Term 1: let the games begin!

Well this is my first post on my first blog, not bad for a technophobe! Anyway down to business.
My collection this year will be based around the exploration of resilience. I want to explore if poetry can or does play a roll in resilience from trauma, both personal and on a global scale. I have been researching poets whose backgrounds have exposed them to trauma, either on a personal level or through political persecution due to religious beliefs or ethnicity.

I have been reading The Holocaust is Over We Must Rise from its Ashes by Avraham Burg
Avraham a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) writes of the current position of Israel and Jewish people worldwide, putting forth the radical notion that Jewish society must stop living in the shadow of the Holocaust. He shows that the Jewish people have been traumatized and therefore have lost the ability to trust themselves, their neighbours, and the world around them. This distrust has led to growing nationalism and the violence that is plaguing Israel and reverberating worldwide.
For me what has been interesting in terms of this project is that it seems to be that the author is saying that the Jews have lost their ability to be resilient. The extreme trauma of the past stops all Jews even those personally untouched by the Holocaust to move forward in a positive way. In the book he gives the example how all Israeli children are taught in schools that ' we are all Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) survivors' he says 'only my youngest son Noam did not join this trend(to see himself as a survivor). He like me, does not want to base his his Israeli, Jewish and universal identity on the worst trauma of human experience'
From this I begin to see the importance of resilience and the negative long term issues that can arise when we lose the ability to be resilient.
I understand what he is saying personally. For many years I identified my self as a survivor in
my case of sexual abuse. This label that I gave myself had a similar outcome to survivors of any trauma, it dictated how safe I felt in the world, what I could and couldn't do and really held me back from creating the future I wanted. One day I too like Avraham Burg saw how being a survivor kept me chained to this trauma, a prisoner of a label.
Why and how are some people able to access their resilience in times of great trauma and others are completely devastated by it?