The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Grow After Adversity

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Karen Guggenheim was devastated by the death of her husband, Ricardo. She was alive, but dead to the world around her. Slowly she put her life back together and found growing happiness. To share her insights with others in need, Karen started the World Happiness Summit.  Karen's campaign to spread global happiness is just one example of "post traumatic growth". Clinical psychologist Dr Edith Shiro (author of The Unexpected Gift of Trauma) has worked with many people who have recovered from trauma and grown as a result. She explains how we can give ourselves the best possible chance to experience post traumatic growth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. who was born into slavery, but eventually became one of Rome's greatest thinkers. Epictetus argued that we have more control than we think about how we react to negative events. He said we should try to think about life's bad times as opportunities to learn and grow. And so whenever I face a new problem, I try to treat it as a challenge to be overcome. But I'm a pretty lucky person. Most of my own personal challenges have,

at least today, knock on wood, been fairly trivial. Thankfully, I haven't yet had to go through anything like the challenges that my next guest, Karen Guggenheim, had to face. Eleven years ago, last week, actually. Last week. Last week, my husband caught the flu, which developed into a pneumonia, and within 10 days, he was gone. Wow. Karen's loss was shattering. People often say that you gain strength through adversity, but I think they usually mean tinier sorts of adversity.

Things like not getting some job you wanted or flunking your driver's test. But are there ways we can grow from the truly terrible events in life? Things like the grief of losing your life partner suddenly? Can the worst traumas imaginable also come with unexpected gifts and growth? That's the question we'll be exploring in today's episode. And Karen is the perfect person to help us. You see, Karen's story

is a lovely example of what psychologists call post-traumatic growth. Now, most of us have heard of the phenomena of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, cases in which people struggle emotionally after experiencing a stressful situation. But psychologists have also documented the opposite reaction. There are certain people who go through a traumatic situation and wind up stronger on the other side. They turn their pain into growth. As we'll see in this episode, Karen turned the pain of her husband's death into a mission to improve everyone's well-being.

Her loss spurred her to develop and found the World Happiness Summit, an annual celebration of the science of well-being, where scientists like me get to share our happiness findings with people from around the world. I had a chance to chat with Karen about her story at this year's World Happiness Summit in London. We snuck away from all the lectures and panel discussions to chat about the journey that began with her husband Ricardo's death.

The trauma was on so many things, being in the hospital, watching it happen, having the doctors come in and trying to save him, telling my children that their father had passed. I mean, something that I wasn't prepared for, obviously you can't prepare for it, but it was a loss of identity. He was my best friend. He was the father of my children, my husband. So it was like his death also felt like a death for me because in one moment to the next, I wasn't those things. And so it was really, really traumatic. And a couple of days after he died, you know, I was like, okay, I've been married 21 years. I got married when I was 21 and he died when I was 42.

So I was married half my life with this person. I grew up with him, really. He was 11 years older and he was my best friend and my advocate and somebody who accepted me completely. And so we talk a lot about belonging now. And so I felt this huge sense of belonging with this person. And he was gone. And I was like, okay, well, I'm done. This is great, everyone.

Thank you so much. But I'll take the check, please, because I'm out of here. And then for some of us, invariably, it's the voice of your mother in your head. What about the children? And I'm like, what? What about the children? And I was like, oh my God, I can't leave them.

This is bad enough what's happening. And now if I'm gone, and I don't think that I was suicidal at all in that regard, but I think we can be alive dead if I can say that, just being numb to life. And I knew that that would be game over for them, right? And so I thought, okay, I'm going to live. And then I don't know how it was, Lori, because I didn't know anything about the science

and I didn't know about, you know, the work that you amazing experts do. But intuitively, I said, I choose happiness because the pain is so, so bad that I got to find a way for it to be great. And I don't know how to do that. And what I hung on to is purpose and meaning because I could control that. And that was the first thing that I learned is life happens and many times you can't control it, but there is always something you can control out of the experience. And eventually I accidentally became happy again.

And when I found out that there was a science behind it, what I had done accidentally and haphazardly, I decided to dedicate my life in 2016 and create Wahasu to put on the World Happiness Summit six months later. The World Happiness Summit is now a very big deal. It's been held on both sides of the Atlantic and showcases cutting-edge work in happiness science. Karen's summit has now helped people around the world learn effective strategies for improving their well-being. But her own trek from misery to post-traumatic growth was rather haphazard. I asked her about the habits she stumbled upon that helped her find her way.

