When Army surgeon Rhonda Cornum regained consciousness after her helicopter crashed, she looked up to see five Iraqi soldiers pointing rifles at her. It was 1991 and her Black Hawk had been shot down over the Iraqi desert. Dazed from blood loss, with a busted knee and two broken arms, the then-36-year-old medic was subjected to a mock execution by her captors, sexually assaulted, and kept prisoner in a bunker for a week.
Her crisis included textbook causes for post-traumatic stress—a near-death experience, sexual assault, utter helplessness—and yet, after her release and medical rehabilitation, she surprised psychiatrists by focusing on ways she improved. “I became a better doctor, a better parent, a better commander, probably a better person,” she says. One might suspect Cornum was suppressing the real toll of her ordeal, but her experience is far from unique.
“Post-traumatic growth,” a term coined by University of North Carolina psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, describes the surprising benefits many survivors discover in the process of healing from a traumatic event. After counseling bereaved parents, people who had lost the loves of their lives or were severely injured, cancer survivors, veterans, and prisoners, the researchers found growth in five main areas: personal strength, deeper relationships with others, new perspectives on life, appreciation of life, and spirituality.
[For more on this story by Michaela Haas, go to https://www.yesmagazine.org/is...to-strength-20180903]
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