Trauma: Get Over It

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Our problem, Scaer says, is that we keep our fears, anxieties, and sadness bottled up inside us: 'We don't throw ourselves on the coffin of our loved one or tear our clothes and wail, or really do anything to discharge our losses. So they stay in our unconscious and our bodies.'

The good news is that trauma could be a powerful untapped force of cultural transformation. 'When a woman is in childbirth she goes through excruciating pains, but after, there's a hormone that erases the memory of the pain,' says psychotherapist Gina Ross, founder of the International Trauma-Healing Institute. 'I have thought, 'Why didn't God do that for trauma?' But you need the pain and you need the screams and you need the cries to be able to work on fixing what created the trauma. The Jewish mitzvah tikkun olam calls on us to repair the world [through social action]. Trauma helps us to focus on that work of repair.'

Last summer, the day after a tornado touched down in the small town of Viola, Wisconsin, my friends and I drove out to see if we could help with the cleanup. When we arrived, we discovered that folks from all over the county had had the same thought. Clumps of people gathered to tell stories and shake their heads. Guys brought their trucks and bulldozers to help drag trees off the streets; someone on a four-wheeler drove around with a cooler handing out bottled water.
Even as outsiders, we all felt the charged emotional atmosphere of the town: grief at lives disrupted, awe at the power of the storm, relief at having escaped, and an almost euphoric excitement at a world turned upside down. We went home to dinners that tasted just a little better, with families that seemed just a little more dear than they had the day before.

These conflicting emotions point to one of the central paradoxes of trauma: In the midst of the deepest suffering lie the seeds of growth, change, and hope. In 1995 psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term 'posttraumatic growth' to describe the flowers of hope and renewal that can grow from the ruins of a catastrophic event.

Their work suggests that trauma upends our psyches in much the same way that the tornado tore up Viola. When an accident or disaster strikes, to say nothing of a deliberate act like torture, the old ways in which we saw the world no longer make sense. We ask, 'How could this happen?' and 'Where was God?' And by slowly struggling to answer such questions, we develop a new and deeper understanding. We grow.

'Trauma turns the internal world upside down, and afterward a new worldview is built,' explains Amy Ai, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the interactions among faith, optimism, and trauma. By way of example, Ai describes a friend and colleague -- a renowned doctor who had built a successful private practice and earned a prestigious appointment to a medical school. At the age of 62, he suffered a heart attack followed by a stroke. 'He lost the capacity to drive; he couldn't handle his practice. He had lost his purpose. He felt like a useless person. He had a broken heart and a broken mind,' Ai says. Eventually he was placed in a psychiatric unit under suicide watch.

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