Hidden Brain - What We Gain from Pain

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

We've all heard the saying, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But is there any truth to this idea? This week, we explore the concept of post-traumatic growth with psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme. He finds that suffering can have benefits — but not necessarily the ones we expect. If you like this show, be sure to check out our other work, including our recent episode about how we define intelligence. Also, check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Some years ago, I got a talking with an investor. By his own account, he was a 1%er. Like many other successful Americans before him, he had overcome many challenges growing up. And then he told me about the one thing in his life that made him sad. His kids.

They were sweet and smart, but they lacked drive. They had led easy lives, he told me. They didn't have the same hunger that had made him successful. I've heard variations of the same story over the years. People who have come through adversity will invariably tell you that their adversity played a central role in their success. You're the Godfather of technology. You founded this company, you're still thriving, and you came from such humble beginnings. Tell me how you did.

Well, I think for my favorite line is I had all the disadvantages necessary for success. I was jobless, alone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. I now know from interviewing over 50,000 people over the years, and my own personal experiences, that everything that has happened to you can be used to strengthen you if you're open to it. This idea that hard times make us stronger has been touted so often and by so many people that we rarely stop to ask ourselves, is explore whether adversity is the secret sauce of success.

Iranda Jaya Vikrama grew up in Sri Lanka while a civil war raged in that country. When he was 21, he moved to the United States to study. Soon after his arrival, Iran began to notice that Americans had a way of thinking about adversity and suffering that was new to him. It became the start of a lifelong exploration. Today, as a psychologist at Wake Forest University, Iran is asking a question that is increasingly relevant in many parts of the world. What happens to people as they go through terrible times and what advice can science give them about the best path forward? Iranda Jaiwakrama, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me. Iranda, you arrived in the United States shortly before the 9-11 attacks and a few weeks after the attacks, New York's mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a speech at the United Nations. This massive attack was intended to break our spirit. Has not done that. It's made us stronger, more determined and more resolved. So there was a theme in speeches like this that jumped out at your under.

You felt it reflected a particularly American way of thinking about trauma. What did you hear? One thing that I remember being struck by was this idea that, well, this bad thing has happened, but something good is gonna come out of it, right? That if we're absolutely determined, that something good is gonna come out of it.

And I remember thinking, well, that's interesting because the first thing you typically want to do is make sure you can manage with the impact of that bad thing. And maybe in the wake of what's happened, try and return to where you were before or return to a baseline. But this is something different. This is the idea that this terrible thing has happened. But somehow we're going to overcome it and we're going to get to a place that's somehow better than before. And I'm wondering if you can almost summarize this way of thinking in a single line that you see all over social media nowadays

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Exactly and this happened I think you know in the last 10 or 15 years or so right this this quote right which comes from Friedrich Nietzsche the German philosopher It's become almost like a culture of touch, Tony. And I remember, I think in the last few years, there have been songs by Kanye West, then Klee Klopzer. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger than a little power? That that don't kill me can only make me stronger.

There have been memes that go around the internet. Life and man said, what doesn't kill me. Just makes me stronger. Since almost like a default attitude towards trauma, right? Like when bad things happen, we're going to use this as an opportunity to become better. And that, to me, seems quintessentially American, right? The idea that we are going to take even the worst opportunities, the worst experiences, the worst

experiences and make something positive out of them. Once Miranda noticed this phenomenon, he started remembering all the times he had encountered it earlier in his life, particularly in American superhero movies. So when I was growing up in Sri Lanka when I was a small boy, I remember watching the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve and Marlon Brando. What's your background? Where do you hail from? Well, it's kind of hard to explain, actually.

See, I'm from, well, pretty far away. Another galaxy, as a matter of fact. And the movie begins with Superman as an infant, leaving the planet Krypton, before it's destroyed, trying to earth, growing up on earth, realizing he has superpowers and then becoming a superhero. And when I was destroyed, trying to earth, growing up on earth, realizing he has superpowers and then becoming a superhero. And when I was young, I just thought,

oh, this is a cool superhero story. And then once I moved to the US, I realized, well, it's interesting that so many superhero stories, the Batman movies, for example, or Spider-Man, right? So this is, to tend to follow a very similar plot. So the protagonist goes through some type of trauma, adverse event, and somehow that event is a catalyst. The story of my life is not for the faint of heart.

