Page 54 - Personality disorders and insecure attachment among adolescents

Resilience
‘Resilience’ was defined as the belief that once could cope with stressful life events. A few adolescents mentioned the topic of resilience. They described how they had learned to adapt without falling back into acting-out behaviour.
‘I still find this difficult, but I can cope with it now.’
‘I am aware of how I feel at a moment and how I can deal with it, without falling into acting out.’
‘I sometimes feel sad or lonely, the difference is that it no longer feels endless, I know how to deal with it and that I can accept it.’
Epistemic trust
A few participants mentioned ‘epistemic trust’, defined as the ability to learn from and trust
others. Epistemic trust differs from for instance the factor interpersonal learning input in the fact that this ability enables social learning in an ever changing social and cultural context and allows individuals to benefit from their social environment (Fonagy & Allison, 2014) and therefore seems a precondition for the other therapeutic factors. Experiences in the therapeutic milieu were described as being a corrective emotional experience.
‘The Albatros was a safe house for me, a house where I could trust everyone, which at first seemed impossible.’
‘Thank you for what you have shown me. For the fact that thanks to your help, things have become bearable and that I have learned to feel what it is really like to care for people and to be able to rely on them.’
Results of the quantitative analysis
The 70 analysed letters consisted of 4669 sentences in total. Each letter had an average of 66.7 sentences, with the shortest letter containing 17 and the longest 171. The frequency of occurrence of the 12 therapeutic factors of Yalom and the four new therapeutic factors per participant are presented in Table 2.
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