Resilience Approaches

There are many traditional ways we support people, but often-times those are unintentionally power-over mechanisms.

The following approaches illustrate ways of being with people to grow resilience over time.

These approaches are ways to help people get a felt sense of safety through our actions and our language. These approaches are most helpful when used by multiple people on the person’s team, so that parents, therapists, and caregivers can be on the same page for the person they are supporting. You can modify by using your own language. Some of these approaches may seem strange at first, just give it a try! All approaches are designed to help us to respond versus react in difficult situations.

Resilience Approaches Introduction

The Safety Script

The Safety Scripts gives us words to say in order to help a person feel safe. When a person is acting angry, it’s often because they don’t FEEL SAFE. Safety scripts are a way to connect behavior and safety. The safety script can help people feel safe in their body and to stop doing the thing that is harmful because they are reminded first that no one is going to let them get hurt.

Anger Onion

The Anger Onion is a tool that helps us identify the root of anger. While anger is an obvious and easy-to-see emotion, it is actually coming from the fear center of the brain. The Anger Onion helps us identify the underlying sadness and fear driving anger responses, so we can put interventions in at the level of the fear to stop the anger.

Reflect Honor Connect

Reflect, Honor, and Connect gives us a framework (outline) for responding to a person in a way that reflects their thoughts and/or feelings, honors their experience, and connects them with a sense of felt safety, safe and positive adults, and/or a sense of the future.

The 3Ps

People who have experienced trauma need to heal the part of the brain that helps them plan and execute action. Use the Three Ps to ‘walk through’ a situation that might cause anxiety or stress. This approach helps people get a picture memory of what they would like to have happen in the future.

Affirmations for Rebonding

If you’ve experienced a lot of neglect throughout your life, you did not get the message that you belong or matter. Affirmations for Rebonding are messages that we give that a person might not have received early on in life.

Lift Off and Landing

Regulation comes in two flavors: upregulating and downregulating. One gives us energy (upregulating) and the other slows us down and allows us to relax (downregulating). Lift Off and Landing helps us identify activities, people, places, and things that upregulate us as well as those that downregulate us.

The 3 Ps:

The Safety Script:

Reflect – Honor – Connect

Affirmations for Rebonding:

Anger Onion

Lift Off and Landing