Six Phases of Resilience

Theory of change

The person and their system change when the trauma can be recognised, made safe, shared, integrated into a coherent history, transformed into agency, and can open processes of reconciliation and repair.

Core ideas

1. Trauma needs to be recognised before it can be worked through

   The model places recognition of the trauma as the first phase because many patients arrive with serious experiences that have been normalised, denied, hidden or reinterpreted by themselves, their families or even professionals. Not knowing prevents facts, emotions and consequences from being connected and can become a second traumatic blow when the environment disconfirms or trivialises what was lived. The intervention begins by restoring intelligibility to the experience and recognising that certain events or deprivations were relevant to the present suffering. (Selvini, 2024, «Las seis fases de la resiliencia»; Selvini, 2022, «Comentario a la reedición en español del artículo Secretos familiares. Cuando el paciente no sabe»).

2. Safety precedes disclosure and deep processing

   The second phase establishes a rule of clinical timing: recognising a trauma does not authorise exposing the person immediately to all of its content. The disclosure of secrets or emotional deepening requires sufficient internal and relational safety, because a premature intervention can reactivate fear, confusion or retraumatisation. The therapist therefore first assesses whether the pain is still active, what supports exist and what conditions must change before moving on. (Selvini, 2022, «Comentario a la reedición en español del artículo Secretos familiares. Cuando el paciente no sabe»; Selvini, 2024, «Las seis fases de la resiliencia»).

3. Pain shared ceases to be an isolated experience

   Putting pain into words constitutes a phase in its own right because relational trauma is usually accompanied by silence, shame, secrecy or the absence of an interpersonal response that recognises the experience. Sharing the suffering under safe conditions allows previously encapsulated emotions to be received, mentalised and linked to an intelligible history, reducing traumatic loneliness without turning emotional expression into an end in itself. (Selvini, 2022, «Comentario a la reedición en español del artículo Secretos familiares. Cuando el paciente no sabe»).

4. Integration requires a coherent history connecting trauma, defences and identity

   The fourth phase seeks to enable traumatic events, emotions and survival strategies to be situated within a coherent biographical narrative. The integrated account makes it possible to understand why certain responses became necessary, how they influenced development and what effects they maintain today, avoiding both fragmentation and an identity absorbed by the trauma. Family history thus becomes a tool of continuity and mentalisation. (Selvini, 2022, «Comentario a la reedición en español del artículo Secretos familiares. Cuando el paciente no sabe»; Madonini & Scoglio, 2023).

5. Resilience includes recovering the capacity for defence and agency

   The fifth phase introduces a movement from helplessness towards action: recognising that someone was the victim of real harm is compatible with helping them stop organising the present exclusively from that position. Completing the defensive action means recovering the capacity to protect oneself, to set limits, to choose and to take responsibility for what does depend on the person now, without turning that responsibility into blame for what was suffered. (Madonini & Scoglio, 2023; Selvini, 2014).

6. Relational repair forms part of the treatment of trauma

   The model culminates in reconciliation and repair because many of the traumas studied arise and are maintained within significant relationships. Recovery may require changes in the acknowledgement of harm, in responsibilities, limits, forms of care and relational rules, and not merely an intrapsychic modification in the patient. This orientation maintains the systemic tradition of intervening on the small communities in which the person lives. (Madonini & Scoglio, 2023; Selvini, 2024).

7. Person and system are two inseparable levels of the same formulation

   The proposal arises from an explicit self-criticism of forms of family therapy that lost sight of the patient's singularity, and it also distances itself from interventions that isolate the individual from their relationships. The systemic family-individual model integrates personal history, personality functioning, attachment, trauma, family dynamics and social context in order to understand how one and the same relational experience can generate different individual responses and how the environment can contribute both to the harm and to the recovery. (Selvini, 2014; Selvini, 2024).

8. Post-traumatic defences are attempts at survival rather than defects of character

   Responses of fight, flight, freezing or submission, and protective, punitive, submissive, seductive or self-sufficient reorganisations, are read as solutions that made it possible to regain some degree of control in the face of situations of fear or disorganised attachment. This reading transforms the clinical formulation: the therapist tries to understand what function the defence served, what cost it produces now and what alternative can replace it without depriving the person of a protection that was once necessary. (Selvini, 2014; Selvini, 2024).

9. Family, network and community can be active therapeutic factors

   Resilience is understood in individual-systemic terms because the presence of supportive figures, conditions of safety and social resources can alter the course of the trauma. The model retains family therapy's historical aspiration to intervene on the real and community conditions that make harm or protection possible, so that the network acts not merely as context but as part of the mechanism of change and of the prevention of further traumatisation. (Selvini, 2024, «Las seis fases de la resiliencia»).

10. The six phases are a recursive map and not a rigid ladder

    Recognition, safety, shared pain, integrated meaning, agency and repair describe clinically distinguishable tasks, but the real work may move forwards and backwards among them. A new secret may return the process to recognition, a relational crisis may require fresh safety, and a failed repair may reopen pain or meaning. The model's usefulness lies in locating which task dominates now and adjusting the goal to that phase rather than mechanically completing a sequence. (Madonini & Scoglio, 2023, review of «Le sei fasi della resilienza»).

Influences

• Systemic family therapy
• Attachment theory
• The theory of interpersonal motivational systems
• Psychotraumatology
• Dissociation theory
• Resilience
• EMDR

Key references

• Selvini, M., Fino, L., Redaelli, L., & Senatore, A. (2022). Le sei fasi della resilienza. Un modello di terapia sistemica del trauma. Libreria Cortina Milano.
• Selvini, M., Sorrentino, A. M., & Gritti, M. C. (2012). Promuovere la resilienza «individuale-sistemica»: un modello a sei fasi. Psicobiettivo, 3, 32-51.
• Selvini, M. (2014). L’integrazione della diagnosi di personalità e dei funzionamenti post-traumatici nel pensiero sistemico. Ecologia della Mente, 37(1), 49-59.
• Selvini, M. (2022). Comentario a la reedición en español del artículo «Secretos familiares. Cuando el paciente no sabe». Vincularte. Revista Clínica y Psicosocial, 7, 19-22.
• Selvini, M. (2024). Las seis fases de la resiliencia. Introducción. Vincularte. Revista Clínica y Psicosocial, 10, 3-14.
• Madonini, L., & Scoglio, C. (2023). Recensione: Le sei fasi della resilienza. Un modello di terapia sistemica del trauma. Rivista di Psicoterapia EMDR, 43, 38-39.