Community Mothers and Vicarious Resilience: An Exploration in a Colombian Community

Abstract

This study explores vicarious resilience process in early childhood education. It addresses the question of how low-income community mothers who are involved in child care and education for other low-income working caretakers are affected by the children’s resilience. It focuses on the women’s interpretations of the children and caretaker stories’ experiences and stories, and how they make sense of the impact these experiences and stories have on their lives. Twenty-one semistructured interviews were conducted with community mothers who work in the Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar Program (Wellness Community Homes), of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare in Cali, Colombia; their perceptions of the children and caretaker’s overcoming adversity were explored. Data were analyzed through grounded theory and Consensual Qualitative Research methodology to describe the themes that speak about the effects of witnessing how children and caretakers constructively overcame adversity. These themes are discussed to advance the concept of vicarious resilience and how it can contribute to sustaining and empowering educational endeavors, community leadership, and family life in the context of poverty, adversity, and potential trauma.

Keywords

vicarious resilience trauma resilience children women

Humanistic psychology suggests that people possess personal agency and that they can be intrinsically motivated to empower themselves to pursue things that will help them achieve their full potential as human beings in spite of adversity. People can experience psychological growth and self-actualization. However, this process must be understood in social context. Contexts of adversity vary greatly depending on the social, economic, historical, and cultural conditions of a particular community. In Colombia, the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) institutionalized a community-based solution to address issues early childhood care in low-income communities since 1986. Women¹ who are recognized by the community for their solidarity, commitment, and care for children are trained by the ICBF and helped install child care services in their own homes and community centers to help parents and other caretakers who work outside the home. As community members, these women know well the adversities their community confront and are witness to the specific challenges that families and children face due to their exposure and active involvement with the children they care for. As witnesses of children’s growth and development in the context of families who face multiple adversities, they are especially positioned to be affected by the resilience they witness. This study focuses on the vicarious resilience processes generated in the relationships that these women develop with the children and their families. It asks if vicarious resilience is a relevant and useful concept in community settings involving underprivileged children and their families in Colombia; and if so, it explores how these community leaders working with children and families exposed to severe poverty, domestic violence, and other forms of social distress, are affected by witnessing their trajectories of overcoming adversity.

Vicarious Resilience

The concept of vicarious resilience involves an appreciation of the reciprocal nature of helping relationships, allowing helping professionals such as clinicians and teachers to balance the painful, difficult aspects of trauma work with those that bring hope and promote growth. In the context of clinical work, vicarious resilience is defined as the positive impact on and personal growth of therapists resulting from exposure to clients’ resilience (Hernandez, Gangsei, & Engstrom, 2007²). National and international qualitative research studies have documented the presence of vicarious resilience with mental health professionals and teachers working with survivors of severe trauma and family members dealing with the consequences of violence (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Hernandez et al., 2007). In clinical and educational contexts where traumatic experiences are common, vicarious resilience offers a counterbalance to the negative effects of trauma work by reframing negative events and developing a hopeful outlook on surviving adversity.

In their work on vicarious resilience and teachers working with children whose studies have been delayed for 2 or more years due to social and economic challenges in Colombia, the authors found specific elements contributing to the empowerment of teachers through interaction with students’ own overcoming of adversity and developing of resilience. These elements involved affect regulation as a relational activity, expansion of relational skills, resonance with own adversities, changes in interpersonal relationships, reassessment of one’s problems, recognizing the impact of trauma and constructivist learning strategies, perspective taking and flexibility, recognition and affirmation of racial and gender identity diversity, raising critical consciousness and advocacy, and compassion fatigue. Teachers in this study generalized the impact of witnessing children’s resilience beyond the classroom to significantly shape their perception of themselves, their relationships, and their environment (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014). Teachers are in a helping position demanding responses to learners with varied and complex needs in contexts of poverty.

Women community leaders assisting children and families in early caretaking settings are also in a special position to influence affect regulation processes, the development of relational skills, the recognition of the impact of trauma in a child, the development of perspective taking and flexibility, and awareness of racial and gender identity diversity. Can these mothers identify and articulate how they help others and how they are positively affected by these helping relationships? Is it helpful to understand these reciprocal influence to deal with the emotional aspects of their work and add value to their empowerment and survival?

