Memory matters: how recall can build resilience.

Abstract

Who is resilient? Nelson Mandela? Gandhi? Malala Yousafzai? What makes people resilient? Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps, and felt that a sense of purpose helped the inmates survive. In your practice you may come across many patients who display resilience. General practice may be less exciting in terms of medical breakthroughs but it does allow us a uniquely close observation of the long-term response to stressful life events. Research in the US around the time of 9/11 showed that what drives resilience is access to positive emotions that, under stress, mediate psychological growth and protection from depression.1 But where do such emotions come from? The answer may change our ideas on resilience and recovery. Freud recognised that, if people were allowed to free-associate specific autobiographical memories around negative/traumatic life events, they sometimes came up with a variety of relevant memories, some of which generated negative emotions on his couch. Sometimes this process of catharsis appeared to be healing. But we are only now beginning to untangle the influence of memories on our wellbeing and adjustment. It has been shown that certain core negative (here meaning specific and autobiographical) memories can exert ongoing long-term negative effects, 1 year later, on our wellbeing, as they are often repeatedly triggered implicitly (that …