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Sunday Salon Announcement:
Your Body Is Innocent / Sunday, March 23, 1 - 2:30 pm PDT / 4 - 5:30 pm EDT
If you’ve struggled with feeling negative emotions about your body and want to learn how to stop sending it negative messages, this workshop is for you. We’ll use inquiry (Byron Katie’s Work) to question your thoughts about your body and discover what’s true instead, which is what your body has done for you in your life. The body is your truth teller. You’ll forgive your body and yourself for what you’ve experienced.
The workshop is free if you’re a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Otherwise, it’s $49. Alternatively, you can become a paid subscriber and attend my quarterly workshops for free. Questions? email sherold@sheroldbarr.com
Photo: Nurses who cared for me at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego (one year after the near-fatal car wreck in Baja, Mexico, in 2017).
For some people, post-traumatic growth (PTG) can lead to unprecedented psychological strength and optimism.
After I was removed from the ventilator I’d been on for a week, I was brought back to my room on the neuro-surgical floor at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego.
I soon realized I didn’t need any more certifications for work to prove myself. Almost dying from repeated abdominal surgeries caused by blunt-force seat belt trauma woke me up to what was no longer necessary. There were no shoulder harnesses, only lap belts in the van we were riding in as we returned from whale watching in Baja, Mexico, that day.
My life as I knew it was over.
I didn’t know if I’d make it during two weeks of five abdominal surgeries. I began to fear more complications from my small bowels would never end. A few days after each of the four surgeries, my doctor would tell me I needed another surgery.
Rummaging around in my hospital patient care bag, I found earplugs and an eye mask. I was pleased. Now I had a way to shut out the outside world of the hospital with all its noise and blaring announcements overhead, Trauma Team A to the ER; or Trauma Team B to the ER.
After my third abdominal surgery, I had a spiritual awakening (a near-death experience) that gave me hope in the midst of all I was going through. It gave me a roadmap for how to live after I recovered. A voice said telepathically, “You get to choose how you go through this situation. What will you choose?
I didn’t want to be a victim, so I chose the high road and used love and gratitude to heal.
As I lay in my hospital bed with earplugs in my ears and my eyes closed under an eye mask, all I wanted to do was sleep. I was so exhausted from a life of striving. Sadly, I realized I had an excuse to rest for the first time.
Although I experienced post-traumatic stress from the accident, I knew I could look for new possibilities in my life.
I believe every trauma and challenging experience in life has a lesson for me to learn. I was open to learning.
Psychologist Jean Rhodes of the University of Massachusetts-Boston spent more than a decade studying what happens to people years after surviving Hurricane Katrina.
Rhodes and her team had been studying the health of young parents attending community college in New Orleans since 2003. When Katrina hit in 2005, they realized they had two years of health data from before and after the natural disaster.
Their data became the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina Project (RISK), which showed Katrina's impact on mental health.
They found surprising results. Sixty percent of people’s mental health returned to normal after the storm.
About twenty percent saw their anxiety and depression increase and persist.
Rhodes said there were two ways people were doing better:
“Their psychological functioning, about three to five percent were doing better on indices of anxiety and depression. There's also this other interesting, unexpected finding. That's something called post-traumatic growth; this is the flip side of post-traumatic stress. They often go hand in hand.”
Rhodes said they learned there is a critical period after the trauma. If you’re not exposed to more trauma or stress, you can begin to reflect on and appreciate your life more. You can feel a sense of strength having gone through the trauma.
Rhodes told NPR, “We found what was different from Katrina was pet loss. People were not forced to choose between staying with their pets versus evacuating. Because of that, there was less stress and trauma….Five years after Hurricane Katrina, we saw that the loss of a pet was one of the three biggest predictors of depression and anxiety.”
Hurricane Katrina was a game changer in so many ways. Seventy-thousand people refused to evacuate, many because their pets would be left behind. Thanks to Congress in 2006 and the Pet Act, animal rescue policy is forever changed.
Why do some trauma survivors thrive?
“You can be anxious and suffering from post-traumatic stress and still have post-traumatic growth,” said Rhodes.
The research found that stress was the fuel for growth.
This stress catalyzed these women's rethinking of their lives and caused them to experience an “existential awakening.”
Spirituality can play a role in growth after trauma
How people think about fate may be predictive, says Rhodes.
Your personality plays a role.
Happiness seems to play a role in those who experience post-traumatic growth. Some people struggled because they tried to create the same life as before.
Other people noticed the difference and saw ways to improve life.
“We’re learning that for post-traumatic growth to occur, you have to be able to stick to one place emotionally, where you can step back and begin to process everything,” says Rhodes.
“One of the things that we know about exposure to natural disasters is that there's kind of this critical period where if you're not exposed to additional stressors and you can begin to process and make sense of what happened, you can begin to heal. It's almost like a concussion — if you are continuously hit with new stressors after the initial stressor, it makes it much harder to heal.”
What is Post-Traumatic Growth?
PTG is a positive psychological change that can occur after a traumatic event or life crisis.
It doesn't deny that distress can occur but that adversity can change how people understand themselves, others, and the world.
PTG can occur naturally but can also be facilitated through education, emotional regulation, disclosure, narrative development, and service.
Examples of PTG:
Appreciation of life
New possibilities in life
Personal strength
Spiritual change
Changed relationships with others
Feeling stronger and more self-confident
Post-Traumatic Growth Assessment
The Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory is a 21-item scale based on Tedeschi's five-factor model. It is considered one of the most reliable and valid ways to measure personal growth after a stressful event.
The development of the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory is an instrument for assessing positive outcomes reported by persons who have experienced traumatic events. This 21-item scale includes sections about New Possibilities, Relating to Others, Personal Strength, Spiritual Change, and Appreciation of Life.
Download the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory and find out how you score.
Women tend to report more benefits than men, and people who have experienced traumatic events report more positive change than people who haven’t experienced extraordinary events.
The scale appears helpful in determining how successful individuals are in reconstructing or strengthening their perceptions of self, others, and the meaning of events when coping with the aftermath of trauma.