Childhood, Poverty, and the Community Homes Implemented by the ICBF in Colombia

In 2015, UNICEF reported that 34% children in Colombia suffered from multidimensional poverty in Colombia in 2014, a decreased from 43% in 2008. Poverty in Colombia is larger than the Latin American average and that of other countries such as Ecuador, Perú, Panamá, and Brazil, while extreme poverty is less than the regional average. According to UNICEF’s (2005) report on the world state of childhood, children who live in poverty are deprived from material, spiritual, and emotional resources needed to survive, develop, and prosper. This lack of resources in multiple areas prevent them from reaching their full potential as human beings and enjoy their human rights. In addition to lack of financial security, poverty is associated with malnutrition, lack of access to basic services, social risk, discrimination, and social exclusion. In Colombia, the group most affected by extreme and multidimensional poverty is that of children between the ages of 3 and 5 years (35%) followed by adolescents (35.5%), children aged 6 to 11 years (33.6), and children aged 0 to 2 years (28.6 %). The most vulnerable populations include Indigenous children and Afro-Colombians.

The Colombian government has institutionalized specific policies and programs for children and adolescents (República de Colombia, 2009³) to foster their legal and human rights. The Colombian Wellness Community Homes (Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar) or HCB, is a community-based program serving over one million low-income children younger than 6 years, delivering home-based child care, supplementary nutrition, and psychosocial stimulation.

The HCB program was born in 1986 and converted into law in 1989 as a joint effort between the state and communities to provide care of vulnerable children and families and to guarantee children’s physical, cognitive, and emotional development while promoting female labor participation. Central features of HCB program are provision of supplemental nutrition and the promotion of children’s physical growth, health, social, and cognitive development. Participant parents are required to pay a monthly fee not higher of 25% of daily minimal wage (Gonzales & Duran, 2012). It seeks to promote children’s physical, cognitive and social development, to support healthy parenting, and to connect families to community networks (Bernal & Fernandez, 2013).

Bernal and Fernandez (2013) examined the impact of early care and education on children’s development to identify the effects of exposure to a subsidized child care program on children’s nutritional status and cognitive and socioemotional development in Colombia. They analyzed data on 10,173 program beneficiary children (aged 3-6 years) collected in 2007. They compared beneficiary children who had been in the program for a long time with beneficiary children who had been in the program for a month or less, by age group, to estimate program exposure effects. They found that cognitive development improved 0.15 to 0.3 of a standard deviation after at least 15 months of exposure for children between 3 and 6 years of age. Socioemotional skills improved 0.12 to 0.3 standard deviation for children older than 3 years after at least 15 months of program exposure. No significant gains were found for nutritional status.

The HCB involves the leadership and hands-on involvement of community members. These are usually women who are mothers themselves and who are trained in basic early child development skills. These mothers are responsible for the care of first infancy children at the HCB program. HCB home modalities involve (a) a traditional setting in which the community mother in her own home opens a space to attend between 12 and 14 years children; (b) a setting where the community mother provides care for pregnant and nursing women and their children younger than 2 years, teaching families good care and child-rearing practices; (c) and group settings where several community mothers organize themselves in groups in a municipality property attending children in better equipped spaces (ICBF, 2016). Currently, there are 69,000 community mothers in Colombia (ICBF, 2016) and after recent litigation they have been recognized as employees and paid a monthly salary with benefits. They hold a high school degree and/or some higher education (technical or professional studies). All mothers in these programs attend trainings on child development, health, nutrition, safety, and community participation (Buchely, 2015).

