In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 6: Poly-Strengths and Poly-Victimization

A convo with Sherry HambyJan 18Time: 29:57

Sherry Hamby joins us on this episode of Tell Us About It to expand on the topic of “poly-strengths,” as well as her work in resilience as a tool for victim services. Dr. Hamby is a research professor of Psychology at the University of the South and is most widely known for her work in poly-victimization and developing measures of violence. She is currently the Director of Life Paths Appalachian Center and Co-Chair of ResilienceCon. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today, and many more media outlets.

 

Transcript:

Susan Howley: Welcome to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos, a podcast from the Center for Victim Research with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On each episode of Tell Us About It, we talk to researchers and practitioners about their work, the tools being built for use in the field, and how we can work together to build an evidence base for victim services. I’m Susan Howley and on today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Sherry Hamby. Sherry is the Director of the Life Paths Appalachian Research Center and Co-Chair of ResilienceCon, an international conference addressing all aspects of resilience, strengths, well-being and adversity in individuals, families, and communities. She is also a research professor of psychology at the University of the South and is best known for her work on poly victimization and developing measures of violence. Welcome Sherry.

Sherry Hamby: Thank you for having me, Susan.

Susan Howley: Sherry, can you start by giving us a little background on your work regarding victimization and trauma issues?

Sherry Hamby: I’d be glad to. I have been working on issues of victimization and trauma and trying to reduce people’s burden of violence for over 20 years now, both as a researcher and a psychologist. In terms of my research, I have published over 200 articles, as you noted in your introduction many of them on polyvictimization and measuring violence. And I also am the founding editor of The American Psychological Association Journal Psychology of Violence. Last year, I was very delighted to be awarded the Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Science of Trauma Psychology by APA Division 56. But I also think it’s important to note that I’m originally trained as a clinical psychologist and have also been engaged in grassroots activism and have experience doing crisis intervention and therapy and all kinds of other clinical work.

Susan Howley: Wow so you have long resumes on both sides of the partnership: practitioners and researchers.

Sherry Hamby: Yes I think that’s just a nice way of saying that I’m getting to bea certain age but I embrace that fully. Yes, I’ve spent most of my adult life working on these issues in different capacities.

Susan Howley: Well, you mentioned your work on polyvictimization. What drew you to that area of trauma research?

Sherry Hamby: Originally, I started off with my primary interest in domestic violence and that’s what I did my dissertation on. And then when I did my postdoctoral fellowship at the Family Research Lab with David Finkelhor and Murray Straus, that sort of expanded into family violence. And it was really each time you add another piece, whether it’s sexual assault or child abuse or whatever, you just start to see all of these interconnections and so it’s been, well this year actually, just 20 years. So we started in 1998, David Finkelhor and I, working on what we hoped would be a broader measure that would more fully capture the true burden of victimization in people’s lives.

Susan Howley: Wow since 1998 and yet, people still see polyvictimization as kind of a new concept but I guess it has just taken a while for it to resonate with the field.

Sherry Hamby: Well you know when we start something that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s out there for the field. Most of our first papers on that didn’t start coming out until the early 2000s and then some of the key findings that I think have become best known in the field were really not until 2005 to sort of 2010 range. And so it’s a long, slow process to try to launch a brand new research program like that.

Susan Howley: And just as the rest of us are catching up with polyvictimization, you’re on to a newer but related concept of polystrengths. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Sherry Hamby: Sure. So I think maybe it’s – as I mentioned I’ve done a lot of clinical work and one of the big insights, definitely, from working with individuals and families and communities, has been that you can’t just isolate some single event of domestic violence or bullying or child abuse or whatever the case may be and that you have to understand the whole web of violence sometimes we say. But at that same time, I also slowly, very slowly, started to realize that the way I’ve been trained and the things I was trying so hard to master when I was a graduate student and an early career professional were not really the way that people wanted exclusively to be seen. They didn’t just want to be seen as a victim and it was slowly through that that I realized that we were missing a big piece of the puzzle. If you talk to people about how they overcame violence, they don’t really talk about that in terms of well you know and that was the day my T-score for depression dropped below 60 or something like that. They talk about the sort of turning points and major changes in their lives that help them to achieve thriving and well-being, and so I got very interested in trying to understand that pathway to healing and back to thriving and not just a burden of victimization.

Susan Howley: So why is a strengths lens important for working with victims of crime and other trauma? What would you say to victims service providers?

