course, some of the most famous people in history, like someone like Nelson Mandela, have just been through terrible experiences and still really managed to overcome
- 37:27them.
- 37:28But what we're now learning, and there's so much research to support this, is that resilience is the most typical outcome after trauma and that
- 37:39any of us can get better at resilience.
- 37:41It's not something that you're either born with or you weren't born with.
- 37:45We can all get better at it.
- 37:47I still work on getting better at it.
- 37:49And if we keep working on getting better at it, that we can really overcome what's happened to us.
- 37:55I just, I really love the way that you put together that even with trauma in your life, and it can be even severe, you can still have a beautiful life.
- 38:06It takes work though.
- 38:07It takes work.
- 38:08It doesn't just come easy.
- 38:10It's right.
- 38:11It's not automatic for sure, but it is a lot more possible than I think we used to assume.
- 38:20You're not doomed because you were the victim of some terrible experience.
- 38:25It doesn't doom you.
- 38:26And that for me, I think what that core gives you is hope, that there's hope there for that beautiful life that you can work towards.
- 38:27Yeah.
- 38:38You know?
- 38:39Yeah.
- 38:40Well, I want to thank you so much for sharing your gift and your knowledge and your wisdom, Sherry.
- 38:48You know, I think we have been so fortunate
- 38:51to be able to learn from you.
- 38:54And so thank you for being here today.
- 38:57And for our listeners, I also want to thank you for being here today.
- 39:01And if today's episode was valuable and informative to you, please share it and let people know that we have this episode on here.
- 39:11And remember Dr.
- 39:13Hamby's book, "Stronger Than You Think." And remember:
- 39:17Wellness is a journey, not a destination.
- 39:20So please take care and we'll see you the next time.
- 39:23Thank you.