kena Cline emerged from a tragedy at a higher level of happiness than they experienced before dr. Sanyal uber murski a psychology professor and researcher has studied this phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth sunny reveals why this happens but not only that she shares new perspectives on how to foster it so imagine that someone had a bad event like whether to diagnosis or losing a job losing a spouse and for some people they kind of they're like this and Happiness they go down and they never recover and that's actually a pretty small subset other people they go
down and their happiness and then they go back up the same level and that's the majority and so a lot of resilience researchers on that you've had and that's literally what resilience is you bounce back to bounce to the same level you were before but what I think is the most fascinating are people who are kind of going down and when they come back up they actually come through a higher level than they were before and that's called post-traumatic growth not to say that we should all experience trauma so we could experience that but if
you have experienced it some people just are able to they grow they appreciate their life more they feel like life is so precious I didn't know I didn't believe preciate that before they kind of lived day to day but you know and it was interesting to me is are the individual differences you know what what what makes that person special that seed that way and actually my very very at the beginning when I first started be doing this term happiness back when I was in grad school my advisor back then and I he had this
friend talked about this he had a friend who was a Holocaust survivor well actually two different people he knew were Holocaust survivors and he said one of them said you know it's indecent or obscene to ever be happy again after the Holocaust like after that happened how can anyone be happy again and the other person said it's insane or indecent to never to be unhappy again like how can you not enjoy life regular life you know after you've survived the concentration camp so it's just to kind of put in justice or contrast this very different
perspective that some people have fortunately most people have the more positive perspective and they grow and so that's what's the most interesting to me about resilience um there are some research that shows some how people can become more resilient Florrick who's at Missouri she does research on meaning and so she finds for example that you know some people make this distinction between happiness and meaning like you could be happy or you could have meaning and I've always thought that they really go together you know it feels good when you feel like you have meaning in
your life and so that's exactly what she finds jess is this really great study which she measured people throughout the day and she asked people how happy do you feel and how much meaning do you feel right now and on days that you felt happier you felt you get more meaning and days you had more meaning you felt happier so they kind of called each other and lots of other social studies coping and she finds for example getting back to coping there when people experience negative events or like real major adversity they not only did
they actually can become happier they become more mature and so she for example have studied women who have kids with Down syndrome and sort of she studied their life stories and how how they described you know when we first found out and and basically she finds that most of them have become kind of more mature through that experience more kind of cognitively complex it's like they think about life in a more complex way she also looked at these shows in different groups women who got divorced after many many years so older women who are divorced
after like very long marriages suddenly their identity has changed and how they've cooked through that and they also shows us that he gave in lesbians who have come out and how you know the hard parts of that so anyway so she finds that people not only get happier after some of these very difficult events but they become more mature when major adversity hits it can recalibrate a person's perspective in ways that they may never have imagined but now I'd like to hear from you what are your thoughts on helping a client grow after they've experienced
the trauma and how will you use these ideas in your work please leave a comment below and thanks for watching