The mothers who become “community mothers” are community members who before their training with the ICBF have no formal knowledge of child development, nutrition, emotional bonds, and interpersonal skills required to work both with the children and their parents. Thus, the knowledge base they begin with is uneven and while some grew up with adults who offered safe and loving homes, others grew up in homes where they experienced domestic violence and child abuse. For example, Blanca, a community mother who had a foundation of interpersonal skills required for conflict resolution before her training with the HCB, discussed a situation in which another woman exhibited open and hateful homophobia in the community and tried to bring her views into her home with the children. The woman justified her views as a part of her Jehovah’s Witness faith. Blanca, approached her in a friendly manner and asked her not make judgments, she related to her religious beliefs by asking if she was free of sin to judge anybody else, warned her to not speak ill of others as this may return back to her; she related that as a parent she did not have control of how her children would turn out to be, like her mother told her “we bring them to the world and we raised them but we cannot control the conditions around them and when they grow up they will make their own choices.” On the other hand, women like Myriam, grew up in home with domestic violence and child abuse. She stated that with the HCB training she became aware of her overall lack of patience and tolerance, and insufficient language skills. She explained that she felt that she did not know how to articulate her thoughts and express herself. She not only lacked vocabulary but also needed and wanted to learn how to express in ways that showed less aggression, more gentleness, and appreciation: “As a result of my work with the children I learned to speak in a different way; I talked in the same way I heard people speak in my family; I also had to change and I like how I am now.” Myriam was able to develop more congruence between her self-concept and the behavior that was threatening her self-image (Rogers, 1985). In this social context, becoming a community mother is a career path in which there is material and psychological growth for these women. In return for their work, the community, and the families they serve bring back their appreciation and affirmation of their leadership (Bedoya, 2016).

According to Masten (2014), early childhood is an important window of time for understanding and promoting resilience as the foundation for competence is established and the most important protective systems for human development emerge and begin developing. Community mothers are embedded in the fabric of communities whose adversities involve a myriad of interpersonal, social, and economic issues. As witnesses of children’s development in the context of families who face multiple adversities, they are especially positioned to be affected by the resilience they witness. This study inquiries whether vicarious resilience process exists in the relationships that community mothers develop with the children under their care and the families they influence. If so, it seeks to identify specific vicarious resilience processes and their usefulness in early preventive educational contexts with underprivileged children and families in Colombia.

Method

This qualitative, exploratory study was guided by grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Gibson, 2007). Through inductive analysis, this study sought an in-depth understanding of the participants’ comprehension of and their views on how clients’ resilience had affected them. The following guidelines for trustworthiness in qualitative research were followed: interview guideline translation and consultation, data analysis triangulation, transferability (depth of the interviews and variability of the experiences and contexts in the participants selected), dependability (researchers accounted for their personal influences and biases using debriefing), and data analysis saturation (Morse et al., 2009). Our research team included two bilingual doctoral-level psychologists, one bilingual female masters psychology intern (Spanish/English), Spanish-speaking master’s student, and one bilingual doctoral-level consultant. The authors constructed a semistructured interview in Spanish and the formulation of interview themes drew from previous studies on vicarious resilience (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014).

Participants

The participants were 21 low-income community mothers, female and heterosexual identified, between the ages of 24 and 58 years working for the Wellness Community Homes program in the city of Cali for an average of 39.9 years; 14 identified as Afro descendants and 2 as Indigenous descent, and 5 identified as Mestizo. Fifteen identified as Catholic and six as Christian. They held high school degrees and resided in the communities they served and their average salary was $400 per month. In the Colombian context, the geographic location of their homes, jobs, and salary amount are indicative of a low-income population.

Procedure

The sample was purposefully selected according to intensity, chain, and politically important sampling (Patton, 2002). In this process, selection occurs with the intent of obtaining “information-rich cases that manifest the phenomenon intensely.” Participants were identified through Fundación Corficolombiana’s resilience training program madres resilientes-hijos resilientes (resilient mothers, resilient children). Potential referral sources were contacted by phone. The purpose of the study as well as its potential benefits and risks were discussed. A letter of invitation and a consent form was sent to all potential participants. A semistructured interview with an open-ended format was designed and conducted in person or over the phone by the authors. The interview questions were similar to the ones used in previous resilience studies by the authors with editorial modifications to adjust the content to this population (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Hernandez et al., 2007). Interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes (see the appendix).

