Trauma: Get Over It

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The former healer found himself swept up in an existential crisis. His identity fell away and left him with no choice but to dig deep within. It was then that he bumped into a spiritual core that had long been dormant, rediscovered his faith, began going to church, and regained his desire to live. He turned his energies toward mentoring youth in faith and writing a book on spirituality. 'This is a typical example of posttraumatic growth,' Ai says. 'He has found a new meaning and purpose in life.'

This sort of clarity in the wake of trauma is widespread. Tedeschi and Calhoun show that people who have survived an astonishing range of trauma-triggered by events such as a death in the family, being held hostage, sexual assault, or medical emergency -- all report coming out of the experience with positive results. Matthew Sanford, who at 13 was paralyzed in a car crash that killed his father and sister, puts it this way: 'I think that I'm a better person than I would have been.'

It's tempting to think of posttraumatic growth and posttraumatic stress as two opposite ways of coping with a crisis. But the truth is more complicated than that. Some behaviors fit both conditions. For example, some friends of mine who lived through the Viola tornado told their story over and over again -- they couldn't stop talking about it. Psychologists call this 'rumination,' and it has long been linked to depression. It's also linked to posttraumatic growth. 'You can have high levels of PTSD and still have signs of growth,' explains Ai.

The bottom line is that trying to separate 'positive' growth from 'negative' stress is like trying to extract the yeast from the bread: What causes spiritual renewal is struggling with the effects of trauma. Gina Ross, in fact, calls trauma one of the 'four paths to spirituality,' along with prayer, meditation, and sexuality.

Yet most of us don't look at a tornado or a car crash and see spiritual renewal -- our culture, and especially our medical establishment, focus almost exclusively on the negative side of trauma. According to the New Scientist (Dec. 3, 2005) psychiatrists at Harvard are even working on a drug to selectively erase flashbulb memories. Currently, doctors 'pathologize' the victims of trauma, says Ai, as if the mental suffering that results from a sexual assault or a car crash were some kind of illness. Instead, she argues, 'We should facilitate their growth. And spiritual growth is part of it.'

Our cultural goal seems to be just the opposite: not to face trauma and heal it, but to avoid it altogether. Failing to grasp this element of renewal, we are increasingly ruled by fear and anxiety. Signs of this anxiety are everywhere: the requirement that we remove our shoes before boarding an airplane; hypervigilance over our children (padded playground equipment, metal detectors in schools); our overreliance on antidepressants. All these measures share one thing in common: They do virtually nothing to prevent us from experiencing trauma when things go wrong.

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