Is There a Positive Side to Tragedy?

Upside:  The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon, Touchstone Books, 2015.  Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.  Visit his author website at jimrendon.com.

Wouldn’t it be sort of obvious that we almost always learn and change the most through difficult times? It is, but if you think about it the heaviest emphasis in the past couple of decades has been on the negative consequences of trauma, especially with the official diagnosis of PTSD—post traumatic stress disorder. And there is no doubt that those who have experienced pain, injury, disaster, and loss often, indeed almost always, suffer from all kinds of lingering issues, from flashbacks to sleeping problems to depression. Yet we know that we also grow from those experiences. As I read this book I realized that there has often been an either/or, all-or-nothing school of thought about trauma. Either I learn and grow, or I am a lesser person than I was. The message of this book is that it can be both. The author, veteran journalist Jim Rendon, begins by telling about his father, a Holocaust survivor. On the one hand, the negative one, his father sleeps poorly and is sometimes consumed by anxiety. On the other hand, the positive one, he is full of humor and compassion. “All that he lived through, all that he survived, all that he lost, left him changed and some of those changes have been truly positive” (xv).

That’s just in the introduction to this wonderful book. Rendon then goes on to explore many examples of people who have grown through adversity, from cancer survivors to accident and natural-disaster survivors to grief survivors. He has read the literature, but, more importantly, he has talked to the people involved. The many stories of adversity and tragedy that fill this book are its heart; if you skipped the psychological theorizing and just read about the people (which I did at least some of the time), you would come away uplifted and grateful for what you have experienced yourself, however bad it may have seemed at the time. I was irresistibly reminded as I read this book of Joni Eareckson Tada, the wonderful Christian author, artist, and activist who was paralyzed from the shoulders down at age 17, and of my own son, whose bout with cancer last year will, I’m sure, continue to shape his perceptions and attitudes throughout the rest of his life. (I was tempted to try to interview him for this post: “What did you learn from your cancer?” But . . . sometimes the parent has to take precedence over the blogger.)

The saddest stories aren’t about the people who’ve suffered illness or injury themselves but about those who have seen those they love suffer, especially their children. The chapter “Bonding with Those Who Get It: How the Sad Dads Saved Each Other” is about those who have lost children to cancer. As you can imagine, the chapter really hit home to me, as there was a time last year when I wondered if I was going to be such a parent. I love this quotation from a man who lost his five-year-old son: “I may be a broken man, but a broken man can help somehow” (204). He has gone on a mission to help fund efforts to find new anti-cancer drugs, founding the nonprofit Solving Kids’ Cancer.

And indeed the most common change that has happened in the lives of those profiled in the book is a move toward helping others. A particularly striking story in a book full of striking stories is that of former Marine Jake Harriman who saw an Iraqui man’s family wiped out by insurgents; he became consumed with the desire to help relieve the poverty that he believed was fueling terrorism and founded Nuru International, which seeks to help the poor help themselves. The main point for me in this story is that, while others might see Harriman’s life as sacrificial, he is happy doing what he does and would be miserable working for a lot of money, something he certainly could be doing. One of his friends says, “He sees how fragile life is, how brief it can be, that there isn’t time to waste” (234).

The book ends with a discussion of happiness, a subject of course dear to my heart. I hadn’t realized that modern psychologists have come up with two types of happiness: hedonic and “eudaimonic.” The first term should sound familiar, as I wrote a recent post on the “hedonic treadmill.” As Redmond says, “This kind of happiness may lead to a lot of fun, but it is often fleeting and lacks greater purpose.” Eudaimonia, on the other hand, is the type of happiness you feel as you stand in a refugee camp handing out food: it “is deeper and related to pursuing personal growth and becoming a better person” (243). How biblical these ideas are! Jesus said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25 KJV).