Available Topics

Resilience After Trauma: Understanding Key Factors That Promote Thriving After Adversity

When people dream of the future, they do not dream about avoiding depression or minimizing pain. People dream about seeking and achieving joy, love, and meaning. After many years of focusing on victimization, risks, deficits, and symptoms, health and social services are finally starting to address the ways that individual, family, and community strengths help people overcome family violence and other adversities. Using a new concept called "resilience portfolios," Dr. Hamby will use multiple mixed methods datasets involving in-depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys to identify key strengths that promote thriving after adversity.  Dr. Hamby will focus on ways that psychologists and other practitioners can assess and promote key strengths for facilitating resilience after trauma.

Resilience After Trauma:  Evidence-Based Assessment & Intervention

Dr. Hamby speaks on the strengths that help people thrive after victimization and other adversities, with a focus on developing balanced “resilience portfolios” of psychosocial strengths.  In this talk, she focuses on ways that practitioners can assess and promote key strengths for facilitating resilience after trauma. She describes evidence-based assessments and interventions, such as motivational interviewing and narrative, that can be used in a variety of settings to help people achieve well-being even after traumatic experiences.

Portrait of Resilience: Insights from Rural Appalachia

Despite overall shifts to more strengths-based approaches, remarkably negative, deficit-focused portrayals remain the norm for some groups. In the United States, this is perhaps truer for rural Appalachians than any other group.  Mainstream media and entertainment still routinely mock stereotypical characteristics of people from this region, and terms such as “hillbilly” or “redneck” are permitted in public discourse in ways that other slurs are not.  However, like all stigmatized groups, rural Appalachians have under-appreciated strengths.  Using a new concept called "resilience portfolios," Dr. Hamby will use multiple mixed methods datasets involving in-depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys to identify key strengths and values in southern Appalachia, including self-reliance, humility, privacy, spirituality, and the use of self-deprecating humor.  Many Appalachian people rely on these values to both resist and navigate the challenges of violence, adversity, and marginalization. Core Appalachian values are almost entirely missing from mainstream research in resilience, but better understanding of strengths and coping in this region can improve services to Appalachian communities, which have over 25 million residents.  Further, improving our understanding of one subculture can inform our broader understanding of how people cope and thrive in the diverse communities of the United States, and often produces insights that are useful in many cultural contexts. Among other implications, these findings point to the need to do more to incorporate meaning making and community connections into approaches to overcoming victimization and promoting resilience.

Poly-victimization and the Prevention of Elder Abuse

Understanding vulnerabilities to abuse in late life requires understanding the full burden of victimization.  Poly-victimization refers to the experience of multiple different types of victimization.  In addition to forms of elder abuse perpetrated by family members and caregiver, elders are vulnerable to other types of victimization that affect their functioning, such as identity theft and other crimes.  Research on adverse childhood experiences has also shown the lifelong impact of the cumulative burden of early childhood adversity.  A more comprehensive approach to recognizing victimization can inspire more effective strategies for the prevention of elder abuse.  This talk will focus on strengths-based approaches to elder abuse prevention, with a focus on ways to support the key strengths and needs that contribute to thriving in late life.  Prevention efforts in the following domains will be described:  home safety, physical health, psychological well-being, social connections, financial well-being, and spiritual well-being.  More holistic approaches to prevention have the most promise for promoting safety and well-being among older adults.

Poly-victimization:  Essential Information and Implications for Treatment

Poly-victimization is experiencing multiple different types of victimization, such as physical abuse at home, bullying at school, and witnessing community assault.  It is the strongest predictor of psychological symptoms in national studies. Adaptations of current trauma treatment models can help address poly-victimization.  This workshop will provide a basic background in key concepts of polyvictimization.  Dr. Hamby will discuss how poly-victimization compares to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), complex trauma, trauma-informed care, and other emerging concepts.  The most important characteristics and consequences will be presented.  She will also address the primary components of a poly-victimization approach to treatment, such as considering that caregivers may be poly-victims themselves and may need assessment, safety planning, and their own interventions to support parenting strengths, engaging and planning interventions across multiple contexts including schools, and recognizing that multi-pronged treatment approaches may require a longer time frame and need to be developmentally specific. Examples of treatment models to address poly-victimization will be provided.  She will also discuss ways that professionals can work on policies, resources, and programs to prevent further victimization.