At Affordable Relationship Counseling in San Diego, CA, Dr. Barbara Cunningham offers a resiliency or strength-based approach to counseling, whether she is treating individuals, couples, and marital partners. She views challenges as a natural and an expected part of what it means to live a life. When we expect life to be nothing but rainbows, smooth seas, and laughter, we set ourselves up for bitter disappointment. Life is a fabric, a woven tapestry of good with bad, difficult with easy, happy with sad, sickness and health. Having realistic expectations going in to life transitions, such as marriage, parenting, and career changes, is part of the ability to function well. Some people become so paralyzed by change, transitions, and challenges that they never move forward–they are frozen in whatever place they were emotionally before the onset of the change, transition, or challenge. Others merely “get through it.” And then there are those who seem to thrive and prosper as they sail from navigating stormy sea after stormy sea. Who are these thrivers and how did they get that way? Differences in the way one thinks about life and the way one lives in one’s relationships can make one’s life look very different. How we think about things affects how things come out in many cases.
So what about those people who thrive as opposed to merely surviving through their life challenges? Wolin and Wolin (1993) discuss such resilient people in their book entitled THE RESILIENT SELF: HOW SURVIVORS OF TROUBLED FAMILIES RISE ABOUT ADVERSITY.
