Post-Traumatic Growth

Several days ago I watched Jane McGonigal's TedTalk "The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life." (Watch it if you can, you'll enjoy it even if you don't have chronic pain.) In this talk, she explores something researchers call post-traumatic growth. This is a phenomenon in which individuals grow stronger and happier after trauma. It gives me hope for what can lie on the other side of this pain. Chronic, debilitating pain is traumatic – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The physical effects are clearer, more visible, whereas the emotional and spiritual impacts require more conscious awareness to recognize. When I examine the emotional reactions I’m having right now I notice a sort of grief, deep sorrow about missing the things in life that bring me joy. I’m both in my body and outside of it. It’s too painful to be fully in my body. Where that part of me goes, I don’t know. It’s been nearly 4 weeks and I’ve only just started to recognize the emotions that have accompanied this experience. It’s a quiet grief, a gloom that this is how life will be like now – filled with pain and the inability to do the things I love, like gardening, walking around the neighborhood, playing with the kids and the dogs, riding horses, sleeping.

There is also a lot of shame. I’m ashamed that I have this pain – if only I had done more, taken more supplements, continued that Pilates class, exercised more, and on and on. I’m ashamed that I can’t function, that I’ve left my partner and kids in the lurch and have burdened them with my broken body. It’s been helpful to examine these thoughts and emotions that were buried beneath the pain. As I read more about pain, how it intertwines within all layers of our being, and the complex reactions occurring with our brains, it’s easier to give myself grace and understand why these feelings and thoughts are occurring.

In the midst of this period of trauma there is, or at least can be, something else going on. Potentially a springboard toward increased happiness and strength. In this way pain can be creativity generating. In fact, as I was pondering this very idea I was peripherally watching SNL, and in one of the skits the character said this very thing almost verbatim ('Drivers License' SNL Sketch.) Talk about a sign!