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Are difficult experiences good for us? Do people get stronger following a traumatic incident? It depends, says new research on the effects of adversity. It seems that a moderate amount of difficulty is actually good for us while too much, and surprisingly, too little hardship makes us less resilient or more prone to psychological distress.
Researchers Mark Seery, Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen studied the effects of prior traumatic events on 2,398 internet respondents. "The list of events included seven categories: own illness or injury, loved one's illness or injury, violence (e.g., physical assault, forced sexual relations), bereavement (e.g., parent's death), social/environmental stress (e.g., serious financial difficulties, lived in dangerous housing); relationship stress (e.g., parents' divorce); and disaster (e.g., major fire, flood, earthquake, or other community disaster). People with some adversity showed less distress and higher life satisfaction compared to those who had experienced many difficult life events and also compared to those who had experienced none. According to the authors, "Experiencing low but nonzero levels of adversity could teach effective coping skills, help engage social support networks, create a sense of mastery over past adversity, foster beliefs in the ability to cope successfully in the future, and generate psychophysiological toughness."
The question is why does just a little bit of getting knocked around by life help us grow stronger and more resilient? I think this happens because pain, threat, and distress acts like a wake-up call. If we are sleepwalking through our lives, taking things for granted and not really paying attention to our own body function, sensations, and emotions, the sudden loss of easy freedoms can bring us back to our body sense. We can't take our bodies for granted anymore. We have to feel our pain and distress and come to terms with injury, disease, and possible impairment. If there is no adversity, we just keep sleepwalking. If there is too much, we are overwhelmed and our bodies will activate defensive suppression responses to keep us from feeling ourselves. This is an instinctive reaction to threat: we need all our resources directed to countering the threat and none are left over to nurture ourselves.
This may seem completely off topic, so bear with me. There is a link between the Seery et al study and research on the effects of spirituality in recovery from trauma. People who survive war, genocide, fires, and sinking ships, for example, often mention religion or spirituality as the most important factor in helping them endure. This is because spirituality is correlated with a readiness to face questions related to the meaning of one's life. Furthermore, there is an embodied component to spiritual engagement in the form of surrendering our defensives and letting ourselves come into the present moment of being held and nourished by a higher power. The healing effects of religious practice has been linked specifically to the body sensing neural networks that are known to be activated during meditation.
Coming back to the question of why moderate adversity is healthy, experiencing and resolving the effects of trauma can be a pathway to developing a more encompassing sense of embodied self-awareness, or body sense. Depending upon the person, this could mean acceptance, forgiveness, humor, compassion, or gratitude. In trauma recovery, we come to realize that the events surrounding the trauma and the body's protective response to the threat of those events are beyond our control.
The "I" of our conceptual self-awareness - who we think we are, what we think we can do - has to be revised to more accurately reflect what we actually did and felt and lost in that fateful assault by a chunk of the universe much bigger than that "I." Recovery and restoration occurs at the point when the body sense of "I" feels and accepts and forgives the human frailties of a body that was not able to cope, that was injured and hurt, but that still can feel alive emotionally and physically.