Some of it has to do with actually things that I did. So one of the things that I did, I had received a shirt from my nephew that said, I am happiness. And I was not happy. And I was not pretending to be happy. But I wore it because I said, that's where I'm going. I don't know what I'm going to get there. So please have self-compassion. It takes time. It's painful. Things are painful and that's okay.

Right. And we hear a lot of things like, Oh, once you're happy, it doesn't matter. And it's going to be as long as it is for you. But I can tell you something that really helped me with like Susan David's work is I am sad I am feeling sad so to be able to vocalize it to a friend or loved one you know what today I'm really feeling sad and it's funny because my kids are like why it's like no you know I really don't know but it's okay and then you know it's like you begin to invite moments right and to begin to invite moments, right? And to begin to invite moments and don't wait to be happy to be happy. So for example, if you want to be happier and somebody asks you to go for a walk

or to have a call or do it, and you don't really want to, try it. Because we know the connection helps us. You know, when you brush your teeth, you're not having a philosophical conversation. I may want to, but I don't think I do. You know it's good for your teeth, so you do it. So use some of these strengths that you use for other things with your emotional state.

So you're committed to other things, maybe to exercise regime, maybe to sleep, whatever it is. And so for your well-being, start to notice what works for you and reach out to people. And give yourself permission to laugh again. That's another one because we have these prescribed ideas, right? And so for example, one of the words I hate the most is the word widow. And I always have to fill it out. Single married widow. It's like, can I just be single? I'm going to the doctor. Who cares? You're right. Because it's a lot of things that are tied to that. So you get to tell the story about yourself. So start to think, who do you want to be in your life? And who did Karen

want to be? She wanted to be someone who could share the science of happiness broadly, so she could help as many people as possible. But that can be kind of tricky. People have lots of misconceptions when it comes to maximizing happiness. They don't often accept that simple habits like talking to strangers or writing a thank you letter can have a huge impact on their happiness. As Karen learned more about the science, it felt like a leap of faith for her too. First it was putting a foot into an open abyss, right? Especially if you're just learning about this. At first it's almost like it feels like it's Santayss, right? Especially if you're just learning about this. At first it's almost like,

it feels like it's Santa Claus, right? And you're like, well, I don't know about it, but then just be curious, right? And you put that foot out and you're like, wait, there's something there. And then you put the other foot. And then all of a sudden, when you start practicing it habitually,

you start to see life in what I call technicolor. For me, it was black and white before I was happy, but not fully alive because I wasn't connected to my real purpose. I didn't even know I should have a, I mean, I love being a mother, but it was like, like the waves of the water, you know, like I'll be happy and then I wouldn't be. And then I'd be happy. And, but I didn't know that I could have any purposeful action around that. And that's what I've learned, that I can do something about it because I think we share this. We've got to work at it.

So we're not one of those rosy people who are just like, hello, life! And so this keeps me honest. This work really, really keeps me honest. And it works. It works if you practice it. So I think the second thing that we often see in these moments of post-traumatic growth is the idea of social connection. You start to realize the people that matter in life. You start to have gratitude for the people who've kind of helped you along the way. You kind of know who really matters and who

kind of didn't matter, you know, as much as you might have thought. Is that something that you experienced with the death of your husband in this path too? I think you're right. It does fine-tune that. And that's another element of post-traumatic growth is that you experienced with the death of your husband in this path too? I think you're right. It does fine-tune that, and that's another element of post-traumatic growth, is that you feel more empathy for people. And the other thing is that the level of compassion increases. Also, self-compassion, which is really, really hard again, but you kind of also increase that and you understand how what you give out to others also needs to be nourishing and self-care for yourself to be able to do this, because if you burn out and are depleted then you also can't do the work for others so that's also something I learned not to do too much and I think you've learned that as

well to take care of yourself in addition to the other people in your life definitely but when you're talking about people it has really expanded my heart because the pain was so great. So I just want to say with post-traumatic growth, you don't bypass the pain. Yes. You go through the pain, unfortunately. And I think part of the pain is kind of what gives you the energy and the knowledge that you need for that compassion, because it's like you felt that pain. So when you see pain in other people, you kind of want to want to help right like you kind of know what it feels like you have that kind of instant empathy I remember this in high school I have a really close friend Jenny Valente who caught this terrible cancer and wound up passing away it was kind of a long process but in the middle of that I remember she was just like the

most empathic person when it came to other people's pain now she was like in chemotherapy and didn't have hair like her health problems were just so devastating. But I remember in high school, I had to get my wisdom teeth out, which felt like such a silly thing. But she was the friend that showed up, showed up with flowers, was ready to be there for me. And I genuinely don't know.

