“That’s what nihilism is for,” said Raúl.
Earlier in the night, Raúl said he lost his faith in humanity after the death of his friend. At the time, Raúl was attending college in Alaska. He was swimming with his friend in a gravel pond in Fairbanks when both of them started cramping up in the cold water. Raúl’s friend started to drown. Raúl tried to save him, but he soon exhausted himself. He called to the people on shore for help, but no one came. They thought the two young men were playing a practical joke. Raúl nearly drowned as his friend pushed him underwater to stay afloat. Raúl eventually realized that if he didn’t swim back to shore, he would die. Worn out from struggling, the only stroke Raúl could muster was the backstroke. As he swam on his back to safety, he saw his friend fight to stay above water and then sink—and then fight then sink, and fight then sink—until he finally drowned.
When Raúl finally got to shore, he was nearly delirious. The first people he saw were a mother and her child, who was playing with a raft. In a daze, Raúl asked if he could take the raft because his friend was drowning. They didn’t believe him. The mother said, “Then why don’t you go out there and save him.” But it was too late to send anyone out to save him. The authorities found the body three days later. For Raúl, it was hard to imagine how the death of his friend was anything other than senseless.
“I flirted with that philosophy,” Christine said of nihilism, “but I didn’t find it very productive.”
Instead, Christine finished college and moved to New York, where she abandoned her plans to be an engineer. There, she chose to pursue what she thought was her true calling: being a pastry chef. “I wouldn’t have done that if my mom hadn’t died,” she said. “After an event like that,” she went on, “you think about your life and who you are and what you want to do. Ninety-five percent of the decisions I make now are influenced by the fact that she died. So, yeah, pastry.”
I was struck, sitting there and watching them speak—sometimes angrily, sometimes sadly, sometimes with deep remorse and guilt—by how, with every sentence, they were struggling to understand their loss and what it meant for their lives now. Some of them were further along the road to recovery and growth than others. But each of them was leaning on some of, if not all, the pillars of meaning. They were forming a community. They were figuring out what their purpose was in light of their loss. They were trying to make sense of what had happened. And they were participating in a ritual that helped them step outside of the hustle and bustle of their daily lives to find peace.
This is why Carla and Lennon founded The Dinner Party: they wanted to bring meaning to people whose lives had been thrown into disarray by grief. “We want to create a movement,” Lennon said, “where people are living bigger and stronger versus being derailed and devastated by the loss.”
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The idea that we can grow to lead deeper and more meaningful lives through adversity is an ancient one in literature, religion, and philosophy—as Nietzsche famously wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” But it is a relatively new idea in mainstream psychology. Until recently, many psychologists considered trauma primarily a catastrophic stressor. One of the characteristics of trauma, they believed, was that it damaged a person psychologically and physically, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by psychologists and psychiatrists to diagnose mental illness. Since then, PTSD has received a great deal of attention from psychologists, the media, and ordinary people trying to understand what happens to people after a crisis.
The story of Bob Curry, a Vietnam War veteran from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a good example of exactly what psychologists were talking about. Curry grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Wisconsin, the kind of place, he said, where people eat a lot of apple pie and watch a lot of John Wayne movies. As a child, he took to heart the lesson of John F. Kennedy’s “ask not” inaugural address. “Whatever your country asks of you,” Curry remembers thinking, “you do it.”
When he was a teenager, the protests against the Vietnam War were at their height. Even so, Curry felt a strong call to serve his country. So he joined the army as soon as he graduated from high school. “I thought that I was doing the right thing, what I needed to do with my life,” he said. “That was an honorable period of my life. Anything that I was asked, I would do. And I thought what I was doing was saving or helping save people further down the line.”
During the war, Curry flew reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam and Laos. It was a harrowing experience, he said. His plane was often bombarded by enemy fire and he nearly died on several occasions. The terror of his war experiences never left him, nor did the guilt of surviving the war when so many others—including his friends—had died. Curry returned home in 1971 a different man. He tried to ease into leading a relatively normal life, and at first he succeeded. He started a family, bought a home, and worked for IBM. He had some flashbacks, but he largely managed to bury his guilt and fear.
When the Gulf War started in 1991, though, Curry’s fragile hold on life started to slip away. He couldn’t escape the depictions of war plastered all over the television sets he watched and newspapers he read. Those images brought him right back to Vietnam. His flashbacks got worse, and he started having nightmares about his plane going down. He scared his wife by slamming his hand on the backboard of their bed in the middle of the night, as if he were reaching for the handle of the plane’s eject lever over his head. He also started to drink heavily. But it didn’t help. After the 9/11 attacks, which once again threw war into the national spotlight, his flashbacks intensified, and so did his drinking.
One day in 2002, Curry was in a drugstore near Milwaukee waiting to pick up a prescription for his wife when he started looking through a magazine and saw something that shocked him. The remains of two men with whom he had served, and who were thought to be missing in action, had been found in Laos. Learning that his old friends were dead sent him on a bender. The next thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital with two police officers at his bed. They told him that he had been in a car accident. Then they told him that he had hit and killed a man.
