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In fact, everyone has the ability to overcome adversity and recover from trauma.

Editor’s note: Illness, divorce, love affair, violent injuries, traffic accidents, natural disasters. People always regard such experiences as scars that plague their lives, and therefore become prisoners of post-traumatic stress. . And Psychologist Stephen Joseph Combining a large number of real-life cases with cutting-edge psychological research, introduces a new science-post-traumatic growth Psychology , trying to tell everyone that everyone has the ability to overcome adversity and recover from trauma. If you are also suffering from stress and trauma, perhaps this book “I can’t kill me will make me strong: post-traumatic growth psychology ” can help you heal the pain you have suffered.

Adversity becomes a catalyst

In the past 20 years, I have devoted myself to studying the impact of adversity on human psychology. This book is the result of all my thinking and research over the years. Needless to say, I have experienced many adversities myself and they have opened my eyes. As a psychotherapist, I help people through difficult times; as a psychology researcher, I have read the personal statements of countless people who have suffered trauma. I am more and more convinced that people will grow up after the disaster. I want to share with readers my experience as a scientific researcher and psychotherapist in this book. I also tried to answer this question: Why would someone live a better life in the same adversity?

The core idea of ​​this book is the “shattered vase theory.” Suppose you place a precious vase in a safe and secure place in your home, but one day you accidentally knock it down. Sometimes the vase is broken, but the bottom of the vase may be intact and repair can be started on this basis; but sometimes, the vase is shattered and looks completely impossible to repair.

So what would you do? Trying to put the vase back into place with glue and tape? Or pick up the pieces and throw them into the trash, because the vase can no longer be repaired? Or pick up beautiful and colorful pieces and make them into something new, such as colorful mosaics?

When disaster strikes, people often feel that some of their hearts have been smashed-such as the world view, their views on themselves, or their close relationship with others. Some people just want to restore their life to the original situation, but they will still feel frustrated and weak. Others choose to accept the reality, have a new understanding of themselves and the world, and dare to try a new life. This book is based on my many years of scientific research and clinical experience, Hope to help readers pay attention to, understand and consciously control their thoughts and behaviors, and lead a better life after adversity.

Adversity will undoubtedly bring us great psychological pain. We know that extreme fear can cause high levels of psychological stress, which can last for months or even years. Not everyone will fully show symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but most people will experience emotional fluctuations due to post-traumatic psychological stress. Why are some people more vulnerable to trauma? How can we better help others get rid of the negative effects of post-traumatic stress? These issues have been studied in detail over the past decades. People have even developed “cognitive-behavioural treatment” to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. This type of treatment seems to be effective, with thousands of people already benefiting from it; thousands of trained mental health professionals continue to promote trauma therapies around the world.

Helping people to heal psychological trauma has developed into a specialized industry. Practitioners include consultants, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, and their development has grown by leaps and bounds. This is of course a good thing, isn’t it? If in the past, I might agree. But as I shifted my research interest from post-traumatic stress disorder to post-traumatic growth, I began to question the trauma industry and its impact on the human spiritual world. With our increasing attention to post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma industry is constantly expanding, and the concept of post-traumatic growth is completely shrouded in its shadow. When we understand how humans adapt to adversity, we tend to be too one-sided, focusing only on the negative effects of trauma.

However, the impact of trauma on the human spiritual world is not limited to post-traumatic stress disorder. We need to consider various factors such as physiology, culture and politics in order to decide how we should deal with adversity and live out the value of life. The intricacies of these issues have caused me three concerns about the trauma industry. Will the success of the trauma industry have unintended consequences and cause new problems?

First, the trauma industry is keen to use medical terms. Post-traumatic stress disorder has become an independent diagnostic category that can effectively assess human mental pain. But the trauma industry uses a lot of medical language and treats therapists as doctors, as if patients don’t have to do their own efforts, they can rely on others for rehabilitation. Moreover, the word “patient” has its own problems. It describes an abnormal state and refers to a person who is mentally impaired, disabled, dysfunctional, or disordered. This kind of medical vocabulary implicitly shifts the individual’s responsibility for recovery to the therapist. However, trauma is by no means the same as a disease that can be cured by a doctor. Psychotherapists can indeed provide guidance and professional escort on the road to mental rehabilitation, but in the final analysis, people must shoulder the heavy responsibility of rehabilitation and find the meaning of life.