Data analysis was guided by second-generation grounded theory (Morse et al., 2009) and the Consensual Qualitative Research methodology (Hill, Thomson, & Williams, 1997) involving the researchers’ discussion and tracking of their biases and views in relation to the subject studied by using logs and field notes before and after the study was completed and after each interview; coding of transcripts for each individual interview into domains that were agreed on by consensus; auditing the development of domains; constructing core ideas for all material within each domain for each individual case; and cross-analysis developing categories to describe consistencies in the core ideas within domains across cases. The consensus process involved each researcher’s review of each other’s analysis and a back and forth discussion until agreement was reached. Questions and disagreements where marked and submitted to the independent auditor for feedback. Data triangulation consisted of case summaries developed by each researcher for each interview with participants, separate coding, and discussions to develop consensus on the coding process and the categories selected. A consensus process was built into the analysis when new categories emerged in the coding (Hill et al., 1997). Researcher triangulation included an ongoing data analysis review by an independent auditor. After each interview was transcribed, each researcher developed independently a case summary which was later reviewed by the auditor to address differences, similarities, and offer feedback to the researchers.

Results

The data analysis resulted in the identification of eight themes: solidarity, empathy, reassessment of one’s problems, affect regulation, client inspired hope, expansion of relational skills, changes in interpersonal relationships, and perspective taking.

Solidarity (N = 21)

In this context, solidarity refers to the coping processes that occur in reference to and dependent on a social context filled with economic and safety challenges. Solidarity for these women involves to rebuilding and sustaining social relationships to heal the wounds interpersonal trauma and other traumas due to displacement and loss; to coexist with the many of religious, ethnic, and cultural differences, and to find hope for the next generation. Leidy stated as follows:

When you start to work with the community, you begin to feel how they all feel, you begin to see how similar and different we are . . . we are all poor but we have different religions, some of us are Mestizos, some Afros, some Raizales, some Indigenous . . . and some have suffered more than others; I see how they suffer and I see that I am not alone in this earth, I am too a person who needs of others to make something out of me. I became more humble and able to put myself in their shoes to help out and to ask for help because I can’t do it alone.

She added that the role of the community mother is hard and challenging because a lot is expected from her. For example, she is expected to help children who come from violent environments and integrate them in homes where there is love and physical nurturing while helping the caretakers change their ways. At the same time, she acknowledged that the community sees her as a leader and shows their appreciation in many ways. She has made it a point to introduce people and encourage them to bond. She states that her work is possible because it is done with her community.

Empathy (N = 20)

The women spoke about developing an ability to sense other people’s emotions and imagine what the children and their families might have been thinking and feeling. They spoke of the feelings they felt in response to others’ emotions. Empathy is a first step to compassionate action, which is also a part of the women’s narratives. Miriam explained as follows:

I feel the pain that they feel; when they are going through a difficult time, I put myself in their shoes and try to do my best for these children. I pay more attention to them because they need me more in that moment. I try not to let the parents feel bad about themselves because I put myself in their shoes.

Reassessment of One’s Problems (N = 20)

Responses in this domain referred to developing the ability to contrast and compare their own personal situations with that of the children and their families to gain perspective. All but one participant discussed having been affected in their ability to reassess their own personal and/or work-related issues. Diana’s statement illustrates how many of them were able to understand the relative dimension of their problems:

In the past I used to see only my problems and see them as intractable, I would wonder “why me” “poor me.” Over time I learned that my problems are a lot smaller and manageable than that of others. There are people who have more needs than I do. I have changed. I have learned to value myself, my environment, those around me.

Sandra spoke succinctly of how children have helped rethink her problems in her life:

I have to problem solve with the children all the time. I have to find ways to get them to do what they are supposed to do. In my work with them I forget of my own problems, but most importantly I use the same attitude in my own life. There has to be a way!

Affect Regulation (N = 19)

The women spoke about their ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience such as breathing, reminding themselves of their role as caregivers, taking a time out for themselves, changing activities, smoothing difficult conversations with parents with their voice and choice of words, and prayer. They coincide in stating that they learned to diffuse or moderate negative emotions as a result of their training and work with children. This in turn made them less reactive in their own personal lives. Ingrid stated as follows:

Sometimes the children first arrive showing aggression, lack of attention and it is like they are unable to see you and see how all is organized in the home for the benefit of all. Overtime I learned how to approach and talked to them. When they speak ill, I speak with sweetness and gentleness. If my words are harsh like theirs, I hurt them; when I have had conflicts with my adult children I learned to stay calm and wait to explain who things occurred so we can talk.

