Traumatic Incident Reduction Association

TIRA eNotes – June 2020 (No. 22)

Resilience in the Face of Extraordinary Challenge

by Marian Volkman

Human beings demonstrate resilience, especially when called upon to do so in challenging times.  Though we may not always feel resilient, we are probably doing better than we think.

Rebecca Solnit, writing in The Guardian Weekly, puts it this way:

As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive.  It was, I suspected, because  we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from an illness, pregnant, or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is growing, healing, making, transforming and laboring below the threshold of consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world. (April 24, 2020 North American Edition)

Let us by all means acknowledge ourselves and each other for this work, this effort. Meanwhile, we have the methods and techniques to ease the strains and make daily life better, which is to say, pleasanter, less painful, more fulfilling, and more livable.

Now more than ever, capable Traumatic Incident Reduction/Applied Metapsychology practitioners are needed to help with the strains of unprecedented experiences in people’s lives and online sessions are available.  Sessions do not change the outer world, but they can help us change our perspective on it and our experience of it.

We are no longer limited by geography.  Find a practitioner who works on line (and ideally is within a few time zones of you).  In this person-centered method, your goals, feelings and ideas are what count.  The work goes beyond reduction of worries and traumas to personal growth and enhancement of your resilience.

Training in Traumatic Incident Reduction and related techniques gives you the means to provide real help in a short term and effective manner. For best results, plan to take all three on the basic workshops:  the TIR Workshop (Level One), followed by TIR – Expanded Applications and the Life Stress Reduction Workshop.   It also gives you access to being able to trade sessions with another workshop graduate.  Now that TIR training is available online for the first time (Spring of 2020), it is more accessible to more people than ever before.

We know the saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.”  We might go on to say, “Nothing improves our resilience like being able to take effective action.”