Life Events Kept in Secret Destroy the Resilience Important for Successful Aging

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For some decades the medical interview has been aimed not only at establishing a diagnosis, but also at determining the patient’s state of health and quality of life. In the field of geriatrics, conversation with the patient intends yet to assess the extent of physical fitness and mental performance impairment as well as to evaluate the risk factors which lead to a decrease in mental capacity and also the patient’s socalled psychological resilience, which determine the favorable course of aging. Researchers enumerate some kinds of factors determining mental resilience, e.g. pride in one’s personality, positive family relations, empowering relationships with professionals, the so-called ‘power of giving’, a balanced view on life and so on. There are, however, very few guidelines in geriatric literature on how to obtain this ‘balanced perception of one’s own life’. We do not find such tips either in the papers of authors who write about assessing the so-called ‘trajectory of life’.

We have presented recently an attempt to formulate a method of insight into the way we remember and even how we arrange the remembrance of own biography. As we emphasized, one should pay attention not only to biographical facts but also to important ‘psychological transformations’ concerning decisions on one’s own further anticipated actions and behavior.An example would be the decision that, “it is not worth striving for good grades in school or even to get a formal education because prosperity in life depends on other conditions” or for example, “that monogamy is not an advantageous pattern of behavior”.

Moreover, in our view, so far geriatric researchers have not paid enough attention to the kinds of extremely important facts which determine the course of life, resulting from dramatic, often hidden biographical events such as exclusion from family, broken family ties, sexual abuse like rape, incest, the suicide of someone close, the death of the mother in childhood, war or disaster experiences. They cause so-called entanglements, and sometimes incline one to acts of revenge or plans to take vengeance. As we mentioned, various literary works contain thrilling descriptions of such key mental changes. The content of the novel “Fates and furies” by Lauren Groff can exemplify such descriptions.