Changes in Interpersonal Relationships (N = 19)

Community mothers coincided in stating that after years of working with children and families in this community-based ICBF program, their interpersonal relationships changed (N = 19). They spoke of becoming more compassionate in relationships overall, better at raising their own children, and better equipped to deal with conflicts involving caretakers and community members. Celina spoke of how Maura a 4-year-old who suffers from a skin allergies in addition to being curious and active embarked her in finding out how to help her with the allergies and handle her insatiable curiosity. Celina learned to be attentive to her rashes and scratching by bathing and medicating her. She also figured out that giving her responsibilities and making her a leader was helpful in keeping her busy. Celina discussed her successes with Maura’s frustrated mother and over time the women became close friends, something Celina did not anticipate due to their differing personalities.

Milena explained that some parents “are not respectful of others and try to instigate conflicts by criticizing and arguing.” She stated that she lost her fear and now approaches them calmly and speaks with them about respecting each other values and preferences, coexisting in the community, and listening to different points of view: “There is not one way of doing things, people have different ways of doing things, if you value them, they will value you.”

Client-Inspired Hope (N = 18)

The women spoke about how hope emerged in their work as they became open to be influenced by the children’s joy, creativity, honesty, and ability to forgive and forget. Ana lost her husband when their only son was 4 years old. She felt desperate and struggled to put her life together as a single mother with little skills and no income. She became a community mother through the encouragement of a cousin who helped her see how she could take care of her son while being of service to the community. She related:

The children came into my life at a very difficult time, I was sad and stayed at home all the time unless I had to leave. However, the children filled me and overtime I had to let go of my pain to pay attention to them. When I saw a child crying because their mother left, I consoled them, I learned to give them love and nurture them. They learned to love me and learned to love them. Overtime, I fell in love with my job and I felt hopeful and alive again.

Expansion of Relational Skills (N = 17)

A total of 17 out of 21 community mothers coincided in having had to face unexpected challenges in their community homes involving children’s misbehavior (e.g., aggression, hyperactivity, lack of attention). This forced them to expand their repertoire of relational skills. They related that through experience they learned to first create a calming and soothing environment to then interact more actively with the children, provide care, and promote positive development. They had to pay attention to developing emotional connections with the children especially the most deprived. They were able to build an emotional and behavioral structure in their homes by showing acceptance, understanding, and patience while creating new expectations and appropriate consequences for misbehavior. For example, Beatriz explained that before being prepared to work as a community mother, she used to focus only on rules and understanding. Overtime, she learned from the children about how to communicate with them by using the everyday language of their homes and communities, changing her body posture, tone of voice, and eliminating punitive interventions. Instead, she learned to use reinforcement, reframing, activities, and music to help them both relax and center their attention. These mothers also developed skills to reach out to caretakers and developed relationships that affected the children’s home environments. While not always successful, they had to expand their relational skills to engage reluctant parents and invite those who also needed help in parenting at home. Ingrid stated as follows:

A child needs love to overcome these conditions. . . . I became a mediator, a guidance, a person who gives them love to heal their wounds. I became a model to them and I saw them changing. They become good people in spite of their problems, and I became a better person too.

Perspective Taking (N = 14)

Participants discussed how the challenges they experience in their lives and later in their work fostered a desire to learn more about how to change the way they raised their own children and help the families and children in the community. In a rudimentary but clear fashion, all the women who identified having suffered child abuse in addition to the impact of severe poverty, stated that they had a desire to break the chain of abuse, began taking steps prior to becoming a community mother, and experienced a profound change with the ICBF and Corficolombiana Foundation trainings and the actual hands on experience with children. They made changes in their relationship with the children and their caretakers involving use of strengths-based perspective while keeping in mind the challenges that these families have. Their perspective taking specifically refers to understanding how their own issues came into place with the children and their families, figuring out where children were coming from and addressing challenges at hand. Nubia explained her process as follows:

I am thankful to God because my desire to give my children something different from what I got has been fulfilled. I suffered from hunger, humiliation; sometimes we did not have a roof on our heads; I am grateful for how much I have learned because this has allowed me break the chain, because I was raised with a club, my mother was fearless . . . so my first daughters experienced the same thing . . . but after I learned how to raise my children differently I stopped it and now I have stability and security to be a good mother to them.

