The Car Accident

As in past blogs, I’m going to present a challenge from the game, “Bounce Back,” which has been developed into an electronic game that will be available on the Internet in the fall of this year. The game is a tool that we have been using in teaching the skills and attitudes of resilience. It is a serious game, meaning that it teaches skills that ask you to apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience to a specific challenge and describe how you would respond to that challenge using these skills. And just like life, we don’t know what challenge we will be dealt.

This one involves a car accident. After a car collision on the Interstate caused by Kelly texting and driving, Kelly finds herself in the hospital with minor injuries. Next door, she can hear the doctor and parents of a person that was put into a coma with severe head injuries from the same accident. It doesn’t sound good. The doctor enters Kelly’s room and is asking her permission to let the coma patient’s parents speak to her about the accident. Kelly is wracked with guilt, unsure how the conversation will go moving forward. She agrees to see the parents. What skills and attitudes should Kelly apply in this situation?

This is obviously a difficult situation for Kelly. She feels responsible for the accident.  She will have to really manage the strong feelings that she has if she is going to be able to communicate with the other patient’s  parents. She will need to try to make some connection with these people and will need to use the communication skills that she has to understand what they are requesting of her and to communicate to them the feelings that she has about the situation. 

After the conversation, she will need to connect with others who can support her. And she will need to talk about the feelings that the conversation brought up. She will need to take care of herself.

We would encourage you to talk with others about this situation. Some of your family and friends may have been in a situation like this. You may come up with other skills and attitudes that you could apply to the situation. As we have said in earlier blogs, every situation and every individual is different. Again, we would encourage you to think this through and to talk with others about how they have dealt with similar situations.

We have found over the years that using this game encourages people to really think about what they would do in a specific situation and requires them to actually demonstrate how they would apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience to the challenge.

So talk about it with others. We will present another challenge in our next blog