I mean, she was a very empathic person before the cancer, but it felt like it was going through that trauma that allowed her to see that other people needed help and what action she could take to do that. It sounds like in your story, it's been the same, is that that empathy actually comes from the pain. The pain is sort of what builds it in some sense. Absolutely, because you're able to feel so much love and compassion for people and how people matter. And so that for me, I was friendly before.

I wasn't a bad person. I cared about people. But now to the level that I genuinely love putting this event on because it makes people happy and that makes me happy. Painful events can leave us shattered, but they can also lead to post-traumatic growth, a new way of living that can make us and the people around us even happier. Karen's own trauma helped her find deep compassion and purpose in life. But is Karen's story unique? Can any of us turn our trauma and pain into resilience and growth? When we get back from the break, we'll unpack the research on post-traumatic growth. We'll meet an expert who's dedicated her career to understanding the

complicated science of human trauma and how its effects and even its definition can be so variable across people. Trauma is subjective. I cannot tell you what is traumatic for you and you cannot tell me what trauma is for me. We'll hear more when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I know Karen Guggenheim very well because the first time we did the World Happiness Summit was here in Miami.

This is clinical psychologist Dr. Edith Shiro. She's the perfect person to help explain how Karen Guggenheim went from feeling shattered by the trauma of her husband's death to becoming a major promoter of global happiness. Yes, I mean, I know her work very well. But Edith isn't just Karen's friend. She's also an expert on the consequences of adversity

and the author of The Unexpected Gift of Trauma, The Path to Post-Traumatic Growth. Edith has worked with the survivors of awful disasters, tragedies like 9-11 and the 2021 Surfside Condominium collapse in Miami. But Edith also counsels people suffering from the kind of life traumas that don't make headlines. Trauma is not just what we used to know, where we associate

trauma with PTSD, with post-traumatic stress disorder, and really that comes from all these experiences of soldiers, of war veterans. Really the way I understand trauma, and I think the way that trauma works well, is by understanding that trauma first of all is relational. It's what happens to us in relationships with ourselves, others in the world for which our belief system is shaken or shattered and we don't have the resources or the tools to deal with what's happening to us in the moment. It can be a small thing or it can be a big thing. It can be a big T trauma or a small T trauma, but it's really not being able to overcome it, to face it, to deal with it. The other thing about trauma is that trauma is subjective. Trauma is about what I

decide and what I believe to be trauma. I cannot tell you what is traumatic for you and you cannot tell me what trauma is for me. Because I sometimes hear, even in my students, right, these cases where your people go through something that's terrible, but they feel like, well, it's not as terrible as the Holocaust, right? You know, my loved one didn't die, right? You know, so talk about why, you know, all kinds of experiences can be traumatic and whether we should feel guilty

for kind of going through these tough, a kind of trauma-related response for cases of stressors that maybe somebody might not think of as that bad. Yeah, no. And you know, you can hear your students say, oh, well, I have a bad breakup, but there's a war in Ukraine. Yes, this is happening. But even if it's something that compared to other things, small, but for you, that experience of a breakup or ghosting or not being invited to a party or being discriminated or bullied in your school, this can be very, very traumatic experiences for you. You know, that's why I'm saying it's subjective. In some way, feeling guilty for that is not allowing yourself to really heal that trauma. It's saying, I don't have the right and I don't deserve to feel better.