Second, the trauma industry has led people to form some kind of misunderstanding about post-traumatic stress disorder: Post-traumatic stress disorder can neither be prevented nor unavoidable—people who experience disasters must be psychologically shocked and develop Post-traumatic stress disorder must require professional psychological assistance. This may be true for some people, but research in the past decade has proven that trauma witnesses do not necessarily need long-term assistance, and people often overestimate the harm caused by trauma. If people are repeatedly told that they are very vulnerable and need professional assistance, then they will think they are indeed. But research tells us that most people are not so vulnerable when they suffer short-term trauma. They either have enough psychological resilience to counteract mental stress, or they can recover quickly, and their psychological function will remain at a high level. This is the message that this book really wants to convey: most people have enough resilience to cope with the tragedies, misfortunes, and disasters that come suddenly.

The third concern has been mentioned earlier: if the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are alleviated, people will think that the treatment has been successful. This ignores the fact that most people have sufficient psychological resilience, as well as the growth of people after trauma-many people have lived a more meaningful life after adversity. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a complex and multi-faceted mental state, which can cause stress and help people grow. People may find a way to repair the trauma and turn the trauma into an advantage. In the past, people only regarded post-traumatic growth as a special case, as an anecdote that occurred only in a very small number of people—and post-traumatic growth is actually an inherent part of trauma. If the psychotherapist fails to observe the possibility of post-traumatic growth in the inquirer, it is undoubtedly a help.

Simply put, post-traumatic stress disorder as a diagnostic category can help people in need to seek professional psychological treatment. But it also has three drawbacks: people are no longer responsible for their own recovery; they give people false expectations; and they ignore personal growth after trauma. This book strives to break this one-sided understanding and prove that trauma not only has negative effects, but also positive effects, which are related to each other. I can’t agree with today’s trauma industry. I think that post-traumatic stress disorder is a natural process for humans to adapt to adversity. It also marks the beginning of personal transformation. To recover from trauma, people need to find new meanings, form a new understanding of things, and find the key to healing the soul. Post-traumatic stress response can be understood as the process by which humans explore the meaning of life. In this process, people need to constantly remember and think to understand those traumatic events that bring great psychological shock, discover the truth of life, and achieve a new life. . The central point of this book is that post-traumatic stress disorder is the driving force for self-transformation. This kind of self-transition is also called posttraumatic growth.

In recent years, many people have begun to study post-traumatic growth. Some start early, others start late; no matter who it is,It is a long way to go. The theory of post-traumatic growth itself is not complicated, but it has been overshadowed by psychiatric research for decades. Psychiatry focuses only on pain, not on the changes that result from it.

Humans tell stories. Trauma will trigger our switch, and we need to understand all the disasters that occur by speaking to people. While talking to family, friends, or colleagues, we are telling traumatic stories, and the way we tell them is influenced by newspapers, television, books, songs, and poetry—they provide language, sound, and Image mode. In the process of telling the story, the transformation also happened a little bit. By understanding the traumatic event, we have grown up ourselves.

Book Title: “I Will Kill Me That Will Make Me Strong: Post-Traumatic Growth Psychology”

(What Does n’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth)

Author: [English] Stephen Joseph (Stephen Joseph)

Translator: Qing Tu

Publisher: Beijing United Publishing Company

About the author

【英】 Stephen Joseph

Professor of Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK. Leader of Psychotherapy and Counseling Research Group. His research fields include human response to traumatic events, post-traumatic stress and growth, counseling and psychotherapy, and positive psychology.

Registered Senior Psychotherapist at the British Psychological Association and Registered Health Counseling Psychologist at the British Health and Occupational Care Council.

A PhD from the London Institute of Psychiatry, focusing on disaster survivors and how they re-adapt to society.

Writing regular columns for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today.