As community mothers described their trajectories, they identified learning to analyze situations from multiple views, relying on strengths rather than deficiencies, tolerating negative affect longer, and becoming more pragmatic. These mothers described moving from a place of lack knowledge and skills with stereotyped ideas about children to exploring new ways of thinking about child development and relationship building relative to their role in the lives of these children/families. The women’s change in perspective occurred not only relative to their work but also their own attitude toward life. Carmen explained as follows:

I have become a lot more grateful for who I am and what I have, I enjoy more every day and I am less prone to be running around doing something. When I lived fast I learned less and I think that many problems came my way just because I would not stop to figure things out.

She also offered a view about coping with her environment: “I learned to live in this neighborhood, this is a dangerous place but I have learned to coexist with my neighbors; I learned to keep safe and teach my son how to do so.”

Discussion

Do community mothers vicariously learn from the change they witness in the children and caretakers they work with? Are they positively affected by the change they witness? Evidence from the data collected in this study supports the presence of vicarious resilience processes in the lives of these community mothers. They identified the multiple ways in which helping these children and their families has affected their own life and family relationships in a positive manner. Their participation in the change process involved in learning to set up a home environment to take care of their own community’s children has fostered their own learning about child development, affect regulation, perspective taking, empathy, reassessment of one’s problems, hope, relational skills, changes in interpersonal relationships, and solidarity.

These community mothers developed connections that helped them, the children, and their caretakers beyond their immediate relationship and reverberated into the community mothers’ personal histories and interpersonal relationships outside the home. Thus, in this case, change can be seen as an attainment of a new experience of emotional bonding between community mothers and children/families. Community mothers in this study provided narratives describing how they provided a stable warm relationship, firm boundaries, handling of protest, reliability, and emotional responsiveness that assisted with affect regulation. These are all elements of a secure attachment bond (Fosha, 2000); they also speak about the importance of unconditional positive regard to for a positive view of oneself (Rogers, 1985).

These community mothers could benefit from learning early on about the positive impact that their job in the community brings to themselves and others. This may affect their sense of empowerment and motivation to invest even more in their work. Community mothers’ narratives reflect that they were able to perform their work from a position of compassion, awareness, knowledge, and effective action while being reasonably hopeful about the children and their families coping with adversity. They demonstrated how hope is relational, practical, realistic, open, and uncertain at times. For example, interventions can be specifically design to assist them in the process of developing narratives of self and community that affirm their resilience and builds on it. In his work on narratives and identity, Polkinghorne (1988, p. 150) viewed the narrative character of life as “an expression of a single unfolding story,” its dialectic character makes people review and rereview their stories as new experiences enter in their lives. He argues that identity should be viewed as a process of actualization of what is potentially possible in a person’s life. For him, “The emphasis changes from ‘What I am’ to ‘Who I am?’ This ‘who’ is found in the person’s actions . . . ” (p. 152). The development of self-stories has a performative character involving a person and audiences. Thus, stories about the self are open-ended, and combine social context, events, imagination, and personal history. In this context, the community mothers’ narratives reflect their awareness, knowledge, compassion, action, and hope. Strengthening these themes in their narratives can further affect the children and the whole community in positive ways.

Unlike other studies, these mothers did not show awareness of equity issues relative to class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. When probed about these issues only one Afro-Colombian woman articulated how racism exists in her community and how race and class interact in the Colombian society to place her where she is in the social structure. As in the teachers and vicarious resilience program (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014), these mothers came in with a very strong faith and spirituality was not something that emerged or developed in their witnessing the children and families change. Similar to all previous studies on vicarious resilience, these mothers spoke of compassion fatigue as an experience that is present and fluctuating in their work.

