Healing the resilience in others

My career track has been complicated, some might say convoluted and indeed, at times, positively baffling. The benefit of that is being that I am full of interesting stories and anecdotes which allow me to illustrate the things I talk to people about. Here is one such story.

There was a period back in the 1990s when I worked as an adventure sports instructor in an urban adventure sports centre. We were working primarily with special needs children, which is a broad spectrum term, or at least it was at that time. One particular group we worked with were children who had been abused, I won't go into details of how. They would come to us from a residential care home, generally, twice a week. One visit would be for a full day's exercise and the second for 1/2 day exercise. Our job was to help give them a new perspective on life. The tools we used where adventure and fun, both were equally important. And that brings me to my story.

The centre I was working at was, at that time, classed as a centre of excellence. To such an extent that we ran an adult training programme funded by the government. The idea being, that we should spread what we were doing, to other parts of the country.

The particular day I'm thinking of, I was working with one of the trainees and the pair of us were going to take a group of these children for a day’s walk in Northumberland. The weather was good, the kids had all their equipment when we set off in a minibus. The seating arrangement was the standard one. One instructor, sat next to the driver, the other instructor (Me) sat in the back corner of the bus, just in case there was trouble. As we drove north the trainee instructor at the front turn round to me and said “Neil do you think we should warn them?”... I had to think hard. This wasn't something we'd planned, but he clearly had something in mind. My response was “I don't know, do you think we should?” his response was brilliant, he called back “The haggis can be a problem this time of year”. That was when I knew what he was thinking; and we worked it. The rest of the journey was the two of us discussing the breeding season for haggis. We talked about how the English haggis was smaller but actually more vicious than the Scottish one. We explained to the bus how they didn't come much further South than where we were going. We talked about their nesting habits. We spoke about what to look for when we got there, to see if we could spot them. By the time we got to the car park, we had a minibus full of kids who were experts on the English haggis and what to look for.

 It didn't end there. We organised the kids to see if we could find a haggis, we set up search lines thrashing through woodland. We investigated local caves in the sandstone. We collected feathers, inspected animal scrapes and explored everywhere we could in the search of these haggis. Eventually we ended up on the top the local hill called Simonside. We ate lunch, with a pair of binoculars being handed round from kid to kid in the hopes that somebody could spot a haggis. We marched back down the hill still with our eyes peeled, looking for signs of haggis. Even on the way back to the car park and in the minibus going home, those kids were full of the idea of wild haggis roaming the hills.

So, beyond a pleasant anecdote, what is the point of this story? We spent a day creating PTG, Post Traumatic Growth. Those children had gone from the last safe space they had in their lives, the council run home they had been sent to by social workers, into a wilderness full of wild beasts and they had loved it. They had never looked at the world of nature in such a concentrated way in their lives. They had seen things they never imagined they would see, they had done things they never imagined they would do, and without even realising it at the time they had grown beyond the experiences that had taken them to that safe place to begin with.

PTG, (Post Traumatic Growth) Isn't something everybody who has experienced some form of PTSD achieves. But for those who are resilient enough, those who find someone to help them, then it's a step beyond mere resilience. It's a step towards an antifragile mindset. That was what those kids achieved that day as well as giving me one of the best memories I could ever have.

If you would like to discuss resilience, an antifragile mindset, or even PTG, please contact me.