Post-Traumatic Growth Syndrome

Today is Memorial Day–a day when we’re all supposed to stop and remember the high cost of war and those who sacrificed their lives, or the quality of their lives, in service to their country. I say “quality of their lives,” because in addition to the many who never come home from armed conflicts, or come home missing limbs or basic capabilities, there are many thousands more who become the walking wounded; veterans who struggle for years afterward to find a way to integrate back into a “normal” society after witnessing and experiencing horrors those of us who never served cannot even begin to imagine.
The emotional scars of battle trauma existed long before any psychiatrist came up with the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” or PTSD. World War I veterans came home with permanently darker views of the world, and many World War II veterans refused to ever speak about what they’d been through overseas. (A note on that: I highly recommend the 1950s film “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” as an early attempt to explore and publicize that struggle for returning WWII veterans). The difference now is that we talk about it more. And more mental health professionals are focusing on coming up with better treatment options for it.
But a New York Times magazine article I read this spring got my attention, because it described a different approach for coping with post-traumatic stress–one that not only resonated with my own experience and philosophy, but which also is very much in keeping with the message of this website. In the mid-1990s, two researchers at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, discovered that trauma could have more than one effect on individuals. Immediately, of course, it was, well … traumatic. Stressful, debilitating, painful and difficult. But they also discovered that many people who’d been through serious traumatic experiences also reported, down the line, that they had “a renewed appreciation for life, they found new possibilities for themselves; they felt more personal strength; their relationships improved; and they felt spiritually more satisfied.”
To put it in my own terms, what the researchers discovered was that the traumatic path those people had walked had, for them, been something of a hero’s journey: dark and difficult along the way, and scarring in ways that would never heal completely, but ultimately transformative in ways that vastly improved both their lives and their ability to cope with whatever came after that.
Interestingly enough, the U.S. Army has now integrated that approach into an official training program to try to give soldiers the psychological resiliency to look past the pain of trauma to the possibilities for growth the experience might also offer. The program was spearheaded by recently retired Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum–who many people would recognize as the Army flight surgeon who became a POW after her helicopter was downed in the first Gulf War, killing five on board. Cornum was pinned under the wreckage but managed to crawl out despite two broken arms, a bullet in her back, torn knee ligaments and numerous other injuries. She was then sexually assaulted on the way to prison. And yet, Cornum later told a TIME magazine reporter that while being a POW was “a rape of your entire life,” she said what she learned “in those Iraqi bunkers and prison cells is that the experience doesn’t have to be devastating, that it depends on you.”
One could argue that a woman with that approach to facing death, assault and imprisonment and who made her way through a predominantly male hierarchy to become a Brigadier General doesn’t actually need a hero’s journey. But the point of the Army training is to try to give everyday soldiers the kind of psychological perspective and strength to enable them to search for the learning amidst the pain.
I’m not convinced that every painful experience in life has something to teach us, other than how much damage we can sustain and still keep breathing. And even the psychologists focusing on Post-Traumatic Growth say that growth is not a given for traumatized individuals. What’s more, the truth is that growth and pain can co-exist. And sometimes, the growth only happens some time after the pain lessens.
But I think the article is well worth reading, for anyone. And the idea of post-traumatic growth certainly resonates with my own life experience and philosophy. I wouldn’t wish a near-fatal car accident like the one I had when I was 20, living in New Zealand, far away from family and friends, on anyone. But having been through that experience, and fighting for not only my life, and my sanity, but to somehow find a way to re-integrate into a society filled with people whose lives were still untouched by tragedy, unquestionably transformed me and formed the basis of the life I have lived ever since. A life, I might add, that is far richer, more grounded, and better quality than the one I might have lived, had that accident not happened.
Hero journeys are not always sought. And sometimes, they consist of realizing how much a difficult or traumatic experience has taught us … or can teach us, if we step back a little and look at more than just the ugly scars it left. As Richard Tedeschi, one of the UNC researchers who first coined the phrase “Post-Traumatic Growth” put it, “The challenge is to see the opportunities presented by this earthquake. Don’t just rebuild the same crappy building you had before. Why not build something better?”
Indeed, it is the building of something better that distinguishes a hero’s journey from a victim’s tragic tale. So there’s important lessons in this topic for all of us. But it’s also encouraging to see a program that’s trying to help soldiers and veterans work their way through the darkness of their pain to the epic hero’s triumphant Return we wish they all could have.