Sherry Hamby: Well you know I think I would just offer a story from my own clinical work. Back in the 90s, when I was still very much using the traditional lens of danger assessment and safety planning with survivors of domestic violence, and I can remember that there were so many women but there was this one who I think makes a good example. Someone who was an EMT, so a woman who was working full time, was saving other people’s lives and she came in to see me because of her experiences with domestic violence. So I did what I do when anyone comes into my office, I gave her a dangers assessment. We used to Jackie Campbell’s tool and conducted safety planning, which at that point in time mostly meant recommending that they go to a shelter and get an order of protection and often not too much else besides that. And she came out on these measures, the same way that almost every woman I’ve ever talked to who sought help during a crisis or for a domestic violence, as being very high risk. And so I told her I was worried about her safety and that I would be happy to help place her in a shelter. And she was like, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got this job. This was in a very rural area, as most of my work has been, so it was 45 minutes to the closest shelter, if you could even find a spot in that one, and then the next one past that was a good two hour drive from her home each way. She’s like, I can’t do my job if I move that far away and she’s like I’ve got a plan. I think I can start saving some money, I’ve opened a savings account in my own name. I think if I put my name in now for housing that I can save enough money to pay all of the deposits in about six months and then that’s what she ended up doing and then she kept her job the whole time. And I just realized that our framework just didn’t really, especially at that point in time, have anything to offer somebody like that. And she was a very strong woman. Like I said, like me and you and probably almost everybody who will listen to this webinar, she was dedicated to helping others and saving other people’s lives, and she didn’t want that part of herself to be taken away just because she needed help for an abusive relationship. And so those sorts of stories eventually took a while because I was always trying to be a good student and do things the way they’re supposed to do when I was in school. But it took me a long time to realize that, you know, maybe some of the things that we were being taught are not really like the end of the story or not really the best fit for every woman and that’s how I got interested in resilience.

Susan Howley: Yeah I’ll bet this resonates with a lot of our listeners right now. So can you tell us some of the things that you’re learning about polystrengths as you have turned to that direction of research?

Sherry Hamby: Sure. So polystrengths is basically this idea that parallels polyvictimization and it’s this idea that it would be good to have a portfolio of different types of strengths or – to use a terminology that probably a lot of people use in their work – to have a toolkit of different assets and resources you can draw on to deal with different kinds of adversities and traumas. One of the things we have learned from the polyvictimization work is that almost everyone will probably experience some kind of victimization or especially other adversity by the time they reach adulthood. The rates run anywhere from 65 percent of adults with pretty short scales to up to 90-95 percent with more comprehensive measures. So you need to have different assets and resources that are going to help you with these inevitable ups and downs of life. Polystrengths is one way of kind of capturing how many of these different assets and resources that you have, and it sort of fits into our broader conceptualization of resilience portfolios.

Susan Howley: And how does the concept of post-traumatic growth fit into this? I’ve heard about that a little bit.

Sherry Hamby: Well so one of our outcomes that we’re interested in is post-traumatic growth and I think it overlaps very closely with the way that a lot of people think about resilience. I mean, this tends to be another area that can get kind of siloed and specialized and I think people are often talking about very similar ideas, even though they’re calling them different constructs. And so I would never say that that trauma or other adversity is good. I mean, you can definitely see a very strong dose effect, that one trauma is harder than none, and two is worse than one, and three is worse than two. But it is nonetheless possible that people can take these very bad experiences and be resilient afterwards and use those as opportunities for growth that can help them re-establish their priorities, that can make them think about their relationships with families, that can help them find their own sense of purpose or meaning in life. And so there are ways that that can feed into resilience. Although that’s not the only thing that we mean by resilience. We mean we have a very broad definition of it, and so we like to think about all different types of well-being, so not just psychological well-being but also physical and spiritual well-being.

Susan Howley: One question occurs to me: so much of the focus and discussion around polyvictimization and maybe even polystrengths has been focused on children and adolescents. Do the same lessons apply to adult victims?

Sherry Hamby: Yes absolutely. Polyvictimization has most commonly been used as a term with studies on children and adolescents, but it’s starting to move into studies with adults too. For example, Carlos Cuevas has done some work on that. But there’s also this very closely related line of research on adverse childhood experiences and you’re probably familiar with some of that work that was started by Vince Felitti and Bob Anda. And in that work they look at people who are even in their 50s and 60s and older, and you can still see the physical and psychological burdens of adversities from their childhood. And some of my recent work, and some other people’s too, are expanding the assessments of victimization and trauma into adulthood as well.

Susan Howley: And then the polystrengths – I know you talked about how the concept started occurring to you in your work with adults. So is a lot of the polystrength new area of research looking at adults or is that looking at adolescence as well?

