Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder - AND / OR - Growth

      "Over millennia and across disciplines, some variant of Nietzsche’s (1889) maxim ‘What does not destroy me, makes me stronger’ has resonated with scholars and laypersons alike. It serves as a poignant and compelling reinforcement to Tedeschi & Calhoun’s claim ‘that suffering and distress can be possible sources of positive change’. Emerging findings from the domain of posttraumatic growth (PTG), which involves a belief that one has grown through adversity, offer empirical corroboration of such claims as well as conceptual models that articulate the process and potential outcomes of dealing with life’s exigencies.
      Similarly, coping with very difficult, challenging life events has also been linked with wisdom, an ancient construct currently enjoying an academic renaissance within the field of psychology. Against very positive background characteristics (e.g., experiences of love, support, self-actualization), wisdom is believed to be partly forged in the crucible of difficult life experiences; graduates of the school of ‘hard knocks’ are assumed to manifest particular psychosocial strengths as a consequence of successfully negotiating life’s serious conundrums.
     Recently, these two independent research streams have been conceptually linked but not empirically tested. The types of cognitive-emotional processing of trauma-related information may serve as a catalyst for both posttraumatic growth and wisdom. Trauma, by definition, is a requirement for PTG. In contrast, trauma is not necessary for wisdom, and wisdom is enabled and enhanced by non-traumatic, positive life events as well (e.g., peak experiences, success, loving relationships)."
       Webster J, Deng XC. "Paths From Trauma to Intrapersonal Strength: Worldview, Posttraumatic Growth, and Wisdom." Journal of Loss and Trauma, 1–14, 2014 DOI: 10.1080/15325024.2014.932207

     Not mentioned above is that the world's wisdom traditions have the central raison d'être of intentionally cultivating wisdom, and have been doing so for well over a thousand years. A current, secular, evidence-based derivative of one of these wisdom traditions (Buddhism), is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).

     "... veterans who took part in MBSR experienced significant improvements in measures of mental health, including measures of PTSD, depression, experiential avoidance, and behavioral activation as well as mental and physical health-related quality of life over a 6-month period. The MBSR program appeared to be safe for participants with symptoms of PTSD, and improvements in clinical outcome measures were maintained from the point of time when subjects finished MBSR (2 months after enrollment) until the longest follow-up time point 6 months after enrollment. The changes demonstrated for measures of mental health had medium to large standardized effect sizes."
       Kearney DJ, McDermott K, Malte C, Martinez M, Simpson TL. "Association of participation in a mindfulness program with measures of PTSD, depression and quality of life in a veteran sample." Journal of clinical psychology. 2012; 68(1): 101-16.