If somebody said it was a happy little tale, if somebody told you I was just your average ordinary guy not a care in the world, somebody lied. And I think buried in that narrative, right? It's this idea that that narrative, right? It's this idea that, you know, bad things, right? In some cases, can lead to this growth or the development specific abilities that makes you better off than before and also better off than

most other people. And what I find fascinating, of course, is that this way of thinking about suffering is not new in America. In the 1950s, books and sermons by the clergyman Norman Vincent Peale became enormously influential. The world is full of problems.

For what reason? Why do we have so many problems? Why do you have so many problems? There's one answer to that. It is that you will grow strong, so that you're more and more capable of handling problems. The only way to make a strong man is through resistance, struggle, pain, frustration, disappointment. This makes man. When I listen to that clip from Norman Vincent Peel, he's not just saying that suffering produces growth.

He's actually saying, suffering exists in your life in order to produce growth. Right, and that's a very interesting claim, right? This idea that to some extent, in order for you to become the best person, you can be in order for you to sort of best person you can be, in order for you to sort of grow and character, suffering is necessary, right? And it makes it wonder whether that has something to do with the history of the United States, especially for people who had the freedom to immigrate to the United States, right? I mean, I think when they came to the US, there was this belief that

the US is this land of plenty, there's all this opportunity, it's up to you to make the most of it. And to the extent to which you're not able to make the most of it, it's because of something that you're not doing. And I wonder whether that culture belief is consistent with this view, that pain and suffering are opportunities for growth for change. Now, this way of thinking about trauma and suffering are opportunities for growth, for change. Now, this way of thinking about trauma and suffering is arguably no longer purely American.

I feel like I've heard this theme now in many other contexts, perhaps because, you know, American culture increasingly permeates the whole world. But there are videos on TikTok and WhatsApp that talk about how, you know, like Generation One confronted suffering, built its character and pulled itself up by the bootstraps, Generation Two built on that hard work to create great companies or acquire political power.

And then Generation Three squanders at all because those kids grew up in luxury and were not tested by adversity. Do you think it's possible that to some extent some of this American attitude has now started to rub off on the rest of the world as well, the sense that, you know, suffering exists in some ways to allow you to become a better version of yourself. I think there's something to that. You know, a couple of weeks ago in my graduate personality seminar, I was talking with my students about this narrative that adversity and trauma can lead to positive outcomes.

And one of my students, who is originally from China, said, well, I do think this narrative is there in other countries as well, including in my country. What's interesting and different though is that in China, the idea is that adversity and suffering can lead to positive change at the national level, right? So that the country and the community can benefit. And he said there's a clear difference from maybe how American could think about the value

of adversity and suffering, because they were seen in terms of its value to the individual, its value to personal transformation. Very interesting. Now, you notice this theme of triumph over trauma turning up in the lives of the people you were getting to know in the United States.

Tell me about Meredith Rousseau, who she was and how you became acquainted around her So Meredith Rousseau she was a retired English instructor She was very kind to me. I How set for her multiple times she would allow me to use her house to throw dinner parties for my friends And she was just a very kind generous welcome in presence While I was in college, as an international student. So I remember when she told me about her illness, and I went to visit her almost immediately,

and she simply said, well, you know, I have cancer, the prognosis isn't good, but, you know, we're going to take it day by day. And then she went on to talk about how part of what she was experiencing after her diagnosis were people talking about how she was going to fight the cancer like a warrior that she was going to defeat it. It was really important to sort of take the right attitude about fighting cancer. She thought, well, it seems like a lot of stress to think about cancer is something to

be wankished. I have it. I'm going to manage with the best I can. I probably don't have a lot of time left, but I'm going to focus on what's important. It seems like this idea of being a warrior about some of the overcoming and maybe even growing from defeating cancer, it's truckers almost, I'm trying to find the right word here. It's truckers almost unnecessary. And she didn't like the fact that people were sort of encouraging her to take this more,

almost warrior-like position towards the illness. Yeah, so people are telling her, you're gonna come out stronger than before or there's a reason this is happening. And for the person who's actually suffering from the cancer, it now feels like they not only have to deal with the cancer, but they have to deal now with the expectations that they've been bequeathed a gift to actually become some kind of superior person, some kind of superhero. Exactly. And I think it's especially strange to be given that

type of advice, right, that this is a gift, this is opportunity. When you are still sort of thinking about the emotional response that you have when you're given the news, right, that it seems very quick to move from, oh, you have this like very serious situation to, oh, but this is opportunity that you can learn from. This is an opportunity where you can sort of grow your character, become the best possible version of yourself. So by this point, you were starting to become a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, you were in grad school, and you discovered that the triumphant over adversity trope,

or the superhero trope, was not only dominant in American popular culture, but it was a booming area in psychological research. Can you tell me about the idea of post-traumatic growth? What does that mean and how that connected with this larger cultural trope? Post-traumatic growth refers to this idea that people can experience positive psychological changes as a result of going through stressful life experiences.

