From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney
Despite the potential benefits, it can take something like a plane crash or a cancer diagnosis to go through this kind of transition because we avoid at all costs the catastrophic results of nonchalantly tossing out our old worldview and identities. Without a strong lattice, our beliefs, attitudes, and values fall away. We lose our sense of meaning and find ourselves standing naked before the world in total bewilderment.
Still, total reboots of the self are sometimes unavoidable, and when that happens, in the aftermath, daily life can be intensely traumatic. In such a crisis, everything seems anomalous. Tedeschi and Calhoun write that a “psychologically seismic event” can “reduce to rubble many of the schematic structures that have guided understanding, decision making, and meaningfulness.” The traumatic event so contradicts and, in some cases, nullifies the understanding a person counts on for context and prediction that it calls into question the “general purpose and meaning of a person’s existence.”
Extending that metaphor, Tedeschi and Calhoun say that the cognitive rebuilding process that takes place after a traumatic event is akin to the reconstruction that follows an earthquake. Only the strongest structures survive, the ones that we slowly learn are still useful. Anything reduced to rubble won’t be rebuilt in the same, unreliable way again. The result is a new worldview that is “far more resistant to being shattered.” In crisis, we become radically open to changing our minds.
Posttraumatic growth is an accelerated version of the normally invisible, continuous, and gradual process of updating our priors, that collection of conjectures that don’t feel like conjectures. Psychologist Colin Murray Parkes calls them our “assumptive world”: a constellation of mental phenomena that provides us with our notions of predictability and control, much of which is inherited and internalized from our cultures – a set of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes that guides our actions, help us understand the causes and reasons for what happens, and forms the self that gives a sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose.
The assumptive world serves us in three ways. First, it puts the immediate present into context. It tells us the who, what, when, where, and why of our second-by-second existence. Who is my mother? When should I go to sleep? Where is my mailbox? Why did the egg shatter against the floor?
This assumptive world also provides us with a library of if-then statements. These causal narratives tell us what will happen in the future when we interact with the world in a certain way. In the short term, we know if we turn the key, the ignition will fire. If we drop an egg, it will make a mess. If we slap our boss, we won’t get that bonus. The assumptive world allows us to create plans to reach goals now, next week, and decades in the future. In the long term, we assume if we stay in school, we will get a degree; if we keep eating cake, we will need new clothes; it’s a good idea to save for retirement, and we will live long enough to enjoy it.
And the third way the assumptive world aids our understanding of reality is it tells us how we ought to behave if we want to maintain our social support networks. If we want to keep our friends, spouses, lovers, and family members close, we engage in the behaviors we assume we must and refrain from the rest.
Posttraumatic growth is the rapid mind change that comes to a person after a sudden, far-reaching challenge to the accuracy of their assumptive world. When our assumptions completely fail us, the brain enters a state of epistemic emergency. To move forward, to regain a sense of control and certainty, you realize some of your knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes must change, but you aren’t sure which. What is clear, however, is there’s no option to continue as if your current models are true, so you enter a state of active learning in which you immediately and constantly consider other perspectives, honestly assess your weaknesses, and work to change your behaviors to resolve the crisis. In the end, so many of the facts, beliefs, and attitudes that populated your old models of reality are replaced that your very self changes.
This process is automatic. No one chooses to seek meaning after trauma or to grow a new self in its aftermath. It’s a biological switch, a survival mechanism that comes online when needed. Tedeschi and Calhoun say it is important to remember that survivors of trauma don’t actually see themselves as “embarking on searches for meaning or attempts to construct benefits from their experiences.” Most of the time people are just trying to survive.
They point to how the American poet Reynolds Price wrote about the cancer that led to his paralysis. He said when you can’t escape the upending of your identity, it forces you “to be somebody else, the next viable you – a stripped-down whole other clear-eyed person.” Looking back on his diagnosis, he said he wished someone had looked him in the eyes early on and told him, “Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now? Who can you be, and can you get there in double-time?”