BUILDING RESILIENCE
Growing Through Adversity
Brenda Dietzman
The average person experiences approximately five to eight traumas in their lifetime. So, my corrections professional, how many traumas have you experienced this month?
That sounds harsh, and people may wonder why anyone would want to get into a service profession. But the answer is clear to anyone who wears a badge. It’s a calling and our chosen purpose. And the good news? Research tells us that working in a profession that has purpose and meaning is better for us than trying to avoid the discomfort of a profession that experiences a lot of trauma (Poulin, Brown, Dillard, & Smith, 2013).
So far in this four-part series of articles on building resilience, I have given an overview of resilience and discussed the need to prepare for and how to cope with adversity. We discussed the need to acquire and develop resources that help us to become more resilient, such as: • strengthening bonds with friends and family; • working on our physical, emotional, and spiritual health; • becoming financially secure; and • improving our knowledge and skills along with so many others.
We also discussed the need to use our resources when we are experiencing adversity; for example calling a friend, going for a walk, meditating, or getting the proper amount of sleep. This is what a mechanic does when his car breaks down. He doesn’t just keep turning the key in the ignition and hope the car fixes itself. He uses the tools, resources, and knowledge that he possesses to fix the car.
Post-Traumatic Growth This leads us to the last of our four articles: grow through adversity. Professionals in the psychology world call this post-traumatic growth. So, what does that mean?
Post-traumatic growth is finding or creating positive change in yourself as a result of being involved in a difficult or traumatic experience. It is becoming a better, stronger, and more resilient version of yourself than what you were before the event.
Some people who go through a traumatic experience make radical changes in their lives. They may decide to get married, start attending church, write a book, or spend more time on their physical health by exercising, sleeping more, and eating better. But these events that create drastic change and growth don’t occur on a regular basis. They are the events that affect us at an extremely deep level and are called Big T traumas.
There are also Small T traumas. Generally, these are secondary traumas—ones that we see or hear about but which do not happen to us personally. For example, listening to an inmate tell his life story of abuse and neglect or hearing another officer discuss a fight in which she was seriously injured.
Both Big and Small T traumas can have an effect on us and for very different reasons. Listening to someone talk about their abusive parents is difficult.
Post-traumatic growth is becoming a better, stronger, and more resilient version of yourself than what you were before the event.
But if you were raised in a similar environment, it could be harder for you than others because it might remind you of your own bad childhood memories. That is why it is so important to accept people at their word if they say or even appear like they are having a hard time with a particular situation.
There are some people who are naturally more inclined to move toward personal growth in times of trauma and adversity. Those who are more optimistic tend to look for the silver lining in a cloud. They have developed the skills, knowledge, and belief that they can control at least some part of the event’s outcome—even if it is only the idea they can grow from it. Those who use the resources they have acquired and developed will work toward creating post-traumatic growth.
So, how can we intentionally move through both Big T and Small T traumas to gain that post-traumatic growth?
Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory Psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, developed the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory (Chowdhury, 2021), which looks for positive gains in the following five areas:
• Greater Appreciation for Life—learning to appreciate relationships with others and developing an attitude of gratitude. • Relating to Others—feeling closer to and more compassion for others. • New Possibilities—reprioritizing values, accomplishing goals, and developing new roles. • Personal Strength—learning you are stronger and wiser because of the experience and gaining an appreciation of how much strength and courage it took to survive the event. • Spiritual Change—strengthening your spiritual self.
Being intentional in life can help you grow through harmful events and learn from your experiences, both the good and the bad. When you are in the middle of a Big T or a Small T trauma, make sure you remember each of these five categories.
How is the traumatic event going to affect you? What will you intentionally do to help yourself grow and to appreciate your own strength? How will you create a tighter bond with others? Will this event help you to become a better person and a better corrections officer? Will it push you to acquire a new skill or new knowledge so that you can decrease the chances of the event from happening again to you or even others?
Post-traumatic growth is achieved when you live through a harmful event and, as a result, find growth in at least a few of these five categories. Sometimes that growth is natural, but other times you may need to focus on intentional growth. This could be in the form of a self-assessment or at the direction of a supervisor.
What if an inmate is handcuffed poorly and slips the cuffs? And as a result, a fight ensues and either the inmate or a corrections officer is injured? In that scenario, an officer can do a self-assessment and learn from the mistake. Or a post-incident debrief can occur and the entire team can learn from the incident. A potential solution might be to retrain on the skill of handcuffing that may prevent a similar situation in the future. Thus, providing post-traumatic growth for the involved officer and pre-traumatic growth for others that will prevent this scenario from happening again, avoiding both physical and traumatic injury.
Personal Tribulations There are also the really hard life events that occur in our personal life—for example, a horrible diagnosis or the loss of a loved one. I am reminded of a recent situation where a friend was faced with the possibility of losing his wife at a very young age. In the worst of it, he asked all of us to hug “our people” a bit longer and harder than we did yesterday. Gaining an even greater appreciation for what we have in our lives is often a direct result of trauma and adversity.
As we move through life, each one of us will experience good and bad times, both personally and professionally. That is reality. We can’t stop bad things from happening to us.
We have two choices. We can let them break us or we can let them push us towards growth. The next time you experience a hard day or a traumatic event, I encourage you to think about how that event can push you toward growth. What does that growth look like and what steps do you need to take to make sure it happens?
Steps to Grow In this series of articles in American Jail, we have examined how we can prepare for, cope with, and grow through adversity. There are a lot of people in this world who just ‘get through’ life. Their goal is to simply get by or—worse—just to survive. However, there are also people who truly thrive through life, even during the hard times. The difference is often intentional.
Those who just get by let life batter them. Then, they adapt unhealthy coping mechanisms that often cause a downward spiral of bad habits that leads to an unhappy and regret-filled life. But there are others who live intentionally, moving through life and looking for opportunities to grow and be happier.
Those are the people who prepare for, cope with, and grow through the different moments in their lives: • They prepare by strengthening their resources, continuously building healthy relationships, saving for emergencies, taking care of themselves physically and emotionally, living a life of purpose, etc.
• They cope by using those tools to help them during the hard times and allowing them to make the good times even better. • And they grow through adversity by finding meaning in traumatic events and allowing those times to make them better, smarter, and more resilient.
Conclusions What resources do you have that can help you to become more resilient? What resources do you want to develop? These are questions we need to continuously ask ourselves. Then we must work to intentionally acquire new resources and continue to strengthen the ones already in our possession.
What habits can you develop or improve upon that will allow you to make small improvements every day and result in you becoming more resilient? Through continuous and intentional improvement, you will be able to move through life in a more purposeful, healthy, and fulfilling way.
References
Poulin, M. J., Brown, S. L., Dillard, A. J., & Smith, D. M. (2013, August 7). Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Retrieved from https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300876
Chowdhury, M. R. (2021, June 12). What is post-traumatic growth? (+ inventory & scale). PositivePsychology.com. Retrieved from https://positivepsychology.com/post-traumatic-growth/
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Colonel Brenda Dietzman spent 28 years in law enforcement and corrections, retiring as the undersheriff in charge of jail operations in Wichita, Kansas. She is an IADLEST certified trainer and has presented to national and international audiences on resilience and a variety of leadership topics. She can be contacted through her website at brendadietzman.com or directly at brenda@brendadietzman.com.