Video Transcript: Post Traumatic Growth

welcome back to mental health integration, week eight, part two, post traumatic  growth. I'm glad to be with you now. This week, we're going to be talking about  post traumatic growth, and I want to define post traumatic growth for you. Now  

everybody knows about PTSD, about how we can have negative symptoms  because of a traumatic event. But there is also an opportunity after trauma that  doesn't always happen, where someone can grow because of what they've  gone through. There's actually a fair amount of research on this. It's starting to  become a really cool research area, and so I'm excited to see what continues to  come out and develop as people develop better ways of looking at this, and the  science just continues to develop. Now how this is normally researched,  scientists will look at groups of people who have been through incredibly  traumatic events, whether that was battlefield soldiers or whether that was  victims of sexual violence, and they will look for how they are changing. They  will look for evidence of growth, or evidence of that trauma doing damage. And  what they have found is that not everybody experiences post traumatic growth.  It's not a case where everybody goes through that, but it is a case where when  someone does go through it, there is actually a process that is fairly  straightforward. Today we're going to be talking about that process. We're  talking about what it takes to actually grow through something traumatic, and  why that can be beneficial, being that mental illnesses can be kind of a traumatic thing. It seems that you would want to grow through it, especially when that's  been the focus of the last several sessions. So post traumatic growth happens,  depending on the statistics you're reading, in 30 to 70% of cases, or in 40 to  75% of cases, we could have been safe. And just said in 30 to 75% of cases.  But generally, the research is citing one of those two numbers, and the way that  post traumatic growth works is right here, and this is working this where we're  going to spend the majority of our time post traumatic growth happens when one we have a traumatic affecting event that's something that breaks us down,  whether that is a combat situation, Whether that is sexual violence, whether that is a mental illness, whether that is someone having a suicide attempt, whatever  it is that creates a space where we need to do some serious work. Coming out  of that we form core beliefs, and those core beliefs form an emotional security.  Now what happens is our assumptive world is now being questioned by this  traumatic event, right? We had our core beliefs, and they're somehow being  shaken. They're somehow being upset, and that is this trauma is now affecting  our ability to relate to ourselves and our relate to understand what's going on  with us. Our emotional security is threatened because suddenly we're not what  we thought we were, and now we have to start working through this  incongruence between our core beliefs and between what we feel. And you can  see Next we go to intrusive memories and images over dysregulated emotions.  Now we're in this spot where all of a sudden, we're having all of these things  flood our brains, because these intrusive memories are upsetting what we know,

and we're having these dysregulated emotions we can't figure out what's going  on. We're being upset, and in that place, we need emotional regulation. In order  for this work to happen, we have to follow all of these steps through the process. We have to go through our core beliefs being shaken. We have to go through  these dysregulated emotions, and we have to go through some sense of  emotional regulation. And the reason we have to go through that is because if  we don't have emotional regulation, our body can't stabilize enough to actually  do the work that will make this growth happen. It has to have some semblance  of stability. When it finds that semblance of stability, it can make change. But  what do we need for that sense of stability? Well, that's where we need things  like social support. We need occupational support. We need attentive  companionship. All of these things happen together. When they happen, they  give our body that calm so that we can continue to grow and develop. If we don't have that calm, it's too chaotic. We can't grow through what's happening in  education, and in other places, they talk about stress tolerance window, that  there is a specific window, and within that window we have an opportunity for  change. But if we exceed the window, if our stress is way up here, it exceeds  our ability to change, and because of that, it just overwhelms our system in a  place called like trauma. That's what's happening. The stress is way up here. It's upsetting, what's going on. So we need this emotional regulation to bring it back  within the stress tolerance window so that we can grow and develop. And as our stress tolerance window, as we grow and develop, it begins to grow with us. So  to go back to this, this emotional regulation, it takes people, sometimes it takes  things around us. It takes people who know what they're doing, and then in that  place, we can begin to work on the cycle between emotional regulation and  sense making. Now sense. Making is where we literally rewrite our own  narrative of what happened. We need to figure out what this traumatic event  was, how it affected us, what went on, how it's going to affect us, moving  forward, what actually happened, and as we begin to weave those pieces  together, as it begins to make sense in our own mind, our mind begins to take  power over the situation. Instead of the situation dictating us, we're learning and  growing into the situation, and we're able to exercise some sense of power and  authority over it. Now this isn't one shot, right? When you look at this graph, you  see this emotion regulation and the sense making their cycling together. And this is this chart is from the academic article that was in your homework for this  week. So they're going back and forth, and they're cycling back and forth over  the top of each other. And in that as we get sense making, the more we have  that sense making happen, the more we have opportunities for post traumatic  growth that emotional regulation allows the sense making. Sense making is  actually the thing that needs to happen, and as sense making happens. Post  Traumatic Growth happens, well being happens, and positive psychological  changes happen. Then we see as it pushes forward into career, proactivity, 

