Affective Alteration: Co-Constructing Resilience in Alternative Psychotherapy Counselling Practice

Abstract

The conceptual use of resilience has gained much popularity since the 1970s, positioning post-trauma resilience parallel to the paradigm of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to offer a new possibility for healing and a new understanding of illness and suffering during the course of a neoliberal turn in psychiatry. In this thesis, it is shown how suffering and vulnerability becomes a source of authenticity rather than a source of a pathological illness. Through fieldwork with Resilience Summit, an alternative private counselling practice for psychotherapy that combines a feminist intersectional approach to traumatology, resilience is approached as a prototype capable of changing subjectivities because it permeates everyday feelings and actions. It does so by utilizing the flexible framework of resilience, as both inherent and cultivated, to create new capabilities, existential perspectives, and relationships in a therapeutic social network. There is the reconstruction of a condition of being through life narratives that are formed and reworked by the labour of emotional regulation and interaction. A new sense of resilient identity can consequently follow by achieving posttraumatic growth and collective engagement. However, Resilience Summit operates by means of affective governance which has been seen in contemporary resilience neoliberal discourses. It is possible to question to which degree Resilience Summit embraces neoliberal discourses of resilience in the context of a private practice.