Resiliency is one of the six therapeutic powers of play that contribute to increasing the personal strengths of clients – Charles Schaefer, Athena A. Drewes
According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to complex or challenging life experiences, primarily through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. In the book The Therapeutic Powers of Play, Charles Schaefer and Athena Drews list resilience as one of the 20 core agents of change in which play influences the desired change in the client. For personal reasons, resilience has influenced my career choice of working with children and their families.
Having been hospitalized at a young age, I faced and overcame many challenging experiences. Ultimately, I’ve always looked back on this time as one of personal and emotional growth, leading me to my first career choice of working with hospitalized children as a certified child life specialist. This negative experience became a positive one that produced emotional growth for me and one I always look back on when facing difficulties.
As a certified child life specialist, I worked with children facing similar situations and with the same fears. I taught them coping skills such as taking slow, deep breaths and thinking positive thoughts. I advocated for them while teaching the doctors how to perform invasive procedures while the child was comforted on their parent’s lap, and the child gained control by being given the choice to look or look away as the medical staff performed the needed procedure. This, in turn, gave the child the power they needed. I accompanied them to their medical procedures with chosen relaxing distractions while reminding them to use the coping skills they had learned. While we still heard cries in the room, with each procedure a child had to get, the cries dissipated. Reminders of how they got through the last procedure made it less scary each time and, in the end, made them emotionally stronger each time going forward.
As a Licensed Professional Counselor, I continue reinforcing resilience in my work with children and families. While not experiencing medical procedures, the children, adolescents, and families I work with are experiencing other life challenges. Teaching them to use coping skills and providing the support they need empowers them to turn negative experiences into positive growth-producing ones, and, in the process, resilience takes place.
