Do we actually grow from adversity?

a ost by Eranda Jayawickreme and Frank J. Infurna for the Big Think blog

"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger"?


How much people believe they’ve changed often isn’t associated with how much they’ve actually changed. frankie's/Shutterstock.com

In our culture, there's this idea that enduring a tragedy can be good for your personal growth. You'll have a newfound appreciation for life.

You'll be grateful for your friends and family. You'll learn from the experience. You'll become more resilient.

This theme appears in media coverage, time and again, in the wake of natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

But what does the science say?

Is there actually value in pain and suffering? Was philosopher Frederich Nietzsche onto something when he said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger"?

A powerful narrative

As psychologists, we've been studying this question for the better part of the last decade.

We're not the first to grapple with these questions. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun have written about how, after experiencing loss or trauma, people reported feeling a greater appreciation for life, closer to their friends and family, stronger, more spiritual and more inspired. They dubbed this phenomenon “post-traumatic growth."

The appeal of this finding is obvious. It shows there's a silver lining to tragedy. It's also consistent with the biblical theme of redemption, which says that all pain and suffering will ultimately lead to freedom.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

---

Those 5 Stages of Grief: Does Mourning Really Unfold Like That?

a post by Bella DePaulo for the World of Psychology blog



Sometimes a psychological phenomenon becomes so well-known that even people with no training whatsoever in psychology are familiar with it. That’s true for the five stages of grief, as described by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross back in 1969. When someone dies, she suggested, the first reaction of the loved ones left behind is denial. Anger comes next, then bargaining, then depression. Finally, after all those stages have passed, mourners experience some acceptance of their loss.

Originally, Kubler-Ross formulated the stages of grief to describe the reactions of patients who had terminal illnesses. But she never conducted a systematic study of people’s reactions to the death of a loved one, and whether those reactions change over time in the way she predicted. Over the years, researchers have stepped in to try to see whether Kubler-Ross was right.

They found that, with regard to the order in which various reactions peak over time, Kubler-Ross was spot on. She was wrong, though, about the frequency with which the bereaved experience different emotions. The most important conclusion of research on stages of grief, though, is that there is no one way to grieve. Different people mourn in different ways. Their stages may be different than the ones Kubler-Ross described, or they may not go through different stages at all.

Continue reading

---

Witnessing loss in the everyday: Community buildings in austerity Britain

an article by Katherine Robinson (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) and Ruth Sheldon (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) published in The Sociological Review Volume 67 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Abstract

This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority.

The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of austerity rendered these buildings substitutable.

Considering how abstract sociological conceptions of value/s can struggle to break into the embedded common sense of austerity, the authors explore how ethnographic practices of collaboration and attentiveness can help amplify alternative expressions of the meanings of these buildings for their communities.

Enacting a form of ethnographic witnessing, which learns from Wittgenstein, the authors highlight the creative, vernacular registers and gestures of library users and day centre members, and show how these were anchored in the buildings themselves. In this way, the article supplements noisier, more hyperbolic accounts of the violence of austerity by amplifying quotidian responses, which express how ordinary buildings and the forms of life they sustain, matter.

---

The Little Things in Life Are the Ones That Matter Most

a post by Linda Broder for the Tiny Buddha blog


“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” ~Muhammad Ali

TRIGGER WARNING – loss of a child
I personally found it strangely comforting.

I followed a little boy in Walmart today. He didn’t look like my son and yet I trailed him and his mother all over the store. I curled my fingers around the shopping cart so I wouldn’t be tempted to reach out and touch him.

He didn’t walk with Brendan’s bounce or jerk his head back, trying to slide his glasses back onto his nose. He didn’t have his sarcastic smile or those tiny freckles scattered across his cheeks.

But he had the same cowlick sprouting from the back of his head. I wheeled my cart around and followed this little boy who looked nothing like my son. I itched to brush this boy’s hair, just like I did before Brendan grew too old and wiggled away.

I used to smooth his spikes down and then laugh when they sprang back up, no matter how much gel I used. By the time he became a teenager, he gave up trying to tame them and left it messy and wild.

And now, I’ll never get a chance to touch his hair again. My son died in an accident a week before his first day of high school.

Continue reading

---

3 Things That Are Helping Me Deal with Stress, Pain, and Loss

a post by Joshua Kauffman for the Tiny Buddha blog


“Being on a spiritual path does not prevent you from facing times of darkness; but it teaches you how to use the darkness as a tool to grow.” ~Unknown

Life has not been kind lately.

My aunt passed away in October. She had been suffering from cancer, but her family kept the extent of her illness to themselves, and hence I did not have a chance to see her before she passed away. I felt bad about that.

My father followed her a month later, just after Thanksgiving. He had been ailing from Parkinson’s Disease, but his death as well was not expected when it happened.

Two weeks after him, a friend of mine who lives abroad informed me of her diagnosis with a rare form of incurable cancer. She has since passed away before I had a chance to visit her. She was not yet fifty years old.

Right after that happened, the veterinarian diagnosed my dog with heart failure, and his days too are numbered.

In mid-January, my mother, who had been depressed after my father’s death, collapsed with a seizure. A tumor was discovered in her brain. Though easily removed, it was traced back to her lung. She too has a rare form of aggressive cancer and though outwardly healthy, her life will probably be limited to months or a couple of years.

The whole ordeal until diagnosis unfolded over the course of an extremely stressful month, and the future is both frightening and terribly uncertain. Because of this uncertainty, I have needed to change my life plans—I had been ready to relocate and change jobs.

Continue reading

---

Job Loss Presents a Unique Danger for People in Recovery

a post by Kelly Fitzgerald for the World of Psychology blog



Job loss was another painful reminder of why my sobriety must be the number one thing in my life.

It’s been a few weeks since I had a theoretical bomb dropped on me. I recently got laid off from my full-time job and my financial stability, my career, and overall sense of security were taken from me. It was unexpected, devastating, and made me question everything. Job loss is just that – a loss. I felt grief, anger, frustration, hopelessness, and defeat. I questioned if I did enough, if it was the job I really wanted, if I deserved that job, and if I’ll ever find another job as good as this one again. Being laid off had me questioning my life, my worth, my value as an employee, and even my sobriety.

Like so many situations in sobriety, job loss can present a unique danger. As a person in recovery who used drinking as a coping mechanism for the majority of my life, being laid off led to me wishing that I could drink. I wished I had the luxury of numbing my emotions for a moment. I wished I could take myself out of living in the moment for a second. Logical, sober me, knows that alcohol wouldn’t make the situation better, only worse. Sober me knew that alcohol might make me forget for a little while, but it wouldn’t make my pain go away.

Continue reading

---