Research in post-traumatic growth starts you know, started taking off in the mid 1990s. And a lot of the early research and post-traumatic growth, I think, was based on interviews that clinicians were doing with clients who had gone through trauma, gone through adversity. And they were trying to categorize the types of benefits these clients would report in their clinical interviews. And in the last 20 years, you know, work and research and interest in post-traumatic growth has exploded. I can tell you that in the last six months, I think I've seen at least three papers looking

at post-traumatic growth in the wake of COVID. And I'm sure there are quite a few more that are in the pipeline. Even as some clinicians were telling patients that traumatic events could lead to growth, other researchers said, hang on. Are people reporting growth because they've grown? Or are they saying so because the superhero trope is so dominant in the culture. Irranda cites a paper by the research of Patricia Frazier. So I was a graduate student when I started becoming interested in looking at post-traumatic growth. And I remember reading this paper when it came out. And it was a very elegant, simple paper.

It was a short-term, longitudinal study. So it was a study that tracked a large number of undergraduate students over a few months. And it asked them whether they experienced a major stressful event, and then they were asked, okay, since as a result of the stressful event, how much have you changed because of the trauma? And so it turns out that this question, how much do you think you've changed because of the trauma, is the way most measures of post-traumatic growth

asks about change. And this paper made me realize that even though most theories about post-traumatic growth were talking about post-traumatic growth in terms of personality transformation, the measures of post-traumatic growth were actually looking at something different, which was the perception of change. And what they found was that while people who had experienced real change had better quality mental health, the people who reported perceiving high levels of change, as a result of experiencing the trauma or the adverse event, actually reported high levels of mental distress. So from the point of view of someone who was now just looking at this larger

American cultural trope, what I'm going to now call the superhero trope, that bad things produce extraordinary qualities to come out inside you, is it fair to say that this study in some ways was pointing to the fact that if you subscribe very strongly to this belief, the superhero trope belief, but didn't actually have the changes in your life. Not only was this not good, but it could actually be bad. I think that's right. What was happening was that people were having these beliefs about benefits or growth that experience as a way to cope with the traumatic event that had gone through.

So in some ways, having these beliefs was potentially serving the role of making them think about their event in a more manageable way, maybe make them establish a greater sense of control over the event. And I think one lesson from the Frasier paper is that this coping strategy of perceiving growth didn't seem like a particularly effective one, at least for the sample. Now there was another study this one conducted with soldiers deployed to Iraq. Can you tell me what that paper found around it? Yes, this is a paper that looked at soldiers from the Netherlands that were deployed to Iraq. What was nice about this paper is that it tracked people, I think, across 15 months.

This paper explicitly looked to the question of whether perceiving growth served as an adaptive coping strategy. And what they found was that perceived growth actually predicted increased impairment in terms of PTSD symptoms. In other words, the soldiers who perceived that they had grown as a result of adversity were actually more likely than other soldiers to experience symptoms of PTSD. The belief was supposed to be helping, but it led to worse outcomes. Yet the idea that people who experienced trauma would benefit from their trauma proved irresistible. Increasingly, this trope has been actively recommended to patients as a path to recovery. Around 10 or 15 years ago, there was a lot of interest in trying to promote these beliefs

about post-traumatic growth among cancer patients, because there was this belief that maybe growth could help them improve the quality of life. And this led to this pretty acrimonious debate, where you had researchers advocating for post-traumatic growth, talking about the potential benefits of growth, the fact that large proportions of people report high levels of growth, and then you had detectors saying, we haven't properly distinguished between perceived growth and post-traumatic growth. And the existing evidence suggests that growth understood as perceived change

doesn't have a meaningful impact on the quality of life or the longevity of cancer patients. And this speaks to one of the challenges of doing this type of research in the context of a culture that really validates this superhero trope, right, or this idea that you know adversity can lead to these positive outcomes. you can lead to these positive outcomes. I think it's easy for people to accept research that speaks to their own pre-existing beliefs. And I think what happened when I posted my growth research was that people were willing to jump ahead and make strong claims about the evidence before the right kind of evidence could be procured.

