Yet trauma need not be the end of the story. Margaret Plews-Ogan, in an article entitled "What Is Wisdom?" mentions that adversity can be a vehicle for developing wisdom in our lives. She mentions the work of two psychologists, Tedeschi and Calhoun, who interviewed patients who'd undergone traumas. These patients unexpectedly told the psychologists that there were positive ways they'd changed through and because of all that they'd gone through. The psychologists call this "Post Traumatic Growth."
The positive changes these patients mentioned were in five areas of their lives: "increased appreciation of life, warmer relations with others, recognition of new possibilities for one's life, a greater sense of personal strength, and spiritual development."
The psychologists suggest that "trauma induces a disruption in our understanding of ourselves and the world, resulting in learning and growth with the potential for wisdom as the final result."
Plews-Ogan herself mentions working with patients who coped with chronic pain, and one patient, a Doctor, who had made a serious medical error. Her patients likewise learned valuable life lessons through their traumas which helped them change for the better: "increased compassion for others, increased capacity for forgiveness and humility, an increased desire to understand things, but also a deeper understanding of the ambiguous nature of things, and becoming more aware of the limitations of our knowledge."
What helped all these various patients travel through the darkness of their trauma to come into the light of being "new people"? They mentioned having close relationships, people to whom they could tell their story. They prayed and meditated. They did positive things to counteract the negatives. And they each made a choice, a deliberate choice, to pursue something that was hard. The Doctor who'd made the serious medical error made the decision to apologize to his patient and her family, knowing the angry, judgmental attitudes he'd be facing. Others faced up to an addiction or took control of their health.
God uses adversity. God uses adversity to mend our lives. God loves change! Any adversity or trauma causes a disruption in our lives, a crack in our reality, and it's through cracks that the Light gets in. We need to be disrupted from time to time so that we can begin to "see" life, the world, ourselves, even God, in a new way.
When we discover and can accept the "cracks" in ourselves and our lives, our hearts expand and become softer. If we can accept failures, mistakes, and sins in our lives, we've learned how fragile we are - and how fragile others are as well. We've become more humble because we've learned that we don't know everything, that we can't always be at the top of our game. And now God can change us into larger-souled individuals, less likely to judge others, more tolerant of differences, less willing to divide life into black and white. Reality is both more complex and more simple than we once thought. And God is infinitely more loving and forgiving than we'd ever imagined!
You notice that I mentioned sins as traumas - because they are. When we admit that we've sinned, what we're saying is that we didn't love, there was an absence of love in our motives and our behavior. And we can painfully see the results - in ourselves, and in our relationships. God doesn't have to punish us because our sins punish us. We have to live with the sometimes irreparable harm that we've done.
But God climbs in through the cracks that sin leaves in our souls. And God asks us softly "What have you learned through this?" And, hopefully, we've learned possibly more about ourselves, our lives, and our God than we knew before. We're seeing differently! We've gone to the depths of self-degradation and seen what it can do - and yet we can see positive growth in us because it happened.
Because sin happened, we've painfully changed and grown - now we're more loving, more forgiving of others, more humble. God has been merciful to us so we can be merciful to others. We've discovered that "God does not love us because we are that good. God loves us because God is good." (Fr. Richard Rohr.) The way God works with the sin in our lives is the way God truly brings good out of evil. Now we hear God's call to love as unconditionally as we've been loved. The mending of our wounded lives and wounded relationships can begin!
Even though we don't know our futures, even if we know that more traumas will enter our lives, we can live in Hope. Because whatever broken wreckage of ourselves we bring to God, He will always mend us so that we become even stronger and better than we were before.