The story of Abed provides context for considering the importance of attending to complexity. Abed identified his problem as needing asylum. His story illustrates that the ‘overwhelmingness’ of severe forms of adversity can lead to oversimplification and polarised perceptions where refugees are seen as ‘traumatised’ or ‘resilient’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘vulnerable’ and those working with them as ‘omnipotent’ or ‘impotent’.‘Discerning complexity’ means appreciation that reality includes both polarised positions, and much more.Abed recognised how he and agencies he had encountered had co-constructed a ‘trauma narrative’, an oversimplified picture of himself as damaged and vulnerable. His trauma story had become his identity story, a ‘narrative passport’. In therapy he became aware of important events and experiences excluded from this story and of how he had been able to retain many previous strengths as well as developing new ones.The ‘Adversity Grid’ is outlined as a framework for grasping the wider consequences of exposureto adversity, and ‘synergic therapeutic complexity’ as aperspective that enables caregivers to connect their own strengths with those of their beneficiaries.

Restoring health to casualties of the Civil War functioned as a work of unprecedented national literary repair. Soldiers, caregivers, and civilians experienced wounding, illness, and convalescence as conditions that not only imperiled the physical body, but also symbolically disrupted the national body and psyche. Such disruptions were as visible in Whitman's poetic sites of caregiving communion as they were in the turbulence of Chesnutt's or Tourgée's Reconstruction stories, where Black heritage functioned alternately as contagion or reclamation. In fiction, poetry, and memoir, period writers explored the intimacies of caregiving, raising bedside and battlefield encounters to a trope whose racial and gendered valences limned the tragedies and absurdities of war-time loss. Describing a range of traumas from physical pain to the compromises of disability, they oversaw the emergence of the hospital narrative as a budding literary genre that, in coming to terms with the medical crisis of the war and its aftermath, established the genre that we prize today.