After Trauma, New Strength as Well as New Scars (Wall Street Journal)
This is an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 18th, 2015
Who is happier, the winner of a lottery jackpot or someone confined to a wheelchair after an accident? The answer seems obvious—the lottery winner. But it isn’t that simple.
For her 2013 doctoral thesis at Harvard, a young psychologist named H’Sien Hayward surveyed 50 individuals who had been paralyzed in accidents decades earlier, 50 lottery winners who had received an average prize of $6 million about a decade earlier, and a control group of 50 people who hadn’t experienced a major calamity or windfall. Despite their radically different experiences, each group reported similarly high levels of happiness—and the accident survivors said that they took pleasure in daily activities slightly more than did members of the other two groups.
You might think that good fortune would lead to happiness, tragedy to suffering. But that’s not necessarily so. Trauma causes terrible psychological pain, but it can also spark positive change.
For decades, psychologists studied only the downsides of surviving trauma: anxiety, fear, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, depression, even post-traumatic stress disorder. For their part, therapists focused on helping survivors return to being the same functional people they were before some terrible event upended their lives.
But many psychologists now say there is no return to normal. Trauma is a breaking point in a survivor’s life. They are left transformed. Part of that change involves anguish, but research increasingly shows that suffering can catalyze life-altering growth. Survivors are forced to think differently about themselves and the world.