Sherry Hamby: We have done studies with both adolescents and adults. You know it’s funny, it’s just one of these weird things about the way research gets started, but because of the way that IRB ethical approvals go and sometimes people’s research interests, there’s a lot of work on adolescence and then there tends to be, as you already noted with your earlier question, this separate body of work on adults. And one of the things we’re very interested in, because we think it’s such a key developmental stage, is what that transition from late adolescence to early adulthood looks like. So in a lot of our studies, we include both adolescents and adults and then that allows us to look at that transition from 16 and 17 to 18 and 19 and in the 20s. Instead of, right now there’s kind of this black box of like what your life is like up to 17 and this whole body of work on that and then there’s this whole separate literature on 18 and above and so we’re trying to bridge that in our work.

Susan Howley: And how do you think that the polystrengths concept intertwines with that transition period? Do you think it has any particular importance or why would you focus there?

Sherry Hamby: Sure so well like I said we were partly interested in focusing there because it clinically seems like an important transition period and we knew so little about it originally. And I realized this was sort of wishful, but my original hope was that we were going to be able to identify these key strengths that were sort of equally important across the lifespan because that would be so great for people working in any kind of advocacy or clinical setting, right? If they could have this single package of strengths that were just as relevant at age 12as they were at age 63. But that hasn’t really turned out to be the case, which is probably not that surprising. I think that there are a couple of strengths that fit that category. So for example, a sense of purpose and meaning making seems to be really important, even for young adolescents, as well as people across the lifespan. But there are other strengths that we’ve been studying that seem more important for adolescents. For example, adolescents seem more effected – and of course, once you see the data, these kinds of things always makes sense – but they seem a lot more impacted by the social ecology. So their circumstances with their families, their school climate, the engagement of their teachers. These are some of the things that are coming up as important for adolescents. You can see in some of our data that, although school climate and teacher engagement are most important for adolescents, the impact of that never goes away, at least up until like your 50s and 60s, which is about as old as we’ve gone with that. It diminishes, so it matters less to a 50 year old what their high school environment was like than it does to a 16 year old, but it never completely goes away. And then there might be some other strengths that also are more important, like impulse control, as I’m sure anyone listening would know, is a lot more variable among adolescents and younger adults and I think it may be because of that increased variability that it looks like it might be important for younger people. By the time we’re all in our 40s and 50s, so many of us have mastered that that it doesn’t show up as being quite as important, although there are still some things that like sense of purpose, as I mentioned. Another one that really seems very important across the lifespan is a new construct we’ve been working with called Recovering Positive Affect and it’s the sort of positive side of self-regulation. A lot of work on emotional regulation only focuses on being able to regulate negative emotions, like distress or anger. But what we keep hearing in all of our interviews and focus groups with people is that the way that they cope with things was kind of learning to make light of it or see the humor in it and so we wrote a measure to try to capture that ability to kind of get back into a good mood and be able to see the humor in something. Not necessarily like serious traumas, of course, but just in general like how long does it take you when you have your sort of daily aggravations to let go of those and get back into a good mood where you can still enjoy your friends’ company and things like that. And that seems to be something that’s also quite relevant across the lifespan.

Susan Howley: Wow, yeah I can see that. Now, what can victim service providers take from this? How can they start to incorporate a polystrengths focus in their own work to the benefit of the people they serve?

Sherry Hamby: Well I would say two things to that. On the first side, I would think about assessment and the way that you do your intakes. We first realized this when we started doing some pilot work for The VIGOR, which is are our free safety planning tool that you can get online at thevigor.org. And what people told us and the women in those first two pilot studies – every single solitary one of them had already been through traditional safety planning and traditional crisis intervention. They were all recruited from people who were receiving domestic violence services already. And in some of the cases, they had been quite heavily system involved for many years. And yet nonetheless, over and over again, I can’t tell you how many of them came to me and said, This is the first time that anybody’s ever asked me if I had anything positive going on in my life.

Susan Howley: Wow.

Sherry Hamby: Yeah and that is just such a powerful experience. Or I can tell you, we were collecting some of our recent data at a clinic that serves families where the children have been victims of abuse and they put this into their intake for us and then we went to collect our tablets – we needed to borrow the devices to go and do a data collection at another institution where we needed more devices – and they were like well, when are you going to bring those back? Because the families and the children were enjoying filling out this these intake forms, believe it or not, just because they gave them the chance to say something positive and to start this conversation off not only about like symptoms and what happened to you and what’s wrong, but what what are the good things in your life and what kinds of assets and resources do you already have that could be part of the solution toward getting you and your family back to where you want to be. And so that’s just been a really powerful process that we’ve just seen over and over again, and so I would really recommend making some space for that in your intakes. And then in terms of intervention, the one that I am just a huge fan of, that I think can be so easily integrated into a wide variety of settings, whether you’re doing advocacy in a domestic violence shelter or working in schools or you’re doing any kind of support groups or therapy services, is narrative. Some people might be familiar with narrative from programs like trauma-focus CBT and some of the early work in other areas too also focused on narrative as a place to process trauma. But there’s also this whole other really large field of research in social psychology and developmental psychology and positive psychology that have looked at narratives as a tool for expressing your values or expressing important turning points in your life or people who had a big impact on you. And those other types of meaningful personal narratives also have tremendous evidence base behind them. The fantastic thing about narrative, which really you can’t say I don’t think about hardly any existing intervention program, is that it’s been tried in at least a dozen different ways and virtually all of those ways – as long as they ask people to reflect on something meaningful in their lives – show significant effects over time. Not only psychological effects, but there’s also been quite a lot of work that’s been done to even look at the physiological mechanisms and how processing important events, even over a short period of time, can help boost people’s immune systems, reduce their stress response, and just have a whole range of benefits. And it can be done in such a short period of time. Laura King, for example, did this study where she asked people to write about one of their most important positive experiences for just two minutes a day for three days, so a six minute total intervention, and still showed significant improvement several weeks later. But slightly longer ones, like 20 minutes a day for three days, or a couple of hours over a classroom setting where you’re working on it in class over a week or two, those have been shown to have long term effects that can go on for months or even beyond.

