What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

This chapter examines the idea of post-traumatic wisdom, the different factors that contribute to it, and contexts that allow an individual to arrive at that wisdom.

In response to Winfrey’s question about whether children are naturally resilient, Perry explains the difference between resilience and malleability. Resilience is a property displayed by an object like a Nerf ball, where it regains its shape even after it has been squeezed or distorted in different ways. Resilience is not an automatic property of childhood, or even the human experience in general; irrespective of how one eventually adapts following a traumatic incident, no one ever attains the exact state one was in pre-trauma. Even if one’s behavior returns to what it used to be, a biological change has taken place on some level; for instance, the neuroendocrinal changes may leave one more likely to develop diabetes than they had been before. This is in line with the findings of the ACE study, which ultimately suggests that developmental adversity has an impact; it increases the likeliness of one developing certain health issues later in life. However, the extent of this impact, when the resulting health issue may arise, and the kind of buffering that may prevent it, are not predictable.