Spirituality and Resilience in Trauma Victims
Coping
This article argues that spiritual and religious beliefs can impact individuals’ ability to cope with traumatic events.
Narrative building
Religious beliefs can help people cope with traumatic events through aiding them to build narratives based on health perspectives which may facilitate the integration of traumatic sensorial fragments in a new cognitive synthesis, helping to synthesise traumatic experiences and decrease post-traumatic symptoms.
Negative coping
Religious coping is not always related to better outcomes. Negative religious coping; fears that God has abandoned them or questioning why bad things happen to them, can lead to negative mental health outcomes.
Comment:
This article contributes to the large corpus of psychological literature providing evidence for religion and spirituality’s impact on religious coping. However, like the majority of this literature, this article is based in the high-income context of the US.