I don't have the right to take care of deserve to feel better. I don't have the right to take care of myself. And we have to be careful with that. I'm not saying that it has to be the center of the world. Yes, there are other people suffering too, but tending to your own traumas, I'll tell you why it's important. Because if you walk around life with that wound bleeding, the only thing you're going to do is you're going to spread trauma to other people as well. Trauma is very contagious, meaning whatever happens to me affects everybody around me. So if I have a bad breakup and you talk to me about your boyfriend or your girlfriend, whatever, I'm going to hate you. I'm going to be a very supportive friend and I'm going to be responding

with like a nasty comment or I'm going to be indifferent or I'm going to be responding with like a nasty comment, or I'm going to be indifferent, or I'm going to disconnect from you and say, ah, I can't even empathize with what you're talking about because my wound is so big that I can't be there for you. So it's almost like a responsibility, Lori, to tend to your own wounds and to your own traumas, even if you think that they're small, because even those small ones are doing something to the reactions and the choices that you make in life every day. And it really affects the way you show up in the world. If I grew up with a mother that wasn't loving, a typical thing that is not seen as a trauma because it's not an event, but it's an ongoing situation. It's very hard for me to build a life with a partner that is healthy and that is respectful or that is there for me if I carry the

trauma of my childhood of not having you know parents that show me what love was in a healthy way so it's almost like a responsibility that I have as a human being to become more conscious of my own traumas and so give me some examples of the kind of events that could happen to individuals or communities that could lead to trauma so So I'm going to give you like a very, very simple example that we've all gone through in the pandemic, for example. The pandemic is an example of collective trauma for which a lot of people were faced with situations that were really shattering their understanding of themselves or the world around them for which there was no way of really processing, or I thought my life was safer than what it is. And when those things happen and we don't have the resources or the ability or the

tools to really deal with it, that can become very traumatic. And then you can see all these trauma responses around us. Other examples are, I was just working with the community here in Miami, the surf site collapsed and where the building collapsed and almost 100 people died and how a whole community was affected by it. These are examples of collective trauma. Individual trauma can be, Laurie, something from illness. It can be an accident or it can be something like experiences of bullying of a child or an adult or the loss of a pet or a divorce or my boyfriend broke up with me or I didn't get the job or I was fired from a job. These are also experiences of trauma. And it depends how we deal with it to really see if this can become a chronic trauma or it can be something that can be an opportunity for

learning. Yeah. So what's post-traumatic stress? You know, what kind of how does it affect the mind and the body? What are some symptoms? Yeah. I mean, so when we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, it's just one of the outcomes of being traumatized. That's actually a diagnosis that happens after six months or one year of having this kind of symptoms. But what do we see when a person is traumatized? The person is developing trauma responses in order to defend from what they perceive to be dangerous. People ask me all the time, why people focus on the negative instead of the positive? Let's say we have 10 positive things happening in our day and one negative.

And what do we do? We focus on the negative. Why? Why? We can have all the great things, but no, we are right there obsessing about the bad. And I said, you know, we have to keep ourselves alive. And we have a very, very strong system of survival. We are very sophisticated in the way that we defend ourselves from pain, from suffering, and from danger.

So focusing on the negative and focusing on the difficult things is what keeps us alive. So in a way, we have to train ourselves to say, it's okay. I can calm down my body in order to, you know, be able to enjoy and to shift to the positive or to the more enjoyable parts of our lives. What are the responses? Typically, fight, flight, freeze, or phone, right? So what do we do? Something dangerous comes in, some pain, we don't want to feel it. We want to do anything not to feel that pain. And we either fight back, right? And this can be emotionally.

We get irritated. We hyperventilate. We get hyper aroused. We're constantly looking around to see where's the danger. We get into attack mode. We can do flight. What does that mean? We are disconnected.

We dissociate. We avoid situations at all costs. And that comes with a price. Or we freeze. What does that mean? We cannot make decisions and inability to do anything about the current situation in order not to cause more suffering or more pain. All of this is translated into symptoms of anxiety, depression, panic attacks, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, flashbacks, nightmares, hyper-vigilance, hyper-arousal, flashbacks, nightmares, changing appetite, changing sleep.

These are typical examples of traumatic responses and especially triggering responses. So for example, I was working with a girl that was very traumatized and she said, every time I pass by a coffee place, I start getting all these symptoms of anxiety and panic attack. And we found out later on that her father that was being abusive to her loved coffee. And so she would associate the smell of coffee with traumatic experiences. So that was a trigger response. So when you see people overreacting over something, they say, wow, this response was so much bigger than what it's supposed to be. You know, there's a history, there's a story behind that. Then they keep repeating and repeating and repeating. These are defense mechanisms that we use to protect ourselves. The problem is that when we keep using them, after the danger is gone, what happens? It hurts us even more.

