Trauma Makes You Stronger Quotes

Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how. It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change. The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life. As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

I've heard some people claim that their abuser/rapist made them stronger. We must realize that abusers and predators don't get credit for our strength, nor our healing. They did not make us stronger. Rather, the abusers and predators broke us. They shattered us. They turned our lives into a living hell. They violated us! Do you know who made you stronger? Do you know who made you brave? YOU did! You are a courageous survivor. You did the hard work. You overcame great obstacles. You are the one healing you. You did it!

What if, by labelling our patients damaged from the outset, we not only condemn them to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but have overlooked a potential finding of equal importance? That the emotional vulnerability of trauma is oftentimes transformed into emotional strength. What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality? Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger, yes. What if I told you that there are times when whatever does not kill me can make me more, not less, than the person I was before?

have learned that trauma can steal everything from you that is most precious and rip joy right out of your life. But, paradoxically, it can also make you stronger and wiser, and connect you more deeply to other people than you ever imagined by enabling you to touch their misfortunes and integrate their losses and pain with your own. If a person can grow through unthinkable trauma and loss, perhaps a nation may, too. If you are one of millions of Americans who have suffered, in these hard days of plague, violence, and climate emergency, a trauma and rupture like the ones we have experienced in our family, I bid you and your family deep healing and recovery for the battles

posttraumatic growth. Many people who suffer shattering experiences are scarred for life, with little hope of recovery. But for others, shattering experiences prompt them to face their fears, transcend the horrors of the past, and become resilient. PTSD is not a life sentence. POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH While PTSD grabs the headlines, news stories about posttraumatic growth are rare. Up to two thirds of those who experience traumatic events do not develop PTSD. This estimate is based on studies of the mental health of people who have undergone similar experiences. Studies of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan show this two-thirds to one-third split. What’s the difference between the two groups? Research reveals a correlation between negative childhood events and the development of adult PTSD. Yet some people emerge from miserable childhoods stronger and more resilient than their peers. Adversity can sometimes make us even stronger than we might have been had we not suffered it. Research shows that people who experience a traumatic event but are then able to process and integrate the experience are more resilient than those who don’t experience such an event. Such people are even better prepared for future adversity. When you’re exposed to a stressor and successfully regulate your brain’s fight-or-flight response, you increase the neural connections associated with handling trauma, as we saw in Chapter 6. Neural plasticity works in your favor. You increase the size of the signaling pathways in your nervous system that handle recovery from stress. These larger and improved signaling pathways equip you to handle future stress better, making you more resilient in the face of life’s upsets and problems.

For example, moderate, predictable, and controllable activation of our stress-response systems leads to a more flexible, stronger stress-response capability that lets a person demonstrate resilience in the face of extreme stressors. It’s kind of like weight-lifting for our stress-response systems; we exercise the system to make it stronger. The more we face moderate challenges and succeed, the more capable we are of facing bigger challenges. This is something we see in sports, performing arts, clinical practice, fire-fighting, teaching-almost any human endeavor; experience can improve performance. This is why stress is not something to be afraid of or avoided. It is the uncontrollability, pattern, and intensity of stress that can cause problems. Unfortunately, for many people, the pattern of stress activation is unpredictable, uncontrollable, prolonged, or extreme.

Some people really like to talk about honoring the past for what it did to make us. And while I basically understand what they mean by that and why they need to say it, I still think the sentiment is an overflowing bucket of bullshit. Sure, it may be perfectly fine for folks with pristine memories, but it leaves the rest of us dealing with the implication that all of the pain or trauma or damage we suffered along the way was somehow essential to who we eventually became. That the hurt made us stronger, or that the loss gave as much as it took. That we are who we are because of our damage and not in spite of it. And that just sucks as a philosophy. It’s a kind of societal shrug at the worst tragedies, as if to say we can’t do anything about them so we might as well attach some ephemeral pride to having survived. I don’t know. Do whatever works for you, I guess. But I for one don’t feel born from my past so much as resurrected from it. So while I might visit the grave of that life now and then, I’m certainly not wasting any money on flowers.

Connectedness regulates and rewards us. Yet when substance abuse is involved, it can push loved ones away. And many interventions used to deal with substance abuse are punitive and increase distress. The pull to use gets stronger. Disconnection, marginalization, demonizing, and punishing only make the problems of substance abuse worse. The cycle of dysregulation, self-medication, relational disruption, lack of reward leads to more substance abuse. And the spiral continues.

He was the kind of person that made a house a home. The kind of person who took his trauma and used it to make the world a more beautiful place. He was as strong as he was needy. Lost as he was found. He made me feel stronger than I’d ever been before. I needed him. He needed me. The tide and the moon.

You did not make me stronger. This trauma didn't make me stronger. I was already strong. -Bound by Firelight

Trauma is… well, it’s devastating. It affects every part of your life and how you trust and relate to others or make decisions. It’s not always true that it makes you stronger. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. But what it does do is make you consider things more carefully, so you don’t repeat past patterns. The irony is that if you ignore it, those patterns repeat anyway.

It’s not the trauma that makes you stronger. It’s every day you get up after you’ve been knocked down, every time you choose to keep fighting for one more hour, one more day. That’s what makes you stronger.

moderate, predictable, and controllable activation of our stress-response systems leads to a more flexible, stronger stress-response capability (see Figure 3) that lets a person demonstrate resilience in the face of more extreme stressors. It’s kind of like weight lifting for our stress-response systems; we exercise the system to make it stronger. The more we face moderate challenges and succeed, the more capable we are of facing bigger challenges. This is something we see in sports, performing arts, clinical practice, firefighting, teaching—almost any human endeavor; experience can improve performance.

Let me use a simple everyday problem to explain. Suppose I were to try to determine what type of coffee you like. I do not have that information stored in my extensive database, so I would need to learn this fact. I would start with a prior understanding of the coffee preferences of people of your approximate age, gender, and general physiology. Then, I would brew you a coffee. I would analyze your reaction to drinking the beverage. In the short-term, your facial expressions, noises you make, your level of happiness, excitation, etcetera. After this, I would analyze your sleep patterns, elimination rates, urine production, bowel movements, and general health levels. I would interpret this information in the light of other data that may confound my assessment of your coffee preference, such as what events had occurred in the day that may affect your general levels of happiness, levels of trauma, your concomitant food intake, your emotional status. Using each piece of information, I would update my prior understanding, generating a posterior probabilistic model of your individual coffee preference, adjusting for any confounding factors, of course. This posterior model becomes my new prior understanding of your particular coffee predilections. Each day, I could then adjust your coffee: hotter, colder, stronger, weaker, sweeter, more milk, less milk, etcetera — knowing, of course, that many of these factors are correlated. For instance, people who like sweeter coffee generally prefer more milk and vice versa. Then, I would assess your reaction to the new formulation and adjust my probabilistic model as more data are collected, thereby maximizing my understanding of your coffee preference. As you can appreciate, this is simply a rudimentary and idealized example of my learning process.