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Life inevitably includes painful situations and losses. Occasionally, these experiences far exceed the thresholds of our adaptive capacity and push us toward a post-traumatic pathology. However, these same experiences may have very different effects on different people. What, in some, generates a deep, permanent wound, in others might only produce a scar that is incorporated into an individual’s overall experience, not hampering their lives at all. We could therefore say that this person has greater resilience, a greater ability to endure and cope with painful experiences.
We consider resilience in this text as the capacity to psychically survive significant trauma without resorting to primitive defensive mechanisms on a permanent basis, avoiding identity diffusion and maintaining good reality testing. There are multiple factors linked to resilience, including attachment experiences, social support, and mentalisation ability.
We present now some clinical material to illustrate how a musical experience may help a person to adapt to a extremely traumatic situation.