The very thing that is there to defend us and to protect us is the thing that now it's causing the problem, right? Because if I disconnect for a moment not to feel the pain, that's all good and fine in the moment. But if I leave my life disconnected, then what happens? I have higher and bigger consequences because of that. And so your book, in fact, just the name of the book argues that trauma is a gift. Why is trauma a gift? You know, and people ask me all the time, how can you put in the same sentence, trauma and gift? Come on, how can you do that? And I'm like, exactly. Like, I think my book is full of paradoxes like that. Yes, we can acknowledge that something traumatic can happen.

And at the same time, hold that hope that also it can bring amazing things into our life. Now, we have to be very careful when do we say that. If a person just went through the death of their partner and I say to that person, oh, don't worry because you're going to have an amazing life after this. This is going to bring so many gifts in your life. So please, how can you be sad? How can you? No, no, no, no. They would never talk to me again. I would have no patience, right? I would be fired from being a psychologist. So we have to be very mindful how we bring this up. The validation and the acknowledgement and the recognition of the suffering and the pain and what the person is going through is extremely important, right? The person, the group, the family, the culture is like acknowledging and recognizing that pain before we go into beginning to acknowledge that there's a gift. And that can be very powerful to say at some point, okay, maybe, maybe I can see

glimpses of light, right? Rumi says the cracks is where the light enters, right? You know this, you probably know this, right? And I love the Wabi Sabi Japanese philosophy, and it's a technique called kintsugi. And kintsugi is what's used for vases that are shattered and that are broken. Instead of throwing them away and losing their value, what they do is that they take a gold powder and they mix it with some glue and they start very carefully and beautifully and mindfully putting the pieces back together in a way that creates a whole new vase. So what you see is a vase that has gone through experiences, that something happened to this vase.

So instead of having less value, actually it acquires even more value than before. And why is it such a beautiful metaphor for post-traumatic growth? Because it's really not putting the pieces back and bringing you back to where you were before. It's the opposite. It's really taking you to another level to become something new. But in order for that to happen, it has to break. So it's like the trauma, which is like that breaking, that shattering, that like touching rock bottom. And then that gift that is somehow with this process, it's like being reborn, being reinvented, like seeing life from a very different place. And that's why I put trauma and gift in the same sentence. And, you know, the funny thing is that it's not even that I came up

with that is that after seeing patients and working with families and with different groups, this is what they tell me, Lori, they say, I would not wish this on anybody. This is the hardest thing that ever happened in my life, but I would not change this for anything in the world because what happened to me is what made me who I am today. And I would not change it. And every time I hear this and it's like, wow, people have this value, not in spite of their trauma, but because of their trauma. And so let's walk through some of the positives that can come out once people have kind of gone through this process of post traumatic growth. One is a sense of appreciation in life. You know, what is appreciation for life? And what are some examples of how you've seen that in your patients? Yes, yes. Some of my research working with Cambodian refugees and Holocaust survivors and Latino immigrants,

I've seen how people begin to shift their priorities in life. And they say, you know what? I'm not sweating the small stuff because people become so focused on what's important. Even the little things like waking up in the morning, having the sun come out, eating a good meal. It's like, I'm so grateful for that. These people that are going to post-traumatic growth are very, very grateful for what they have, for who they are. They appreciate life. They appreciate relationships. They appreciate who they've become. And they say it maybe because they've lost so much that everything hasn't acquired new meaning.

And they really have been able to shed the things that are not so important to them. And so what happens to a person's sense of personal strength after post-traumatic growth? Right. It really becomes a protective factor in some way. And they tell me this, I think, you know what? I survived my divorce and I know that because of what I learned from the experience of divorce and how painful it was, I can face anything now. And I think you develop tools that are very, very powerful and very protective for the next events that are happening in your life. And what happens to people's relationships after post-traumatic growth?

So the relationships become very meaningful because I think people that go through these experiences of trauma and growth realize that they cannot do this alone. I don't mean to say that you need a psychologist for everything that you do, but having a support group, it can be your yoga teacher. It can be a retreat. It can be your religious group. It can be a community that you belong. It can be your book club.

