Beyond recovery from trauma: implications for clinical practice and research - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 1998 by Lawrence G. Calhoun, Richard G. Tedeschi

The Struggle Toward Wisdom

We have described elsewhere the relationship between recent conceptualizations of wisdom and posttraumatic growth (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 1998; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995). One reason traumatic events may be "wisdom-facilitative" (Baltes, Staudinger, Maercker, & Smith, 1995) is because there is such a strong element of affect in the experience of trauma, and wisdom appears to have a strong affective component as well. It is not merely intellectual understanding. The demolition of old cognitive structures that provided a map for life and the struggle to rebuild are experienced, not merely observed.

Survival in the midst of this chaos appears to involve the experience of paradox that is such an important element of wisdom. The discovery of creative coping approaches that embrace paradox lead to the recognition and management of uncertainty. For example, to manage trauma one must be active, yet let time take its course; one must accept help, yet recognize that ultimately no one else can manage the trauma; and one must acknowledge that the trauma must be left in the past but also woven into the future. Discovering and experiencing this in the posttrauma struggle involves the joining of the intellectual and affective in a powerful new recognition of what it means to survive, then thrive.

Growing by Explaining

Perhaps one of the last phases of growth involves being able to describe it to oneself and others. This is not as easy as it seems, because the changes that occur are phenomenological to a great degree. But until trauma survivors can construct personal narratives to organize information about themselves (McAdams, 1993), positive change may be experienced as tentative or ephemeral.

The stage must be set for the personal description of change by the thorough telling of the events of the trauma, and perhaps of life before the trauma. This provides context for the changes that could be perceived as growth, and of course drains away some of the distressing emotions so that growth issues can be considered rather than clouded by the distress. We see clinical intervention as an essentially continual process of narrative development, where the events are retold many times, with new details included in each version, and the aftermath of the trauma is revised in each telling and by each telling.

A Brief Case Example: Struggle and Growth

Ashlee F. was a client in her thirties whose husband had been murdered in a robbery that turned into a hostage situation at a fast food restaurant. After a long and futile attempt to negotiate with the robber, the police mounted a swift assault on the restaurant building, but her husband was killed by the criminal before the rescue attempt could be successful.

In her conversations with a psychologist several months after her husband's death, several things were noticeable. Ms. F was still quite depressed and still experiencing significant grief. However, she also reported that her sense of strength, her ability to live independently, and her general sense of being closer to something transcendent had never been stronger. She indicated that she had begun work within her religious denomination to develop support groups for parents of gay and lesbian children and to help work toward full acceptance of gay persons within the religious community of which she was a part. Her interest in providing support to parents was unrelated to any direct experience of her own but had grown out of an increased sense of the need to "do something to help other people who are also somehow in pain." Her husband's death had also produced a significant degree of questioning about religious and spiritual issues, and she had not yet resolved these. She still believed in God and felt herself more spiritually aware, but as for the 55-year-old woman described above (Yalom & Lieberman, 1991), the fragility and unpredictability of life now were much more salient for her. In thinking about her life, the sudden death of her husband had now become a major element in how she viewed her own history and her own future: His murder divided her life into a before and after.