Tragedies and accidents can trigger stress, anxiety and depression; or they can be a catalyst for positive change. How can you manage the process to bring positive results out of negative events?
Life is divided into a series of Before-and-After moments. They’re the landmark events that shatter your reality, shake your foundations and – one way or another – define a period of your life. A 2013 University of Cape Town study published in the journal BMC Psychiatry ran through a list of them, ranging from war events to accidents, sexual violence, physical violence and the death of a loved one.
The study found that just witnessing one of these traumatic events occurring to someone else (let alone experiencing it first-hand) can leave you with a form of PTSD. It could be mild or severe. In many cases, it leaves you changed forever.
The key question is: what do you do with that change?
A 2017 study by the University of KwaZulu-Natal noted that the lifetime prevalence for PTSD in the general South African population is estimated at 2.3%. “There was a significant, large, positive correlation between post-traumatic stress and anxiety, and medium positive correlations between post-traumatic stress and depression and somatic symptoms.”
Yet, for every stat and study that links trauma to stress and suffering, there’s a person you meet who tells you that getting retrenched, for example, was the best thing that ever happened to their career. It’s not uncommon, either, to meet a divorcee who blossoms after losing a partner, just when everybody around them thought they would die of a broken heart.
“It boils down to a choice,” says Cape Town-based trauma counsellor Anthony Hawthorn. “It’s a choice of being a victim of a circumstance or becoming a survivor of what happened to you. It’s as simple as that.”
Is it really, though? Surely some traumatic events are so shocking that they leave you permanently rattled? Not necessarily. Author Sophie Sabbage, who has built a career on studying human development and coaching mindset change, explores the underlying science in her book, Lifeshocks (And How To Love Them). For Sabbage, “lifeshocks” are the “unwanted and unexpected moments in our lives” that surprise us, blindside us and shock us. Some bounce off us, she says, while others strike deep into our being.
For Sabbage, your reaction to a lifeshock depends on which of the voices in your head you choose to listen to. “When ‘mindtalk’ goes unnoticed and unchallenged it shapes our ‘personality’, which we then think of as ‘who I am’,” she writes. “It is not who we are. It is a dramatised way of behaving based on unnoticed and unchallenged beliefs that create a false self. The false self envelops the authentic self until our innate qualities of being get concealed and forgotten. But those qualities have not disappeared. They remain retrievable when we wake up and reach inside to resurrect them.”
Change, then, is inevitable after a life-changing event. But it can – and should – be a trigger for positive change. “Bad things happen. That’s a reality,” Hawthorn says. “We’re either a victim to it, or we’re one of those unique individuals who survive it and are better off as a result of what it took for us to survive it. A big part of counselling somebody through trauma is helping them recognise that they have chosen to remain a victim.”
That sounds incredibly harsh – especially when you’re talking about a person who has been subjected to something horrific. But Hawthorn offers this gentle word of counsel. “They’re not unique in the fact that a bad thing has happened to them. That’s a part of our existence as human beings. Bad things will happen to you… but you’re the one who chooses how you’re going to change because of it.”
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