Resilient, a Sidenote

I had not found a workable definition for psychological resilience, and that may simply have been because of looking at it from the right angle but not going far enough. The work on play that Dr. Stuart Brown has done really brought home to me the limitations I had assumed. Rather than dealing with resilience from a problem-solving perspective--which is understandable when you're looking at researching how to overcome emotional difficulties--resilience is really about the profusion of health that overcomes challenges.

From a psychological perspective, the positive emotional experience people have this right. Resilience, then, can be described and researched as the capability of returning to a state of creativity, playfulness, or purpose after experiencing adversity. These states, as foundational to psychological health, describe or characterize healthy functioning. Without experiencing these states on a somewhat regular basis, it is impossible to relate well. By focusing too much on the aspect of durability that may be involved in overcoming adversity, we aren't actually drawing from the most basic healthy aspects of our psyches. Being able to maintain some sense of purpose and focus is actually a poorer approximation of the more complete health involved in--and stemming from--the ability to play.

In this vein, then, we can describe play therapy as any intentional behavior aimed at overcoming blocked playfulness. This is different from play itself, which may not be intentionally focused towards overcoming anything. While play may have therapeutic affects, it is not therapy.