For Most Trauma Victims, Life Is More Meaningful
As the nation mourns its losses and worries about the future, some health experts point to recent, largely overlooked evidence on the psychological impact of violence that may encourage distraught Americans: Most victims of trauma recover, and many say life is better and more meaningful than before disaster struck.
Research on many thousands of traumatized people, from prisoners of war to rape victims to those injured in car accidents, has led hardened clinicians to appreciate human nature’s resilience.
“The bottom line is that people recover and go on to do amazing things with their lives,” said Dr. Sandra Bloom, a psychiatrist who founded a Philadelphia hospital that treated about 7,000 patients with trauma-related psychological problems.
Work by Bloom and others delineates the large and small steps by which traumatized individuals most commonly “transform” misfortune into a life-enhancing event. Most important, they say, is to strengthen social ties and resist the temptation to withdraw and brood.
On a broader scale, social psychologists who have studied towns devastated by hurricanes or floods refer to “disaster rebound,” the process of rebuilding a community so its members are more satisfied than they were before.
This growing body of research into “post-traumatic growth” or “perceived benefits” counters some experts’ predictions that the nation faces an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological afflictions stemming from last month’s atrocities.
Generally, 25% to 30% of people exposed to serious trauma develop post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition lasting months or years that is marked by agitation, fear, depression and other symptoms severe enough to disrupt a patient’s life.
Some researchers specializing in trauma expressed reluctance to discuss growth response so soon after the terrorist attacks, given that this new war is just beginning and the wounds to tens of thousands who have lost loved ones are still raw. But others said the findings offer encouragement to people who were directly affected as well as to the millions made anxious watching television coverage of the largest terrorist attacks against the U.S. in history.
In a soon-to-be published summary of the research to date, Richard Tedeschi, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, says more than half to two-thirds of victims studied say they benefited from the trauma in some way. And every indication is that they initially endured as much pain as people who didn’t fully recover, he said.
Among the studies that support the notion of post-traumatic growth, he said, is one of burn patients, many of whom said the experience made them better people. In other research, many cruise ship passengers who survived the vessel’s sinking later said the experience gave them new strength. In a study of Vietnam-era prisoners of war, nearly two-thirds said they were more content, stronger and wiser than they were before their captivity.
“For individuals as well as communities you can see alterations in their values, in their orientations to life and a new direction into the future,” said Dr. Robert Ursano, chief of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., and co-director of its Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress.
Most people recover naturally, without therapists’ help, and do so fairly quickly, Ursano said. For instance, in a study of people in serious motor vehicle crashes, researchers found that 35% had post-traumatic stress disorder after a month, about 18% after six months, and 9% after a year.
In a study by Ursano and co-workers of military personnel who handled the bodies of sailors killed in the 1989 accidental explosion aboard the battleship Iowa, 10% had symptoms of the stress disorder after a month, but none had symptoms after a year.
Experts say it’s hard to predict who will bounce back, but they can identify some of the most distinguishing characteristics of resilient people. Ursano said those include a tendency to see crises as challenges rather than problems; optimism as opposed to pessimism; and a preference for socializing instead of withdrawing.
Likewise, Bloom, now the director of CommunityWorks, a consulting firm specializing in safety issues, said the most important ingredient in recovery is to remain connected with other people--friends, family, community members. Professional help is necessary in only the most extreme cases, she said, adding that that holds true for Americans who are troubled now. “The nation doesn’t have to go into therapy,” she said.
There are five ways in which a person may grow after a trauma, Tedeschi said. They develop a greater appreciation for life; deepen spiritual beliefs; feel stronger and more effective; grow closer to others; or pursue unexpected paths.
As an example of a life positively transformed by trauma, he mentioned a patient who had been a rock musician until he was paralyzed in a car crash. He eventually became a rehabilitation counselor and told Tedeschi that his new career was so fulfilling that the experience was all for the best.
Another aspect of successful recovery is recognizing that life will never be quite the same, researchers said. “After a trauma, you don’t go back,” Bloom said. “It can never be undone, and you have to find meaning in the event, build a new future. And to do that you have to grieve first for what is lost and what has changed.”
Also, trauma victims who fare best are those who allow themselves to experience their feelings of anxiety, depression, fear or agitation.
Feeling the traumatic emotions without yielding to despair is known to some researchers as “active surrendering.”
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, a University of Massachusetts social psychologist, studied trauma victims extensively for her 1992 book “Shattered Assumptions.” What happens to them applies to what the nation is going through now, she said.
“We have an assumption about being invulnerable. We know bad things happen in the world, but we assumed they wouldn’t happen to us,” she said.
In that sense, recovery entails forging a new middle ground between the extremes of believing the world is perfectly safe and terribly dangerous.
John Harvey, a University of Iowa psychologist and editor of the Journal of Loss and Trauma, said some of the anxiety and sadness following the terrorist attacks may reflect the surfacing of the fear of death itself. “At some level we all see ourselves in the stories about people who have lost loved ones,” he said.
Clinical researchers see much value in the advice of national and local leaders to return to normal routines following the attacks--an important step for trauma patients. “There’s resolve and resolution to it,” Janoff-Bulman said. “Moving on is not just a distraction, it’s basically a rebuke. It’s showing how strong we are.”
At the same time, experts caution that current knowledge of how individuals and communities handle trauma isn’t necessarily a guide to how Americans will cope with the attacks and the threat of further attacks.
Indeed, growth in response to a stressful event appears less likely to occur when the perceived danger persists over time and remains unresolved. For instance, some research on residents of neighborhoods known to be polluted by toxic chemicals have found higher than normal levels of anxiety, depression, high blood pressure and other symptoms of stress.
Also, it’s early yet in the terrorism crisis. “Most of the psychological literature on coping with traumatic stress focuses on how people deal with the aftermath,” said UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor. “And we’re still in the midst of this.”
Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard University psychologist, said people are generally not good at forecasting their feelings. When they’re in bad emotional shape they tend to think they’ll feel similarly in the future. He speculates that this negative forecasting bias developed because it’s useful, serving to overestimate risks and steer people away from dangers.
But that also means they tend to underestimate their capacity to recover, he said. “It’s not that things don’t hurt,” he said. “It’s that they don’t hurt quite as long or as much as we think they’re going to.”
Philosophers, religious leaders and common sense have long acknowledged humanity’s ability to overcome trauma. “The only thing science can add is the knowledge that it’s not a rare attribute,” Gilbert said. “It’s a hallmark of the human mind.”
