Resilience and Self-concept

While there are many variables that contribute to risk and resilience of a client, maturity and self-concept are two important variables to consider. These two variables might be closely knit together when one considers self-concept as the beliefs one holds about themselves and their responses to their environment and socio-cultural norms. 

These beliefs directly influence how a person perceives themselves, their abilities, their characteristics, and behaviors. Maturity influences a client's self-concept in terms of allowing to be better aware of themselves and this may influence their concept of their active resilience (Rak & Patterson, 1996). Rak and Patterson (1996) found that resiliency in children lies in the capacity of those who are exposed to identifiable risk factors to overcome risk. For example, they can avoid negative outcomes such as delinquency and behavioral problems. Furthermore, Rak and Patterson explain that at-risk children who demonstrate the ability to be resilient may have encountered environmental stressors such as poverty, personal stress or family discord such as parental divorce or parental mental illnesses yet they remain resilient in the face of these barriers that can impact their psychological and social well-being (Rak & Patterson, 1996).  

As maturity might be less of a factor in children that have demonstrated resilience it may remain a factor with self-concept and learned resilience in adults. However, this idea reinstates that resilience is generally understood to be a subconscious trait and most literature approaches it from this perspective. Rutter (1987) explains that “literature attests to the importance of people’s concepts and feelings about themselves, their social environment, and their ability to deal with life’s challenges and to control what happens to them. These concepts and feelings are both cognitive and affective. The terms used to refer to them have included self-esteem, self-efficacy, internal working models of relationships, self-concept and learned helplessness.” Rutter (1987) posits that it is protective to have a well-established feeling of one’s own worth as a person. Bonanno (2004) states that “the importance of protective psychological factors in the prevention of illness is now well established.”

These variables are important to a client’s diagnosis because they can and should be related to criteria identified in the DSM-5. For example, the self-concept of a person is related to trait anxieties in which persons are characterized using dimensions of affective states. Affect is a term used to describe feelings and emotions in reactions to some stimuli (Reber & Reber, 2001). It is suggested that trait anxiety produces 'negative effect', and trait resilience promotes 'positive affect' (Benetti & Kambouropoulos, 2000). Thus, it is important to diagnose a person with low self-concept, because this variable contributes to several health problems including (a) depression, (b) substance addiction, (c) eating disorders, and (d) suicide ideation. Particularly in adolescence, lack of a positive self-concept contributes to personality disorders and maladaptive adjustment (Friedman, 2006).

To explain how self-concept as a variable might interact with one individual variable in development of psychopathology, we can examine the multiple pathways to resilience as explained by Bonanno (2004) as he explains that “resilience and recovery represent distinct trajectories that are informed by different coping habits” and he further posits that these habits can be “lack of social support, low intelligence and lack of education, family background prior psychiatric history and aspects of the trauma response itself such as dissociative reactions (Bonanno, 2004).” These variable interactions can provide the explanations for various levels of hardiness or self-enhancement in clients that have demonstrated resilience where others were not able to return to their regular equilibrium (Bonanno, 2004).

Reference

Benetti, C., & Kambouropoulos, N. (2006). Affect-regulated effects of trait anxiety and trait resilience on self-esteem. Personality and Individual Differences, 41(2), 341-352.

Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Friedman & Schustack, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2006). Personality: Classic theories and modern research Boston: Pearson.

Rak, C. F., & Patterson, L. E. (1996). Promoting resilience in at-risk children. Journal of Counseling and Development: JCD, 74(4), 368.

Reber, A. S., & Emily Reber (2001). The penguin dictionary of psychology (3rd ed.). New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press.

Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 316.