Abstract for:Psychological Resilience from a Feedback Perspective

While most campus prevention and response efforts to sexual and relationship violence focus on primary prevention and response, national studies suggest that about half of incoming students have already experienced their first sexual assault, and many will have been exposed to relationship violence in their families. Of particular relevance to developing trauma informed prevention and response systems is understanding the distribution of patterns of response (e.g., chronic and delayed response versus recovery and resilience), especially within the context of interactions of historical trauma. While resiliency research has surged within the past decade across, there is comparatively less known about the potential impacts that resiliency can have for survivors of relationship and sexual violence. This paper develops a feedback theory of resilience based on the existing literature. Simulation results highlight the potentially significant role that interactions between insults and microaggressions can play, and the role that psychological resilience can have for individual growth.