PREVIOUS: Resilience #2
SITE: “7 of Everything – Qualities of the Soul”
ACoAs: As you read through all these lists of Resiliency characteristics & the background needed to provide them in the first place,
PLEASE remember to not use them to be discouraged or cause S-H.
Instead, let them be a road map to guide your growth.
The Recovery process gives us the opportunity to develop any that we’re weak in. We have survived, now let’s thrive!
RESILIENCE & TEMPERAMENT
A study with Australian family doctors examined the relationship between resilience (in R. & Traits) & personality, to identify the main qualities that promote or impair R. in relation to 7 characteristics.
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Researchers started from the idea that R. is a process influenced by each person’s combination of personal traits & their environment.
They found that Resilience is —
• • • strongly associated with a high level of Self-directedness & low level Harm Avoidance
• • moderately correlated with high Persistence & high Cooperativeness
• not significantly correlated with Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence & Self-Transcendence
IMP: The 2 most prominent beneficial traits are the complete opposite of how most ACoAs live. We function from:
🔺 High Harm-avoidance, spending much of our time & effort trying to avoid anything that could potentially cause an abandonment in any one of PMES ways – which includes suppressing our own emotions & needs
IRONY – we are also attracted to relationships which are harmful!
🔻 Low Self-directedness, which fuels our co-dependence, rather than being our own internal motivator.
PS : A recent study with a sample of Korean university students (Kim, Lee & Lee, 2013) examined the connection between Personality traits & Resilience. The most striking similarity to the Australian findings is that in both —> R. was strongly related to high Self-directedness, high Persistence, and low Harm Avoidance…..
And looking at male vs female differences, one surprise was that the Asian men in the sample were higher in Cooperativeness than the women, whereas in the West, it was the reverse. (CHART)
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Philosophical Questions
• Active vs Reactive : Do you mainly act from individual initiative OR usually from outside stimuli ?
• Freedom vs Determinism : Do you have control over your own behavior OR is it always caused by forces beyond your control?
• Heredity vs Environment : Is Personality determined largely by genetics & biology, OR by environment & experiences?
• Optimism vs Pessimism : Are you an integral part of changing your own personalities, OR is everything predetermined?
• Uniqueness vs Universality : Is each human an individual OR are we all similarity in nature ?
★ Ultimately we’re a combination of factors – nurture & nature.(Wikipedia)
DIMENSIONS of Personality (Human Science)
1. Consciousness = development & strength of self-awareness:
• Mental = re. ideas, ideals, plans & initiative – the capacity to think, analyze, understand & organize
• Physical = re. the body – fixed physical & material needs, & deals only with the here & now
• Vital = re. the centers of energy – emotions, sensations, desires & urges
2. Direction = whether the person’s attitudes, motives & actions positively or negatively impact the welfare of others & society (Holmes vs. Moriarty)
3. Values = what is most important or valuable to a person.
• Direction is a horizontal measure of good vs. bad
• Values are a vertical measure of higher vs. lower (selfless vs selfish)
4. Energy = the strength or intensity of personality which is very available to observation & experience, but extremely hard to define & measure (Napoleon vs. Gandhi)
5. Strength = difference in the size & intensity of personality, separate from a person’s physical or mental energy, as shown by an ability to influence people & affect their environment (Churchill, Hitler…)
6. Depth = Personality considered as onion layers, from surface behavior to inner depths, & noting how much the deeper layers are developed, or not
• Character – fixed qualities reflecting values that are fully organized, internalized & therefore subconscious
• Personality – capacity to expand oneself or take creative initiative – in spite of any limitations of basic character, brain ‘issues’, society or personal experiences.
• Individuality – core uniqueness, independent of social conditioning, personal experience or character
• Behavior – capacity for directed activities, based on conscious understanding & intensity of desire
• Manners – superficial, external forms of formalized responses, a subset of social or interpersonal skills
NEXT: Resilience #4
HEAL & GROW for ACoAs 