By Kara Beatty, MD
Resilience Health
Midlothian, VA
and Anne McDonnell, MPA, OTR/L
Director of Brain Injury Services
Cantor Grana Bucner Bucci
Richmond, VA
On Saturday afternoon, Dr. Kara Keuthan Beatty and Anne McDonnell presented on Trauma and Resilience. The colleagues have developed expertise in the field of brain injury and shared their perspectives on the topic.
Ms. McDonnell began by discussing the often unrecognized presence of brain injury in many of those we serve. She provided a shared definition of resilience for the presentation and shared the results of resilience research done by VCU’s TBI Model Systems programs, one of 16 Centers of Excellence in the US; it demonstrated people can be taught resiliency skills, and that when they are, their outcomes improve.
Dr. Beatty discussed Kubler-Ross’s work on the five stages of grief and their relationship to trauma and introduced the audience to the concept of ambiguous loss, which is loss without closure. They closed the presentation with a conversation about the effect of trauma on resilience, and the need to sometimes unlearn to rebuild and rise strong.
