The Balanced Life, Huntsville Alabama

In 2014, June was declared National PTSD Awareness month with the hope that it would help spur on more conversations about what trauma is and how it impacts our mental health, relationships, and lives. More importantly, conversations about how we can have hope in even the darkest times and find a way to bounce back and become even healthier, stronger, and happier than we were before the darkness descended.

This ability to bounce back and become resilient in the face of life’s challenges and obstacles is called posttraumatic growth and it is MUCH more common than PTSD. In fact,  posttraumatic growth happens 80% of the time that people deal with adversity.

In fact,  posttraumatic GROWTH happens

80% of the time that people deal with adversity.

Because it’s so much more common and a much more positive outlook, I don’t think it’s helpful to have a conversation about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) without also talking about Posttraumatic Growth and yet the majority of people out there have never even heard of it.

Almost everyone has experienced trauma.

The American Psychological Association says “trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster.” SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse  and Mental Health Services Administration, describes individual trauma as “an event or circumstance resulting in: physical harm; emotional harm; and/or life-threatening harm.”

Because our imaginations are so strong, trauma (that emotional response to a terrible event) can even happen when we’ve just imagined  some harm befalling either ourselves or a loved one.

Trauma is also a very subjective and personal thing. An event that we either witnessed or heard about might not seem traumatic or scary or overwhelming to us, but it could be incredibly traumatic to someone else.

For example, when my daughter was very young she was traumatized by potato salad.

When my daughter was about five or six years old, she had never had potato salad before. One night, I decided to make a German potato salad that I had a recipe for and, although she thought it looked disgusting when she first saw it, my daughter ended up eating two helpings right before bed. Just as I was ushering the kids upstairs after dinner and reminding them to brush their teeth and put on their pajamas, my daughter walked up to me in the living room and tugged at my sleeve and started to speak when she was interrupted by the need to vomit profusely and repeatedly all over me and the carpet before I was able to rush her into the restroom. 

My daughter had never thrown up before and she was terrified by the whole experience, saying “I don’t want to throw down! I don’t want to throw down!”And she believed that the potato salad was responsible.

We didn’t know at that time, but she was starting to come down with something and while she quickly recovered physically, she refused to eat potato salad for years after that.

It might have seemed improbable or even impossible for someone to have been traumatized by potato salad but we don’t ever know all of the surrounding circumstances that can lead up to that intense emotional response to life’s difficulties known as trauma.

While most don’t want to talk about the times when it seemed as though the clouds had converged and blocked out the light of the sun, it can be extremely helpful to talk about it and work through it so we can move past the pain and toward hope.

The more difficult situations we face that we are able to overcome and learn from, the more we begin to see ourselves as capable and strong and resourceful. We learn that we  have a support system we can count on or that we can create one when one is lacking. We become empowered and can, in turn, empower others.

If you’re struggling to open up about difficulties that you’ve faced or are now facing, find a counselor and start that journey toward hope and empowerment and posttraumatic growth!