看到一篇英语文章，让我思考创伤对人们究竟产生什么样的影响？是就此自怨自艾，成为一名受害者的角色，觉得自己最可怜，不停诉说自己的痛苦还是把它当成学习和成长的资源？有所成就的人都会觉得自己是命运的主宰，而非环境。通过创伤正好能锻炼自己的韧性。也希望看到文章的亲们换一种从灾难或痛苦的认知方式，生命会呈现不同的色彩。能如那个小男孩一样。学会在暴风雨中跳舞。痛并快乐着。
译文：明尼苏达大学的发展心理学家诺曼·加西在他40年的研究中遇到了成千上万的孩子。一个九岁的男孩特别喜欢他。他有一个酗酒的母亲和一个缺席的父亲。但每天他都会带着笑容走进学校。他想确保“没有人会同情他，也没有人知道他母亲的无能。男孩表现出了一种被认为是“韧性”的品质。" "
复原力对心理学家来说是一个挑战。幸运地从未经历过任何逆境的人不知道自己有多有韧性。只有当他们面临障碍、压力和其他环境威胁时，他们的复原力或缺乏复原力才会显现出来。有的让步，有的征服。
garmezy的工作打开了一扇大门，让人们得以研究那些尽管面临挑战但仍能使一个人成功的因素。他的研究表明，有些因素与运气有关，但相当多的因素是心理因素，与孩子们对环境的反应有关。有弹性的孩子有心理学家所说的“内部控制中心”。“他们认为，影响他们成就的是他们，而不是他们所处的环境。有韧性的孩子把自己看作是自己命运的安排者。
乔治·博纳诺多年来一直在哥伦比亚大学师范学院研究韧性。他发现有些人在处理逆境方面比其他人好得多。这种差异可能来自于感知，他们认为一件事是创伤性的，或是学习和成长的机会。“压力”或“创伤”事件本身对生活结果的预测力不大。Bonanno说:“暴露于潜在的创伤事件并不能预测以后的功能。”。“只有在出现负面反应时，这才是预测性的。换句话说，生活在逆境中并不能保证你将来会遭受痛苦。
好消息是，积极的看法是可以传授的。博纳诺说:“我们或多或少会因为我们对事情的看法而受到伤害。”。在哥伦比亚大学的研究中，神经科学家凯文·奥其斯纳( Kevin Ochsner )指出，教导人们以不同的方式看待逆境——在最初的反应是消极的时候用积极的方式来重新构建逆境，或者在最初的反应是情绪“热”的时候用不那么情绪化的方式来重新构建逆境——改变了人们对逆境的体验和反应。
Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother’s incompetence.” The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as “resilience.”
Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity(逆境) won’t know how resilient they are. It’s only when they’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.
Garmezy’s work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual’s success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control (内控点).” They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.
George Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. “Stressful” or “traumatic” events themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” Bonanno said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward.
The good news is that positive perception can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways—to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.