Susan Howley: So those are some real practical tips that people can use. What about ResilienceCon? Can you take a moment to tell us all the good work that’s happening at ResilienceCon to try to get people comfortable with the idea of thinking about strengths?

Sherry Hamby: I would love that. So ResilienceCon is really my passion project that I have been working on for several years now and it really has two separate aims. So one of them is the one that we’ve been talking about already, which is trying to get people who help those or who try to understand violence and adversity shift to a more strengths-based approach and to think about the true desired outcome is thriving and not just surviving. But it’s also, as someone who goes to a lot of conferences and who, probably like many of your listeners, I have to finish the continuing education credits every year, and as I’ve gone on, as we said now that I’m a senior person in the field, I just have become increasingly frustrated with how little I get out of a lot of those experiences and how you can make so much effort to make the opportunity to go and be in the same place with all of these amazing people and then be scheduled in such a way that you end up with almost no time to talk with them, and it’s very hard to meet people sometimes if you don’t already know them. And so what we’ve tried to do is not just change the content of ResilienceCon, but also the process and the way that we’ve done that is that we have been experimenting for several years with different types of session formats. We have been inspired by work in a lot of other fields, including fiction conferences and technology conferences and leadership and theology conferences. I’ve been going to conferences in all different other areas, and we’ve basically changed all of the sessions, from the keynotes down to any panel that anybody submits, so that the talking, that the traditional one-way speeches are shorter, we have a couple of different options for that, that are really fun to do, especially the 20-by-20s are a challenge. And then the second section, the moderator, instead of just being a time keeper, becomes a host and an interviewer and they really use that as a place to unpack some of the lessons learned behind the projects, to tell some of the professional stories. And it seems like it might be a small shift but it’s just amazing about how much more meaningful it is and how much more people’s passion behind their work comes across when they’re being interviewed by and talking to each other, instead of just getting up and giving a speech. And then the third section is this open Q&A. And we’ve tweaked lots of other elements of it too. It would take too long to explain them all but we’re really trying to disrupt business as usual in terms of the conference format and to create something that’s more impactful and more meaningful. And we are building a community that has just really come to mean a lot to me and I would love for other people to come in and check out the experience.

Susan Howley: So it’s a meaningful event about finding meaning and growing resilience. That’s really exciting.

Sherry Hamby: Yeah I might steal that.

Susan Howley: Looking ahead 5 to 10 years, where do you see all this work or this new work on polystrengths going?

Sherry Hamby: So one of the things that I think is most important for the second wave of resilience research is that we have spent a lot of the last maybe 15 or 20 years, when this work and resilience and positive psychology is really started to take off, just trying to figure out what good things work. And so we have a lot of research on, for example, emotional regulation programs versus nothing or social support interventions versus nothing or mindfulness versus nothing, but what we don’t have too much of yet is making head-to-head comparisons of these different promising programs. So I think in the next wave, what we’re really going to see – because of course when anybody in a practical setting is going to want to know is well I’ve got limited time and limited resources, should I focus on you know shoring up their emotional regulation or is it more important to help them develop their social support. They don’t just want to know that both of these things are good, they want to know which one is better and I think that’s where the research is going to be going in the next 5 or 10 years, is to really answer questions like that.

Susan Howley: Because you’re right, there’s a lot of good that could be done and people want to know where best to direct their efforts, so that would be a really exciting area of research. Well Sherry, I am totally jazzed about bringing more of a strengths focus to this work and I’m sure a lot of listeners are too. It has been such a pleasure talking to you today.

Sherry Hamby: Likewise. Thank you so much for giving me the chance to carry on about what has really become my own main mission in life. Tha