Post Traumatic Growth
How trauma be a tool for increasing mental control
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s an old adage, partly backed up by studies of people who have been through a trauma, such as a car accident or a robbery. But while it is true that 7% to 8% of people who survive trauma will develop chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and experience persistent intrusive, unwanted thoughts about the event, most will recover and some may even report better mental health than they had before.
We talk a lot about stress; how to avoid it, how to manage it, and how to make yourself more resilient to it, but what about the so-called “post-traumatic growth?”
A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, argues that post-traumatic growth is the result of the traumatic event triggering a form of mental training that increases some survivors’ control over their own minds.
According to Justin Hulbert at Bard College and Michael Anderson at the University of Cambridge:
“Our findings suggest that traumatic experiences — as horrible as they may be — might naturally contribute to the adaptation of cognitive control skills, thereby improving survivors’ later resilience, at least [for] those who experienced only moderate levels of trauma,”
If this research is correct, it could help us better understand and treat PTSD.
Two studies, each involving 48 students, suggested that those who had experienced a high number of traumas (including witnessing or experiencing accidents, violence, and the death of significant individuals) before the age of 18 showed a greater ability to inhibit memories of a word-pairing that they had previously learned, compared with those who reported no or little trauma. This demonstrated an ability to mentally compartmentalize thoughts and memories about traumatic experiences.
Compartmentalization refers to suppressing, either consciously or subconsciously, upsetting thoughts and feelings. Compartmentalization can be a useful practice, as it reduces the anxiety a person might feel when doing something that flies in the face of his or her values.
For example, when a soldier has to shoot an enemy soldier, he or she might compartmentalize the act of shooting. This act of the mind is known as a defense mechanism, or a way of thinking that people employ to help them manage the traumatic event and feel better. It can be compared to placing some feelings and thoughts in a box in the back of one’s mind in order to allow conflicting ideas to exist together in one’s head.
In this study participants viewed a set of 60 word pairs, which consisted of a neutral cue word (such as “violin”) and either a neutral or a negative response word (such as “street” or “corpse”). They were asked to study the word pairs until they could correctly recall at least half of the response words. Next, they were given a series of “Think/No Think” trials. A cue word was presented on the screen. If the color of the word was green, they had to say the response word as quickly as possible. If the color of the word was red, they were instructed to avoid thinking about and saying the response word for four seconds. This was followed by a surprise recall tests. This time they were given either the original cue word or a new semantic cue plus the initial letter of the response word — such as “anatomy c_____” for “corpse”.
The researchers found that while those in the high and low trauma groups were equally good at learning the initial word associations, those in the high trauma group showed superior performance on the subsequent “No Think” trials, indicating they had a “robust ability” to forget, or compartmentalize, the specific response words when instructed to do so. This held for both neutral and negative words, suggesting this was a generalized skill rather than a specific skill for dealing with traumatic memories.
This data is consistent with the idea that experiencing trauma may, for some, help encourage resilience by training the ability of their mind to inhibit unwanted memories and have better control over their ability to choose to remember or forget certain unwanted emotions and actions.
If these new findings are reliable they could have implications for how to optimise Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) treatments for trauma. Standard CBT therapy for PTSD encourages patients to confront reminders of their experience and the memories that are triggered by them. The hope is that exposure therapy will result in the traumatic memories becoming less distressing. However, this new research suggests that while it may be important not to avoid reminders of the trauma, it may also be helpful to practice suppressing those memories that are triggered by them. “Training in retrieval suppression may augment the benefits of CBT,” the researchers write, “by enabling patients to confront reminders and redirect to more benign thoughts.”
Unfortunately, it remains a mystery why some people who do not recover well from a trauma, develop chronic PTSD. It may be that they have general deficits in inhibitory control or an impaired ability to adopt effective control mechanisms. Perhaps there’s a genetic component. Regardless, these new results suggest that “… for many victims living with trauma, efforts to achieve emotional balance by down-regulating intrusive thoughts may act as a natural form of cognitive training.”