Around the start to wonder, does the post-traumatic growth narrative give people hope and inspiration, or does it demand that people suffering trauma not only survive it, but show evidence they have come out stronger on the other side? When we come back, Iran did not trust what he was seeing in the United States, with his own experience of dealing with conflict in Sri Lanka. You are listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. American culture insists that hard times can make us into better, more successful people.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. After moving to the United States to study psychology, Iranda Jayawikrama began to ask if this popular trope was doing more harm than good. He had a reference point, his own experience growing up in Sri Lanka. Through much of the 1980s and 90s, the minority Tamil population of Sri Lanka and the Sinalese majority were locked in a brutal civil war. Tens of thousands of people were killed. The conflict featured terrible acts of cruelty on all sides. Eranda, you were a kid in Sri Lanka when the civil war unfolded. How much were you allowed to see as a child?

My everyday experience as a nine and ten year old going around Colombo, which is where we lived, was seeing the bodies of people who had been abducted, tortured, killed, and left on the side of the street. And looking back on that, I wanted them struck by, it's just the extent to which I thought that was normal. I had no comparison. I just thought, oh, we don't get to go to school. All this stuff is happening around us, but I just didn't think too much about it. And I think that's set the stage for a

pretty high degree of normalization or extreme violence. And I think for many people who grew up in Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s, that was very much the norm. And even though I grew up in a relatively affluent middle class household, so we were spared many of the terrible atrocities that were committed both in the insurrection and in the civil war. But this attitude of a bomb might go up in you under bus. You have to be careful if you see someone suspicious. These types of behaviors and these types of beliefs just became normalised. I remember, so we moved to candy when we were, I think, 14 years old. And in 1998, I think,

when the tamatikers blew up the temple of the tooth, this major Buddhist shrine in candy, so we were a couple of miles away from the blast. I remember you know our house shook when the bomb went off and the moment the bomb went off the oh something's happened and I think it was interesting that I felt comfortable traveling out to the city center that afternoon to see my friends and to see what was happening right like I remember visiting my friend who lived close to the temple and all the windows in his house had been blown through but it felt weirdly mundane because of'd degree to which we had become sort of accustomed to the type of violence that we saw going on in Sri Lanka at that time.

I mean, it's astonishing that your parents simply let you out of the house. I mean, you know, there was a bomb blast that went off two miles away and a few hours later, you're traipsing out to a friend's house. I mean, that's kind of astonishing. I think looking back, it might be that, you know, we made a decision that, well, the bombs already happened. Chances are something is not going to happen again. So we felt comfortable going out. And I will also say, right, and it was true that there was a degree of difference between what people in candy and crumble were experiencing and what people in the North and East of the country are experiencing, right? People who are actually caught up in the Civil War, right?

So, there's, I think there's a sense in which maybe implicitly explicitly, we believe that compared to other people, this wasn't too bad, right? That if we weren't living in a war zone. We talked earlier about how you move to the United States shortly before the 9-11 attacks. When the attacks happen, you noticed something about your own reaction to the attacks. What did you notice around that? I remember this very vividly. I was in class that morning when they announced

the first plane had a head-to-head world trade center. And I think because of that point, people thought it was still an accident. We continued with class. And then it was after my first class of the day that it became clear that this was actually a con-edit attack. People in shock and the cancer classes to the rest of the day, they set up TV sets,

and they gave out food. And my first thought was, well, this is bad, but it also weirdly feels like home. And my thought was, oh, this is bad, but I don't think it struck me just how bad it would have felt to other people around me. And it was only later that evening, there was an interfaith memorial service that I went for.

And there were professors who were there, and they were crying. They were sobbing because there were seniors who had graduated that spring who had gone to work on Wall Street, who had gone to work at the World Trade Center. And they didn't know where they were. They tried to contact them, right? They were beside themselves with grief. And I remember thinking at that moment, something's wrong here.

