Title : Transforming life crises. Building resilience and promoting posttraumatic growth in addiction and dependence
Abstract:
Individuals experience crisis when their estimation of resources needed to successfully manage traumatic situations such as addiction and dependency is greater than their perception of resources available. Some recovery models are limited in their perspective on enhanced outcomes, including posttraumatic growth (PTG), failing to put the individual in a position of strength and on the path to a positive, more meaningful future. Rehabilitation can be too general, failing to incorporate personal experiences of trauma into the therapeutic plan.
Recovery models must address these insufficiencies and promote an individual’s biological, epigenetic, psychological and spiritual abilities to transform and experience higher levels of functioning, including PTG, brought about by purposefully engaging with challenges, trauma and personal life crises such as addictions and dependencies. These conditions become vehicles, providing opportunities to build resilience, creatively restructure the self and find significant existential meaning.
A heuristic study revealed insights into advanced recovery. The results identified limitations of current rehabilitative models and informed the development of the unique recovery concept and process: metahabilitation. Research provides an overview and demonstrates the psychoeducational intervention as it applies to addiction and dependency.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- Supportive science provides neurological, genetic/epigenetic and psychological content to support compassion, resilience, and PTG of individual and vicarious trauma survivors.
- The presentation addresses specific issues associated with health care professionals and clinicians – those in high-risk careers as well as strategies and behaviors that support overall wellness and mental fitness.
- This presentation introduces and describes a simple but effective psycho-educational program (Metahabilitation/Metahab) to be implemented/utilized in conjunction with existing interventions to facilitate collaboration with clients, concentrating on internal capacity, strengths and past successes to support care and PTG.
- Use principles of self-efficacy to recognize resilience, individual strengths and PTG experiences helping to support and promote personal and professional wellness and mental fitness.
- Acquire knowledge and personal awareness of HOW one builds resilience, a productive recovery and PTG.
- Review a psycho-educational program that encourages individual, secondary and vicarious survivors to recognize what challenges, adversity and trauma did to them but, more importantly, what they did for them.
