Early November past, Steven Wolin, a soft-spoken psychiatrist, walked onto astage in Dallas and delivered a critical karate chop to the 4,000 members of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy sitting in stunned silence before him. He told them that America is being turned into "a nation of emotional cripples" under their eyes.
Over the past 10 years, he said, traditional psychiatric thinking "has slipped out of professional hands, where it had shortcomings enough, into the popular culture, where it has gone wild. I am referring to the Recovery Movement, which I believe has become dangerous. It completely bypasses our capacity for resilience. It glorifies frailty, lumps trivial disappointments with serious forms of mental illness, and portrays the human condition as a disease."
Instead, he said, together they needed to foster awareness of the human capacity for strengths and resilience. He told them he was taking his case to the AAMFT because family therapists have generally made the best case for strengths. He hoped they would join him in objecting to "the modern-day voices of doom on both the professional and popular front." His speech, "The Challenge Model: How Children Rise Above Adversity,'' described how people develop resilience and laid out a way to help people who grow up in troubled families. In the end, Dr. Wolin received a standing ovation.
Wolin, a researcher at George Washington University, in the nation's capital, also practices psychiatry there. He is currently writing a book, Resilience: How Survivors of Troubled Families Keep the Past in its Place, due out later this year and coauthored with his wife, Sybil Wolin, Ph.D., a child-development specialist. On the eve of the AAMFT speech, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY talked with the doctors Wolin about their provocative work.
PT: You are indeed bringing good news to people. You maintain that, contrary to popular thinking, adults aren't prisoners of troubled childhoods; they have powers of resiliency. What is resiliency and how do people get it?
Steven: Resiliency is the capacity to rise above adversity and forge lasting strengths in the struggle. It is the means by which children of troubled families can rebound from hardship and emerge as strong and healthy adults, able to lead gratifying lives, albeit with some scars to show for their experience. Children can overcome trauma, protect themselves, grow and learn in the process, and emerge in surprisingly good health.
Sybil: It is not the ability to escape unharmed. It is not about magic.
PT: Where does your concept of resilience come from?
Steven: My thinking on the subject reflects my own 20 years of research on adult children of alcoholics who do not repeat their parents' drinking patterns; an existing body of research on resilient children; child-development theory; and a recent series of interviews Sybil and I have conducted with resilient adults.
The seriously troubled families we/re referring to are pretty clearly definable. They are those in which the parents are suffering from substance-abuse problems--alcohol, other drugs; serious mental illness, such as manic-depressive disorder; serious depression; or schizophrenia. Also included are those families marked by chronic marital disputes often leading to divorce, but it is really the bitterness of the battle that is the serious trouble. And there is a large number of families in which the parents suffer serious personality disorders: parents who are very paranoid, who have very fragmented lives, or who have serious obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Sybil: We also include families troubled by racial discrimination and poverty because they create conditions that make it very difficult for children. They test resilience. We don't want to suggest that the psychopathology in those circumstances is inherent.
Steven: We don't think the human condition is a disease, nor do we think that difficulties or human failures are diseases.
PT: This idea is particularly intriguing now, because there are large cultural forces that actively work against people knowing about resilience.
Sybil: We would still be closet academics if it were not for the recovery and codependency movements. Steven's been doing this research for a long time. We've come out of the closet to combat what we see as a "Damage Model" mania.
PT: There seems to have been extensive contamination of the language and a metastasis of the concept of disorder and disease.
Steven: The Damage Model is a belief about the intergenerational transmission of disease. It basically says that if your family is having trouble, the chances that you are going to get it are very high. It derives from traditional psychiatric thinking, conventional wisdom, and popular psychology, which stress how children growing up in adverse circumstances suffer lasting emotional disturbances. I call this prediction, with its bias toward pathology, the Damage Model. It is prophecy of doom.
PT: And the "Challenge Model"?
Steven: I offer it: to give survivors of troubled families a more balanced perspective about their past. I also, hope to have an effect on my professional colleagues.
Sybil: We want to restore balance to the mental-health professions, which really are the mental-illness professions.
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