Like I seem to, I feel like I'm having a response to this attack that doesn't seem right. I mean, you were almost responding with a sense of detachment to this terrible thing that was happening around you. Exactly. And it also speaks to the fact that time is that, you know, what seemed real to be normal to me as someone who grew up in Sri Lanka was something that I was realizing was not normal to many other people, at least for people who lived in,

you know, in this part of the world. After he became a psychologist, Iranda started to ask himself whether his own response to the trauma of the Sri Lankan civil war revealed in our growth. When he looked at himself honestly, he didn't see growth. He saw heartening, desensitization, even indifference. Now you could argue if you like Norman Vincent Peel, that hardness is growth. But was apathy in the face of suffering really a sign that trauma had made him a better person?

When Iran then returned to Sri Lanka to do research on post-traumatic growth, he interviewed other people who had been traumatized by the civil war. He saw lots of people who were like himself or worse. It makes no sense to talk to them about what happened to you last week or what was a terrible thing that has impacted your life, right? Because these are people of undergone multiple traumas of all types. And one thing that struck home for me in those interviews is that unlike in the United States,

most shirankers don't want to talk at length about their experiences, about their trauma. There's no sort of investigation into what this means for who am I as a person, or what I can grow for me, or change for me, or what lessen I can take for me, all the conversations I had with people are very matter of fact. If I pushed them on the experiences I had, they would just sort of list them one after another and that would be it. You know, the extent to which it was clear that day-to-day function had been impacted by trauma varied. There were some

people who did come across as very resilient and very positive despite that adversities had gone through, right? Not too many, maybe one or two. But there were many people who you could tell, but just struggling to function day to day, right? There was one person who came to speak to us because that person was hoping that I could help her find her son. And that was like a heartbreaking discussion to have, right? You know, it was clear she was struggling.

It was clear that she could barely function in daily life. But she came to the meeting because she was hoping that talking to me about her son would maybe open up a new possibility that he could be found. So you weren't satisfied with the approach that you were seeing in Sri Lanka, kind of avoidance that left people isolated in their pain, but you also weren't satisfied with the American approach. This polyanish optimism that told people that tragedy would make them better versions of themselves. So you started to examine if there was a third way and you began to look for answers, not just in science, but in philosophy and theology. Why did you do that around there and what did you find?

My first thought was, okay, to the extent to which adversity can lead to change, in what domains would you expect to see change? And in looking at the, you know, the literature in philosophy, looking at different religious traditions, looking at theology, one idea ahead was that, well, it might be that to accentuate these different traditions, talk about suffering, how to deal with it, how to move past it. There might be valuable insights that could come from these different traditions. And in the last few years, there been many people have argued that a fundamental role

of religion isn't to tell you a story about creation, or to tell you a story about why you should be a good person. The fundamental role of religion is to help us understand why they're suffering and trauma in the world. Why do the people that we love get sick and leave us at some point? Why do we suffer unavoidable pain, undeserved suffering?

These are fundamental existential questions that we can't, you know, immediately answer rationally. So, my thought was that looking at different religions, looking at theology, looking at different philosophical traditions that I try to explain the role and value of suffering and adversity, these traditions might give us a better understanding of where we could see change. In the Buddhist tradition, there's this idea that

it's important to understand that life is fundamentally about suffering. And once they accept that core truth about life, it opens up the possibility for you to attain specific virtues, that compassion, that would enable you to lead a good life. Similarly, in the Christian tradition, one lesson that suffering can provide us is that we are vulnerable creatures,

that we need other people that we're fundamentally independent, and that insight is available listen that suffering can teach you. So you began your own research on the role of adversity in promoting this kind of character development, and you became alert to an emerging body of research within psychology

that was demonstrating the potential for suffering to lead to things like compassion or wisdom or creativity. For example, you found the work of the psychologist David Distanneudani-Lem who had examined empirically how adversity affected people's capacity for compassion. Tell me what they found around them. They assessed adversity through a checklist where people were asked across your whole life, tell us what major stressful life events we experienced. And what they found was that if you look to the relationship between the number of adverse life events

people reported in their lifetime and the expression of compassion, they found that people who were experienced high levels of community life and adversity were more compassionate. They were more willing to engage in pro-social behavior. They also found that to accentuate your experience high levels of community of lifetime adversity, you were less prone

to be overwhelmed by the number of people who were suffering, right? So this is called the numeracy bias. So the idea is that when you see one person suffering, you feel like, oh, I can do something with that person. But when you hear that, like, a whole country has a refugee crisis, you tend not to get involved because you feel like, well, this is overwhelming. I don't think I can do anything about this. So I'm not going to engage. It turns out that people who have experienced a high level of lifetime adversity are immune to this bias. So, one implication from these studies is that they, something about experiencing different