positive work, identity, pro social leadership. These are all from traumatic events that happen at work, but they all push post traumatic growth into any area of  your life, because this is the exercise and development of power in your  personal life over something that just grows and grows. So post traumatic  growth, the key to outcomes is sense making, or meaning making. If we can do  sense, making and meaning, making that makes it all possible. I want to tell you  a story about a dandelion. You know my story about mental health. I've already  told it to you, but when I was in college, I did this dandelion is that way? Okay? I  had to write a story of my life for a class, and I had to make a comparison of  myself to something else. And people wrote about all of these things, and I  wrote about a dandelion. My entire life, I had never actually been the best at  anything. I came second first. I came second. A lot. I came first. Almost never. It  was fitting that when I played baseball, my number was two, and two continues  to be one of my favorite numbers. But that was because that was the case  always I did Kung Fu and I was second when I got to be the best in my class, I  was immediately moved to a different class. So, I wasn't the best there either.  When I played baseball, I was good until pressure came. I was never even  second best. When I was a drummer in school, I was never. The best drummer  at my school. I was always the second best, regardless of what was going on.  Every year I was the second best. So I was never the fastest, I was never the  best. I was never anything, but I had an uncanny knack for coming back. So I  described myself as a dandelion, because growing up, if you wanted to kill a  dandelion, you could poison it, you could do whatever you wanted to it. But  somehow, at that point in time, they always came back. And that was me. I  wasn't the best, I wasn't the bravest, I wasn't the strongest, but I kept coming  back. I was resilient. The thing that Life couldn't do was kill me, because I kept  coming back. And just when someone thought they had stopped me out, it  turned that it wasn't true, I was coming back again. That is meaning making.  That is me making meaning of my failures and of my previous life, and saying,  Wait, something about me is not like everybody else, because people get  knocked down and they don't get up, but I get knocked down and I do get up,  and I'm not the biggest strongest. I don't throw the biggest punch, I don't knock  other people down. Instead, I just keep getting up. This is something I'm  phenomenal at, and it gave me strength and courage. This is post traumatic  growth. I went through something hard, and it showed me that I was strong, not  because I could do something more, but like, because I could get up from  something again and again. We see this and how it shares, like, how this  knowledge grows, as Paul shares in II Corinthians, he says, Praise be to the  God and Father of our Lord, Jesus, Christ, the Father of compassion and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in  any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we  share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also we should our comfort 

abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort which produces in you patient  endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm  because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, you also share in our  comfort. The thing about post traumatic growth is it's not just post traumatic  growth for you, it's post traumatic growth you get to share. When Paul walks  through all of these hard things, all of these things that he suffers, he says, it is  for your benefit that we have suffered these things because our sufferings will  produce your comfort as we've seen God comfort us, we'll see God comfort you, because you know that you're not alone, because you know that God can do it,  because that you know that even in the midst of all of these incredibly hard  things, God shows up and does really cool stuff. In the middle of that, when Paul is saying, our sufferings will make you better, you can see this chart again that I  showed you, and see how this emotional regulation and this meaning making,  they actually push post traumatic growth for everyone involved, because we  suffer and we experience dysregulation, we make meaning, we grow out of it,  and then that growth is contagious Switchfoot, because I really like them, says it like this, because your scars shine like dark stars. Yeah, your wounds are where the light shines through. So let's go there, to the place where we sing these  broken prayers, where the light shines through. The wound is where the light  shines through. Your wound is where the light shines through. When we started  my quiet cave, we had this grand idea. And the idea was actually this, that  people who are going through a mental health crisis, they don't just need  someone who is also going through a mental health crisis. There were a lot of  support groups that already existed that were doing that you could hang out in a  room with other people going through depression or bipolar disorder in all sorts  of places in the city. But what you often couldn't find is somebody who had been  through a mental health issue, who could help you walk through a mental health  issue. We thought that might be worth something. The reason we thought that  was because Steve, who helped me start my quiet cave, was actually diagnosed with Bipolar disorder three months before starting seminary, and it was my  opportunity as his friend to help him walk through. Through and make meaning  during his time in school, using my own experience and my own meaning,  making that I had done my own story of being a dandelion. And in that, what we  found was that we had these open wounds, but they didn't stay open wounds.  They healed up and they became scars. And what we decided was that people  needed to find people with scars. They didn't need people with wounds. They  needed people with scars. So we tried to create that space. When we did, we  found that people with wounds flocked to people with scars because they knew  the way through. They didn't just know that there was a way. They knew the way through, and they could walk it with them. And that's what this quote from  Switchfoot said. I'm going to pull it up again, because your scars shine like dark 

stars. They're the place where the glory of God is found, because we discover  what it is to be healed, and that healing is contagious. So that's a week on post  traumatic growth. It's really upsetting. It's not a whole lot fun to go through, but  

that dysregulation leads to fantastic things. Those fantastic things are  contagious and change people's lives when they go through them. As we move  forward, we will be talking about limits and how those affect what's going on in  our lives.