Author: Susie Wiet
It was when I had a conversation with Dr. Tasneem Ismailji, a pediatrician visiting from the San Francisco Bay area, about the importance of letting primary care practitioners know that resiliency from trauma was indeed possible that the idea arose to create the tool. It is called the Health Resiliency Stress Questionnaire (HRSQ). The goal of the HRSQ is for it to be easy and quick to complete by patients and an easy way for the provider to see patterns and respond accordingly. One of the main functions of the HRSQ is to help practitioners ask some tough questions to the patient and for the patient to feel heard. The effect that negative emotional states have on the health and wellbeing of the physical body has been researched extensively. It has been shown how simply being listened to, heard, and validated can be tremendously healing. 
Feelings have become taboo in our culture. Usually the word “feeling” is associated with being overly emotional or having an emotional breakdown, especially in the medical field. Instead, we must reframe our cultural ideas of “feelings” from being negative to becoming associated with acceptance of who we are through validating and seeing our own and others’ feelings clearly. It is through the experience of being seen and validated that one can begin to truly heal. The HRSQ gives providers of all kinds the tools to have those difficult conversations in order to see and validate their clients, which could potentially result in the reduction of unnecessary primary care visits in the future.
The HRSQ is free. Some long-term goals for the tool is to help the provider be able to suggest self-help and coping strategies to their patients and for this to be successful over time. You can access the tool using our electronic version here. Our PDF version is here. Read the full article here.