types of adverse events that seems to increase your empathy towards other people, that seems to make you most sensitive to the needs of others. In other words, suffering and trauma don't always produce growth. When they do, that growth is unlikely to follow the arc of your standard superhero movie. Instead of getting tougher, growth may take the form of increased compassion and empathy. There are caveats however. Trauma can also decrease empathy and compassion. Remember how Iran responded to the 9-11 attacks. It turns out trauma alone usually does not produce wisdom and compassion. A lot comes down to how you process trauma, how

you reflect on your own suffering. One study along these lines was conducted by the psychologists, Judith Gluck and Nick Westreth. Yes, so you've just been doing research on wisdom for many years now and Nick Westreth, later project with her, looking at what predicts whether someone experiences changes and well-being in the wake of adverse life events. And they found that how you thought about the event was a critical factor in determining whether you subsequently experienced changes in wisdom and changes in well-being. Specifically, Nick and you that looked at this construct called exploratory processing, are the extent to which you sort of reflect on the event, right? You try and think, okay, what

this is event mean to me? How do I make sense of this? How can I use this event as an opportunity for me to do something different with my life? And in a study that they ran a few years ago, they found that to the extent to which people engage in that type of self-reflection, those people are much more likely to increase in wisdom and increase in well-being after going through a change in life event. Setbacks in adversity do not magically produce growth and build character. Trauma is just as likely to cause us to turn away from others and become embittered. When we come back, how to cultivate character strengths, following setbacks and adversity.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Aranda Jaya Vikramma is a psychologist at Wake Forest University. He studies how we respond to hardships. He explores how suffering can provide a platform for cultivating character strengths like compassion, wisdom and resourcefulness. Irranda, you've long been inspired by Victor Frankel,

the Holocaust survivor who wrote man's search for meaning. Can you tell our listeners what the book is about and how it's spoken to you? So yeah, I remember reading Victor Frankel as a sophomore in college. And I remember even back then, being struck by the message of the book. The book is about the experience that Victor Franco had in a concentration camp during the Second World

War. And specifically, it was about his experience how he was able to maintain a sense of control over his life, despite the complete lack of control he had from an objective standpoint. And one of the core lessons of that book is, even when you have no control over your environment, you can still exert some degree of control over your reaction to the environment, especially in context where you feel like there's nothing you can do to make the situation better.

Believe it or not, at least I can control my own reaction to the situation, I think gives you some degree of agency, right? That allows you to both maintain an adequate level of well-being in the moment, and also, you know, maintain some degree of hope to think that well, things are terrible now, but at least they're supposed to be able to be better in the future. So psychological research has begun to build on testimonies like this, this idea that we can choose our own responses

to adversity. And this research makes a distinction between what's called primary control and secondary control. What are those two modes of control, Miranda? Primary control is what I think most people, at least most Americans, would think of as a control or agency. It's when you use your own actions to modify or change the environment.

Security control is when you can't change the environment. Or maybe for example, the health diagnosis, you just can't change objectively. In those cases, the focus of control is not on the environment, but on your own thoughts. So while primary control involves changing the environment, secondary control involves changing your own reaction to the environment. There's been a lot of work that looks at the difference between these two approaches in a study that you conducted with Eric Helzer. You assessed how much people exercised this control over the external world versus control

over the internal world and then you measured how satisfied they were with their lives. Can you describe the study for me and what you found around there? You know, we had this idea that primary security control worked together to promote well being. In the literature, there's an assumption that primary control is what's most important and that you fall back at security control when you don't have an option with the hope that in the future, you can then revert back to primary control. Our perspective was that, well, no, maybe we use these different control strategies as

tools to deal with different types of challenges in our world. So we ran a study to look at the unique impact each of these control strategies had on well-being. And we found that these two strategies independently predicted well-being, primary control or control over environment, tended to be associated with high levels of possible emotions, whereas secondary control had this relationship with life satisfaction.