After the accident, Curry went to trial on a homicide charge. He was acquitted after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was sent to a state mental institution. There, he ruminated on how much destruction he had caused. Over the course of the trial, he and his wife lost their house and his daughter had to leave college for financial reasons. Curry considered ending his life. He had, after all, destroyed not only his own family, but also the family of the man he had killed. “I should be in prison,” he thought when his trial ended. “I should be done. I should have killed myself.” But he had been given a second chance. “How do I go forward,” he wondered, “with all the damage that I have done?”
He thought about an experience he had during the trial. His Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, a fellow Vietnam War veteran, had taken him out to lunch at a VFW post. Curry was struck by how cathartic the experience was. They were having burgers and Diet Cokes, and they were surrounded by memorabilia that reminded him of the war but was not arousing negative flashbacks. It was, in fact, reminding him of the reason he signed up for the military in the first place: the desire to serve a country he loved.
In this safe space, he could bond with people who had endured similar experiences during the war and who were dealing with similar consequences after it. They didn’t judge him, either, and that was huge after living for three decades with the burden of fighting in a war that many people hated. When he returned home from Vietnam in 1971, protesters at the airport threw eggs at him and the other veterans while chanting “Baby Killers!” Feeling like an outsider in his own country, Curry later realized, had exacerbated his guilt and stress, which inflamed his PTSD.
When he visited the VFW, he realized that his peers there understood him. �
�Finding people who are going through the same struggle you are makes you less crazy,” he said. Curry started thinking about ways to re-create that bonding experience for his fellow veterans. Though he knew of many existing veterans organizations, those groups tended to appeal to an older crowd, and the social life revolved around drinking—which was dangerous for veterans who, like Curry, struggled with PTSD or substance abuse. Curry wanted something more modern and alcohol-free.
So in 2008, he and some friends launched Dryhootch, a community center for veterans that takes the form of a coffee shop. It is run by vets and offers live music, reading groups, art classes, and therapy sessions for veterans and their families. There is chess club on Wednesday mornings, and a group of veterans gathers Fridays before lunch for mindfulness meditation. Nonveterans are welcome, too, and their presence helps the veterans integrate back into civilian life. “The idea was that instead of a bar, you have a coffeehouse where people in the services could come and hang out with each other every day,” Curry said. “Good coffee and peer groups. That’s what I wanted to offer.”
Initially Curry didn’t have enough money for a shop, so he ran Dryhootch out of an old red-painted popcorn truck that he converted into a mobile coffeehouse. Then, in 2009, he opened his first brick-and-mortar location in Milwaukee. In 2012, the White House recognized Curry as a “champion of change” for his service to veterans. By 2014, Dryhootch had expanded across the Midwest, with two locations in Milwaukee, one in Madison, and two in the Chicago area.
The drunk-driving accident forced Curry to turn inward—to figure out what he could contribute to the world. “Service is the only thing that makes sense after what happened,” he said. “I can’t undo time, but I can make a difference, and that’s what drives me forward. When a vet tells me of the difference Dryhootch made in his life, that’s when it all comes together.”
After a traumatic experience, many people feel a strong drive to help those who have suffered as they have. Psychologists and psychiatrists sometimes call this drive “survivor mission.” A survivor, in the words of the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, “is one who has been exposed to the possibility of dying or has witnessed the death of others yet remained alive.” Survivors, Lifton continues, feel “a sense of debt to the dead, a need to placate them or carry out their wishes in order to justify their own survival.”
Today, the term “survivor” has been expanded to include victims of nonfatal traumas, too, and their mission is often tied to making sure others don’t have to go through what they’ve endured. Survivors of sexual assault, for example, have become abuse therapists. Survivors of mass shootings have lobbied for tougher gun laws. Parents who have lost children to leukemia have devoted themselves to raising awareness and support for cancer research and prevention. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have worked to reduce stockpiles of nuclear arms. These acts of purpose help survivors cope after their trauma. When people who have suffered help others, they report less depression, anxiety, and anger, and more optimism, hope, and meaning in life.
Curry, for his part, wants to help younger veterans avoid making the mistakes he made abusing alcohol. “I can’t go back in time and change the things I did,” he said, “but I can help prevent vets today from going down my path.” By pursuing his purpose, Curry has benefited not only a new generation of vets, but himself, too. His mission has played an indispensable role in putting his life back on track. Curry has been sober since 2002.
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Most people have heard about how post-traumatic stress disorder can unravel a person. Fewer have heard about post-traumatic growth, the process that lifted Curry out of his despair and into his new role as a leader in the veteran community. As Curry’s story shows, these two responses to trauma are not directly opposed to one another or mutually exclusive; someone who experiences one can experience the other, and most people will experience some of the symptoms of PTSD after a trauma, like nightmares or flashbacks, without developing the disorder. But researchers have found that anywhere from half to two-thirds of trauma survivors report post-traumatic growth, while only a small percentage suffer from PTSD.
Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are two of the leading experts on post-traumatic growth, which they define as “positive change that occurs as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life crises.” Tedeschi and Calhoun, who coined the term “post-traumatic growth” in the mid-1990s, came to this idea after studying how people develop wisdom. They interviewed individuals who had endured hardships, thinking those conversations might shed light on how people gained perspective and depth. Maybe these people, they reasoned, learned something from their adversity that made them see the world in a new way. After speaking to many trauma survivors, Tedeschi and Calhoun found that suffering could help people transform in fundamentally positive ways—and that these transformations were both more profound and more common than either of them expected.
“We’d been working with bereaved parents for about a decade,” Tedeschi has said. “They’d been through the most shattering kind of loss imaginable. I observed how much they helped each other, how compassionate they were toward other parents who had lost children, how in the midst of their own grief they often wanted to do something about changing the circumstances that had led to their child’s death to prevent other families from suffering the kind of loss they were experiencing. These were remarkable and grounded people who were clear about their priorities in life.”
After studying a wide array of survivors, Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five specific ways that people can grow after a crisis. First, their relationships strengthen. One woman diagnosed with breast cancer, for example, said she realized her relationships “are the most important things you have.” Many people respond to trauma by actively building this pillar of meaning. James, whom we met in the chapter on belonging, turned to his community at the Society for Creative Anachronism for support after struggling with suicidal thoughts. The bereaved parents told Tedeschi and Calhoun that losing a child had made them more compassionate: “I’ve become more empathetic towards anybody in pain and anybody in any kind of grief,” one said.
Second, they discover new paths and purposes in life. Sometimes, these are related to a particular survivor mission. Tedeschi and Calhoun heard from one person, for example, who became an oncology nurse after losing her child to cancer. Other times, the crisis becomes the catalyst for a more general reconsideration of priorities, as Christine discovered in the aftermath of her mother’s death.
Third, the trauma allows them to find their inner strength. When Carlos Eire suddenly found himself living in poverty in the United States, he developed survival skills by drawing on a well of tenacity he didn’t know he had. The common thread among those Tedeschi and Calhoun studied is a “vulnerable yet stronger” narrative. That paradoxical outlook defined the attitude of a rape survivor who admitted that the world now seemed more dangerous to her but that, at the same time, she felt more resilient as a result of the inner strength she built after the assault.
Fourth, their spiritual life deepens. That could mean that their faith in God is renewed, as it was for Carlos, or it could mean that they grapple with existential questions more broadly, coming to know certain deep truths about the world or themselves, as Emeka Nnaka did after his spinal cord injury.
Finally, they feel a renewed appreciation for life. Rather than taking for granted a stranger’s kindness or the vivid colors of autumn leaves, they savor the small moments of beauty that light up each day. After coming to terms with her terminal diagnosis, Janeen Delaney felt a regular connection to the natural world, which led her to focus on what really mattered to her. “I think I recognize trivial things as trivial now,” said a survivor of an airplane crash. “It reinforced the importance of doing the right thing, not the expedient or politically smart thing, but the right thing.”
Tedeschi and Calhoun use the metaphor of an earthquake to explain how
we grow in the wake of crisis. Just as a city has a certain structure before a major earthquake, so too do we have certain fundamental beliefs about our lives and the world. Trauma shatters those assumptions. But out of the rubble comes an opportunity to rebuild. In the aftermath of an earthquake, cities aim to erect buildings and infrastructure that are stronger and more resilient than what now lies in ruins. Similarly, those who are able to rebuild psychologically, spiritually, and otherwise after a crisis are better equipped to deal with future adversity, and they ultimately lead more meaningful lives.
Tedeschi and Calhoun wanted to know why some people grow after trauma while others do not. The nature and severity of the trauma, they discovered, was less important than one might think. According to another researcher who has studied post-traumatic growth, “It is not the actual trauma that is causing the change. It is how people interpret what happens, how what they believe about themselves and life and the world gets shaken up, not the trauma itself, that forces people to experience growth.” When Tedeschi and Calhoun probed more deeply into their data, they found that the difference between the two groups lay in what they call “deliberate rumination,” or introspection. The participants whom Tedeschi and Calhoun studied spent a lot of time trying to make sense of their painful experience, reflecting on how the event changed them. Doing so helped them make the life changes associated with post-traumatic growth.
One way to jump-start the process of deliberate rumination is through writing. Social psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin studies how people use language to interpret their experiences. He began his research on trauma in the 1980s. Based on previous work, he knew that individuals who had endured a traumatic event were more depressed and emotionally volatile than those who had not, and that they died of heart disease and cancer at higher rates. But he did not know why trauma would have such negative effects on health.
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