Fostering Human Resilience

Biography

Trevor Griffiths studied medicine at Oxford University. He was a pioneering UK family physician for 25 years, where he developed Emotional Logic as a lifelong learning approach to promote physical health and social wellbeing. He founded the Emotional Logic Centre, and now full-time trains tutors internationally who promote healthy adjustment to change by character development in schools, healthcare, business and church settings. He has developed and published theory to account for the rapid changes in personal identity and social character that can follow when understanding how emotions have a social, systemic purpose.

Research Interest

Resilience is defined as the constructive ability to manage multiple small losses and worries about loss that can accumulate in any social setting within setbacks, disappointments and hurts. These un-named ‘hidden losses’ each start their own emotional loss reaction, all of which occur simultaneously when the stressing situation is remembered. Tools have been developed (card sorting, and Loss Reaction Worksheets) that can kinesthetically map the resulting emotional chaos. Habitual or fleeting ‘whirlpools of emotion’ can thus be identified, which make people feel stuck in the situation with tension, distress or confusion, and generate behavioral reactions. These may be diagnosed as illness, bad social character or personality disorder, and may lead people to adopt a victim status to justify their behavior, or to seek help to find a way out. The Emotional Logic Centre teaches that these are adjustment reactions complicating normal and healthy grieving for un-named values. Emotional Logic is a lifelong learning approach to improve understanding, self-respect and strength of character, by which people learn a solution-focused, action-planning way out of the identified emotional chaos. It provides an approach to adjustment that says there are NO negative emotions, only unpleasant ones that have useful purposes to activate adjustment in social settings. The assertive action plan removes the victim status, and enables exploration of new ways to live by renewed, empathic relationship building. Resilience thus becomes a teachable life skill to manage setbacks, disappointments and hurts constructively by conversational methods.