So they're both very tools that we can use to promote our wellbeing in daily life. So in other words, when it is absolutely the case that trying to limit the traumas that affect us, changing the external world, obviously that does help, that is, that does produce positive outcomes, it is also the case that changing our response

to those traumatic events that independently can also promote our well-being. Exactly, and it can do so in a number of different ways, right? It can do so by helping us sort of accept the change that's happening in our lives. Doing so also gives us a sense of agency control, right? We don't feel overwhelmed by the event. We don't feel like this event has somehow sort of taken over a sense of self

has made us lose a sense of control over our lives And it makes the event more manageable So there was a time in your own life around where you had to lean on your own capacity to exert secondary control In other words to exert control over your own your own reactions not the not the external world Can you tell me about what happened in Sri Lanka in 2004? You were enrolled in college at the time and the events that were unfolding were taking place thousands of miles away.

Walk me through what happened. So I remember I think it was, Chris was in 2004 and at some point in the night I got a message from my father saying that there had been a tsunami that hit Sri Lanka. And I remember that morning waking up and watching the news and seeing like these terrible scenes of people being swept through city centers by, you know, these waves of water. And he felt overwhelming because

all the next few days, all these stories came out of the number of people who had been killed, the level of devastation on the eastern coast, on the southern coast, there was a train that was traveling down from Colombo to South of the country, and the wave that came for tsunami engulfed the train and pulled it into the sea and then washed it back up a show, right? And many of these people on that train were lost. So there were all these terrible stories that were coming out, and I, you know, felt completely helpless, right?

I was worried about my parents, or thankfully they were not impacted that badly by the tsunami. I was worried about the impact this would have on the friends I had there, the people in the country. And it wasn't an internet I could do, because I was like a college student and it's finally a, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So I remember thinking, well, I can't do anything to fix it. I just had to figure out how to manage with the fact that this terrible thing has happened and accept the fact that I can't

do anything about it right now. I will say that relying on secondary control at that point in time helps facilitate a more primary control response in the spring. Because in the spring of that year, I worked with some friends of mine to raise funds for people impacted by the tsunami. And it ended up becoming one of the most meaningful experiences of my college career. And this is why I think these different control strategies can be so helpful because depending on where you are at the moment, depending on what you can

and can't do in the moment, selectively utilizing these different strategies can be very helpful. And I do think in the case of the tsunami, I was able to get to a place in the spring where I was then able to exert primary control and do something that I hopefully was helpful to people in Sri Lanka. So another practice that's supported by your research is engaging in reflection on what we really care about and whether we're actually living out our values. Why would this be valuable and how would it work around that?

Yes, so over the last few years I've been working with colleagues on DERP and interventions to help people manage and recover from different types of adversity. And one insight that we include in our interventions, and this is taken, these are ideas that are taken from other practices like acceptance and commitment therapy. It's the idea that you know, one of the challenges when we are faced by adversity or struggle or suffering is that it prevents us, you know, dealing with the impact of that event, prevents us from living our lives the way we want to, right, or living our lives in light of the values that we care about. So one thing that we are trying to do in these interventions we're developing is to highlight for people who are taking part in this intervention the imponds of their own values, right? So despite the fact that they're going through

challenges, despite the fact that there might be events outside the control that they're experiencing, what's imponds to them, what matters to them, and then how can they commit to behaviors that are consistent with those values? Because the idea is that even though you may be struggling or might be dealing with various challenges in the wake of adversity or in the wake of suffering, that you can somehow separate out that struggle from who you are as a person and understand that you are not purely defined by your struggles, right?

That you're also someone who has values and that you can still commit to that life, despite the fact that you're simultaneously managing all these challenges that come from the immodelability. I'm struck by the fact that in some ways this is a very different model than saying trauma and adversity make us into better versions of ourselves. This is really saying trauma and adversity help us discover who we really always were on the inside. I think that's exactly right. And I think one problem with current research and post-traumatic growth is the term itself.

So there are two assumptions baked into the phrase post-traumatic growth. One is that trauma is needed for you to grow, but also that you are going to become a better person. And that is a much more simplistic understanding of what happens to you when you experience a major life event that I think is the case for most people. I think it's quite likely that people can become more compassionate. They can get greater insight into their own lives. They can commit to their values again.

But we should be sensitive enough not to say that that means that the trauma or the adversity was worth it. You know, someone could become compassionate, someone could become wiser, someone could commit to living their values, and still experience significant challenges in their mental health or in other domains of their life. Iranda found that his own life reflected what he was finding in his research. The more he reflected on his values,

the more he found himself connecting his own experiences growing up with those of people in other contexts. One moment of epiphany came when news broke in 2019 of attacks on two mosques in New Zealand. I end up staying up to like four or five in the morning, watching the events unfold in real time. And I had this sort of strong visceral reaction when I heard about this gunman who had gone into a mosque and was indiscriminately killing all these people. My thought was that, oh, if there was someone like that that decided to attack in North Carolina, right?

