Setting the Stage for Personal Resliency

Resiliency is often defined as "bouncing back." I probably started bouncing back when I was three. Four days before Christmas and three weeks before my third birthday, my father died in a one car accident, leaving three small children and an emotionally incapacitated wife behind. My mother was physically and psychologically devastated. She began telling neighbors and a visiting minister that she had killed my father. As a result of her distress, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. My sister (4), brother (13 months) and I (3) became foster children for the next 18 months.

It is never a good time to lose a father ( a great book on this subject is FatherLoss by Neil Chethik). Losing a father at three may have some "Oedipal" implications. Remember Freud? Oedipal complex - a complex of males; desire to possess the mother sexually and to exclude the father; said to be a source of personality disorders if unresolved. In Erikson's psychosocial theory, about the age of three, a child is leaving the autonomy versus shame and doubt life crisis stage and entering the initiative versus guilt stage. "Sigmund Freud, meet Eric Erikson."

more to come....