Methodological Issues and Limitations

We were aware that our findings are shaped by selection of the participants and the choice of interview questions. Participants were all committed women who had chosen to participate in ICBF programs with economically deprived children and families, and from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. As mentioned before, questions were adapted from a previous study on vicarious resilience with teachers in Cali, Colombia (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014). We took into consideration the level of community mother’s low level of literacy, and cultural meanings embedded into the questions. The authors attempted to account for our own biases by using triangulation techniques. It is still possible that our expectations influenced the findings and that other dimensions of the phenomenon remain undefined. In addition, generalizability is limited. Future research can further explore the components of the vicarious resilience phenomenon, the dynamic process through which it affects and empowers these community leaders working with underserved populations, and what specific practices could help professionals benefit from vicarious resilience processes.

Finally, it seems that the development of community settings involving attunement and reciprocity fosters a mutual history of recurrent interactions in which the adults and children involved may develop congruency and mutual impact for the benefit of all.

Implications for Practice

Edelkott, Engstrom, Hernandez-Wolfe, and Gangsei (2016) posited that the concept of vicarious resilience must be explored in more depth outside the field of torture treatment where it was initially conceived. This research builds on the work of Acevedo and Hernandez-Wolfe (2014) within the Colombian social context and specifically with community mothers.

We believe that is especially important to strengthen communities who have historically faced a variety of adversities in order to promote empowerment and self-determination. A focus on community mothers, educators, and other leaders’ own experiences of overcoming adversity, and the positive impact that children and adolescents may have as a result of overcoming adversity, may be covert, subjugated stories that have the potential to significantly influence the use of self as a lens that balances the painful and difficult aspects of work in communities who have suffered trauma with those that bring hope and promote growth. This is especially important in the context of hope that the Colombian peace process has generated.

Further efforts at integrating and refining the themes that emerged in this study may involve addressing the parallels between the helpers’ life trajectories and their desire to help others and children and adolescents whose life trajectories involve both traumatic experiences and active and sustained efforts to help others.

Those who conduct training using as a frame the concept of vicarious resilience must be careful to avoid minimizing the impact of working with complex traumatic stress and continued exposure to trauma. This study suggests that it is possible to undergo positive and negative psychological processes as a result of exposure to trauma in those whom we work. Helpers can be potentially transformed by their clients’ trauma and resilience in ways that are positive as well as not pain-free.

In the Colombian context, communities and relationships are at the heart of the social fabric, and despite the presence of overlapping forms of adversity, what sustains social coherence and cohesion is a network of social valuing mechanisms by which citizens relate to each other (Hernandez, 2002). A key aspect of community resilience is the construction of collective meaning, coherence, and purpose to create a foundation for collective mobilization, especially in communities where “we” takes precedence over “I.” Oppressed communities have historically developed resilience from the tests that social, political, and natural disasters have brought to them, as is the case of Ferguson’s (1994) work with African American youth.

Implications for Research

Future research should continue to privilege local knowledge about aspects of vicarious resilience that may be play a key role for specific communities (Ungar, 2008), and that may signal the need for new areas of intervention. For example, Acevedo and Hernandez-Wolfe (2014) found that Colombian educators were aware of the need to attend to the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexual orientation played a role in a child’s coping with adversity. This was not a theme present with the community mothers that participated in this study. Exploring the need or lack of thereof with the latter population will provide insight in to how they construct with each other what community means to them and who belongs to it. Ungar (2008) posits that evaluating the influence of specific aspects of resilience on health outcomes within context is essential to generate the greatest impact. In this case, it is necessary to expand and refine the themes relevant to community mothers: solidarity, empathy, reassessment of one’s problems, affect regulation, client inspired hope, expansion of relational skills, changes in interpersonal relationships, and perspective taking.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Victoria Eugenia Acevedo, PsyD, is a professor of master’s in family studies at the Department of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia. She conducts research in the areas of family, educational, and community resilience. She leads resilience programs for teachers and community leaders in Cali. She is also a psychologist in private practice.

Pilar Hernandez-Wolfe, PhD, is an associate professor, Marriage, Couple, & Family Therapy Program, Department of Counseling Psychology, Lewis & Clark College, AAMFT-approved supervisor. She has published widely on applications of systemic and contextually responsive models to clinical practice and clinical supervision, vicarious resilience, traumatic stress, and decolonization. She is visiting professor in the Family Therapy program at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia.

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