It was one of the first times where it became clear to me that my identity, being an American and immigrant of South Asian origin, who in this context could be caught up in an event like that. And I will say, looking back on that, that did mark a shift in how I started to think about myself. And my reaction to the Christ Church attack really highlighted the fact that this right, you know, this feels like something that could be done to me, right? This is something that I feel at some level, right? I felt I was been impacted by, right? Even though, like, you know, I don't have a direct connection, right? But it had this visceral sense that what was happening to them could potentially in a different world,

in the different circumstances happened to me. And that's very different than your reaction to 911, which was in some extent a reaction of detachment or a reaction even of like this doesn't really affect me or this isn't about this does not concern me. Exactly. And I think you know this highlights a thing an important lesson right about how we deal with adversity, how we deal with trauma, right? So I don't doubt that the sense of detachment, the sense of normalizing trauma and adversity can be useful when you are in that context. But it also comes with costs, especially when you don't live in that context anymore.

And I think thinking back over my life since coming to the US, I'm struck by how, as I've gained more distance for my life in Sri Lanka, I become more aware of just how ubiquitous this normalization was. And, you know, I understand the benefits of it from a mental head perspective, but I also see the cost. There is one other domain where trauma can produce growth. Again, this growth looks very different than the what doesn't kill you makes you stronger trope. The psychologist Dean Simonton has explored the correlation between the experience of setbacks, adversity,

and being an outsider, and creativity. I think the key idea here, and I think this is something that Simonton has written about, is that, to the extent to which people experience any type of unusual unexpected event that pushes people to experience the world from a non normal perspective. That sort of enables these people to sort of think about the world from the margins. And to the extent to which you experience unusual events unexpected events that enables you to sort of be open to different ways of thinking about the world and understanding human experience.

I mean, I'm thinking about how extraordinary art often seems to emerge out of suffering. When you look at the gorgeous paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, for example, of the music of Beethoven, do you hear echoes in those artists of your own research and findings? You know, going back to this Buddhist idea, that fundamental characteristic of life is suffering, that part of what it means to be human is to find a way to confront and manage our experience of suffering and adversity. And that view I think comes out very strongly in the work of certain artists like Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh.

I mean I'm thinking about Beethoven who wrote some of his most famous music when he was completely deaf. That just seems extraordinary and it's a different kind of superhero trope. You know, it's not developing some new skill but really doubling down on what it is that you have inside of you. I think that's exactly right. And you know, when things then go produce great artwork, right? And you know, lived in considerable psychological pain. Frida Kahlo, produce great artwork and lived in considerable physical pain. And you know, Beethoven produced this wonderful music as he was going in death. you know, Beethoven produced this wonderful music as he was going in death. So, as an appreciative art, I might be kind of saying, well, yes, he suffered.

Many of these great artists suffered, but look what they gave us. And I think my inclination might be to focus on the artwork, right, on what was produced as a result of that experience. I think it's an interesting philosophical question, right? Whether, you know, the production of art is worth the pain and suffering, right?

I think one of the challenges we're thinking about, the changes we experience find adversity, purely in positive terms or in negative terms, I think obscures the fact that we can have a complex reaction to adversity and it can lead to positive and negative outcomes simultaneously. positive and negative outcomes simultaneously. And I think as long as we're honest about that, and we're honest about the fact that, yes, under some circumstances, people can grow more compassionate or they can increase their creativity, right?

But also, that is accompanied by other changes but that may not be as positive. So maybe you will continue to struggle with your mental health. Or you might experience negative changes in other domains. I think going forward, especially because the cultural narrative around post-traumatic growth is so strong, this idea, especially in the United States, and increasingly in other parts of the world,

that bad events are an opportunity for growth. Maybe taking a slightly more humble view and saying, well, you know, adversity and trouble are bad things. You know, those events are clear events that we would not want to wish in other people. And at the same time, they can change people in different ways. And some of those changes can be positive. Some of them can be negative. And I think it's important for us to look at all those changes together before we make claims about whether someone's life is better overall compared to before the event. Miranda Joy Wichramma is a psychologist at Wake Forest University. Miranda, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me. What is Hidden Brain? Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes this week are Matt Ozzug,

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