Dr. Don Marks Gives Special Presentation on Resilience

By Tyler Clark|Published by March,15 2021

Dr. Dennis Klein, Director of Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, invited Dr. Don Marks, Director of Clinical Training for the Psy. D Program at Kean, to his virtual Zoom class for a presentation about resilience on Feb. 23 2021.

Dr. Klein also invited three Holocaust survivors Evi Blaikie, Hans Gesell, and Felice Stokes to speak about their experiences with resilience.

The presentation was a part of Dr. Klein’s “History of the Holocaust Part 2” course. He also refers to the class by it’s informal name “Resilience in the Age of Atrocity”. It is one of the courses in the Master of Arts Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Kean University.

The title of Dr. Marks’ presentation was “Exploring Psychological Resilience: New Insights from Contextual Behavioral Science”.

“The dictionary definition of resilience is the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc., robustness, adaptability,” Dr. Marks said.

Dr. Marks spoke about the term “psychological flexibility” and how it can serve as an alternative way of looking at resilience.

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends,” Dr. Marks said.

The presentation explained how someone could develop psychological flexibility during an event such as the Holocaust by using meaning-making. Human beings are natural storytellers and can use trauma as a way to connect with others.

Dr. Marks explained that when someone experiences a traumatic event, meaning-making can help change the memory of that event. A memory that was terrifying can become a shared experience that forms connections such as the Holocaust.

The presentation showed that these connections are important for a person to develop psychological flexibility because developing psychological flexibility relies on having a nurturing community.

Dr. Marks’ presentation was followed by a conversation with three Holocaust survivors, Evi Blaikie, Hans Gesell, and Felice Stokes, who were children at the time.

Blaikie mentioned how the process of developing resilience takes time and is not easy.

She spoke about how she doesn’t remember what life was like before the Holocaust. Her earliest memories were of being hunted and constantly having to hide. Blaikie spent many years building resilience in order to overcome her trauma.

Stokes recalled how her parents were sent to Auschwitz and killed when she was 5. After that, she lived in various orphanages near Paris before moving to America. Developing resilience was hard for her because she was constantly being moved to new environments with new people.

Gesell was six at the time of the Holocaust. He believed that it was important for survivors of trauma to share their stories.

In his old age, Gessell has realized that talking about his traumatic experiences during the Holocaust can be helpful to others who have experienced trauma in their lives. He feels it is important to share these experiences because in the future there will not be anyone alive who has directly experienced the Holocaust.

“Soon there won’t be anyone directly involved with these experiences. It’ll only be the people that we talk to who will know what happened and it’s important for those people to realize that these were real events. This is not something that was made up. This actually did happen,” Gesell said.

---