Does Trauma Really Make Us Stronger?

I sat down to write about trauma, and whether or not it really makes us stronger….and this led me to wondering about how we grapple with trauma. This week, my community in SW Florida (still recovering from the extreme rains with Hurricane Debbie in August) was battered by Hurricane Helene as it made its way up our entire coastline to its official landfall, north of us in the ‘big bend’ of Florida’s panhandle. After an exhausting few days of worry and preparations, many homes and businesses were badly flooded with saltwater from an ocean surge. The further north along Florida’s western coastline, the higher and more dangerous the surge-waters became. Tragically, as Helene continued to barrel northward across land beyond Florida, people in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas were shocked by massive flood and wind trauma from the storm.

In some places, the trauma from this one storm is truly unimaginable in scope. In western North Carolina, it has been described as the “1,000-year flood.” Homes, cars, people and animals were washed away down mountainsides, or in Florida swallowed up by the sea. Major roads and bridges collapsed into the ocean or rivers, or became covered many feet deep with mud or sand, stranding vehicles and cutting off homes and even entire communities. And now, already, forecasters are tracking another potential hurricane threat in the Gulf for next week.

There are at least four distinct parts to this type of trauma: the trauma of the anticipation of the unknown scope of such a weather event; the trauma of experiencing the event itself (even for those who are not directly in the path of it); the trauma of loss from the actual event; and the trauma of living through the aftermath (and even the trauma of insensitive or righteous people’s judgments about our trauma experience).

And I wondered: does trauma really make us stronger? Sometimes it clearly does, if we are given a chance to discover new resourcefulness and resilience, find our inner strength and courage, learn from the adversity and move forward more clearly. But what happens when trauma piles upon trauma, with insufficient time and support for full recovery and reframing? As a version of this has happened recently in my own life, I have grown extra empathy for others having a comparable experience. And really - for anyone who is paying attention - we are ALL at some level experiencing an onslaught of multiple, quickly-accumulating traumas, encompassing at least the last 4 years. Is it any wonder that so many people are succumbing to overwhelm, anxiety, depression, and burnout?

A common self-preservation instinct is to try and block out what feels too intense or traumatic to face. We can do this by finding various ways of numbing ourselves, and/or by willfully refusing to SEE what we wish was not there. People do this around their health, their relationships, their finances, their jobs, religion, politics….and natural (and unnatural) catastrophic disasters. In some cases, some level of blocking is an appropriate, self-protective boundary which allows us to carry on and focus on creating what we desire in life. Healthy boundaries help us harness our agency to live by design, rather than by default, and prevent us from being powerless in the face of traumas and tragedies that might otherwise consume us.

There is also a kind of blocking of difficult information that might fairly be called “premeditated ignorance.” A friend sent me this quote today:

“Premeditated ignorance is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness. It is when people do not know because they do not want to know. For, if they did know, they would have to take responsibility for the knowledge; and, they would thereby be required to renegotiate their identity and to relinquish the status, privilege, and authority, that are derived from the false order of knowledge. At the very least, they would be compelled to leave their comfort zone.” (anonymous)

It was disturbing to me to glance through several comment threads on facebook, in which people who had not been directly in Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction passed judgment on those who lost their homes to it. The flavor of these comments was that if you choose to be “dumb enough” to live by the ocean, or near a river or a dam, you deserve what’s coming to you. It sadly reminded me of the comments made about people (like me) who chose not to consent to the experimental covid shots. Not only do these kinds of comments fail to allow for the complexity of why people live where they do, or make the life choices they make, they also disturbingly reveal one of the core problems causing the divisiveness of today’s society - a lack of capacity for unconditional compassion for our fellow humans who are suffering.

Some people work very hard taking practical, proactive steps to prepare, well ahead of an approaching dangerous storm. Other people seem to be unable to squarely face the magnitude of what is coming, and end up completely unprepared and vulnerable. And sometimes, our best-laid plans and preparations are unable to protect us against a catastrophic natural disaster, or other type of unpredictable trauma.

We can generously give people the benefit of the doubt, and hold compassion for people who are suffering, or who dare to follow their heart and take on the adversity that accompanies a path less traveled, without necessarily agreeing with or approving of their personal choices —-- can’t we? What is happening to us? Why has so much of humanity turned on itself? While I can’t fully answer that, I am certain that a return to our loving, generous, kind and compassionate inner roots will be our wisest and happiest way forward.

Part of the reason we are afraid to look directly at the dark side of life, is because we don’t feel the safety of a truly supportive, loving, wise and compassionate community surrounding us and ‘having our back’ when we face challenges. While we hopefully work on this as a human community, self-compassion will go a long way toward giving ourselves the support we need right now. Self-compassion is a learned behavior, for most of us. Importantly, it can be available to us at all times. Here is a resource I have found very helpful: “The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook,” by Kristin Neff, PhD, and Christopher Germer, PhD.

When I make decisions to follow my heart and choose to live a raw-vegan lifestyle, unschool my children, opt-out of mass-marketed experimental covid shots, or live near the ocean, I have to take responsibility for how these choices may impact or disrupt portions of my life, work, outer security, or approval from others. This full self-responsibility becomes harder (and more necessary) in a society that is divisive and highly judgmental toward all those who stray from whatever is currently defined as the widely accepted “norm.” It requires real courage to follow our hearts, with or without the support of others, and then to claim 100% responsibility for our choices and the outcomes.

Honestly, I have been shaken by the size and frequency of recent storms impacting my usually peaceful tropical seaside life in Florida. I most definitely followed my heart in moving here, and have been reaping the rich harvest of that authentic choice ever since. When I made my decision to move here, I really didn’t give much weight to the idea of devastating annual storms, since that simply was not in the history of this seaside town. Yet now it appears it may be a new norm, and so I have to do some honest reckoning with this emerging information. Will the storms continue to magnify in intensity and frequency? Quite possibly! Are we in a temporary weather cycle that will change again soon? Quite possibly! There are no definitive answers to these questions.

One thing I have learned by following my heart in life, is that honesty and flexibility is crucial, because the outer world is forever shifting and changing. I have also learned that ultimately the most helpful way to deal with frightening information is to look it straight in the eye. If we step into our power in this way, fear loses its grip on us, and from a grounded, empowered place we can access wise solutions (while keeping in mind that the problems and the solutions are all temporary!) to most any problem facing us. Courage, flexibility, honesty, and tons of compassion are what is needed to get us through these tough times, together.