Being in a place that you feel heard and understood and validated. And when you are experiencing that and you see the power of transformation that relationships have, then you say, I only want to have meaningful relationships. And we begin to really appreciate the connection and really nurture the connection of meaningful relationships. One of the studies that I always talk about is the Harvard study on what makes people live longer and healthier is that having meaningful, long-lasting, close relationships with friends and family truly makes a difference. And I think when you get to post-traumatic growth, you see that in your experience. You said, wow, I look back and I say,

I can see who are the people that are with me that are not with me. What happens when I maintain meaningful relationships and what a difference does that make in my life? And it might be less people than before. It might be different people than before because there's a lot of changes going on, but these are meaningful relationships no matter what

and appreciation for those relationships as well. Bad things can happen at any time in our lives. But Edith's professional experience suggests that we could emerge from adversity more mindful, more empathic, and stronger for having survived the turmoil. But is everyone capable of experiencing the benefits of post-traumatic growth? We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Dr. Ida Shiro had seen the consequences of trauma long before she began her clinical training. Her maternal grandparents endured one of the greatest traumas of the 20th century. They were Holocaust survivors. They escaped the camps that claimed the lives of virtually all of their loved ones, friends, and neighbors. But their individual reactions to these painful experiences

couldn't have been more divergent. I kept seeing that difference between my grandmother and my grandfather. They're both really amazing people. I learned so much from both of them. I'm very close to both of them. I'm very grateful. My grandmother was more quiet about her experience. She was suffering the war. She had the memories in her body much more evident. She actually was sick for a while before she died and she died young. She wasn't able to overcome it in a way that was easy for her. My grandfather, on the other hand, who had very, very similar experiences like my grandmother, somehow was able to transcend that experience in a way that allowed him to appreciate life from a different way. So you could see him, you know, wanting to travel and being curious about life and appreciate life

and connecting with people from all over the world, keeping his friends. But you could see there was something in him that was like that flame of life that was very, very powerful. And I think he made a conscious effort and went through some of this process to transcend it. And I think that was a beautiful example of post-traumatic growth. And I kept seeing, well, how somebody can do that? And what does it take? Is post-traumatic growth possible for anybody? So this is my answer. The possibility of post-traumatic growth is there for everybody. Now, some people have it easier than others. Other people, like my grandmother, for example, she may not have known that that

was a possibility. Some people may not have the support system needed because for post-traumatic growth, at least in my understanding, you cannot do this by yourself. In most cases, I think it's like you really truly need that other person that can listen to you, that can walk with you, that can validate you, that can hold that hope for you while you're going through the dark night of the soul. Some people might not have access to that and some people might not want to do it and some people might not be ready to do it. So sometimes it takes years before somebody goes through post-traumatic growth. Maybe the trauma happened in childhood and it takes until late in life for people to say, oh, I'm

finally working on it and transcending it and transforming it. So it's very, very unique for everybody. That's why this is not a recipe that you have to follow step by step. It's more like a spiral. It's like you go around it once and then you go around it again and then you go around and this is how you keep evolving, you know? So let's take a look at some of the kind of sort of steps or practices that can help us on this path to post-traumatic growth. I first wanted to talk about radical acceptance. So what's radical acceptance? Yeah, that's the first step.

And that first step is one of the hardest. When you're in this mode of repetition that you're going over and over and over and you keep doing the same things and wanting new different results. You know, you keep falling into the same kind of relationships or you keep having the same kind of reactions to things that then you say, oh, why did I react this way? When we're able to, for a moment, pause and see ourselves and acknowledge, okay, this is what I'm doing. When we've been in this level of depression or in this state of anxiety constant it requires a moment of pause and saying okay let me look at myself what's happening what's going on yes let me completely and totally recognize that I'm anxious yes I'm

an alcoholic or yes I am depressed I am depressed this is what's happening I'm super depressed let me recognize that. Let me acknowledge that. But this is almost like a conversation you have to have with yourself. Because even though you have everybody around you telling you this all day long for years and years, it only comes to a moment of you to say,

I need to be radically honest with myself. And that's where you really enter the process of healing. This is the first step because people always ask me, okay, this sounds very great and wonderful. And yes, I want to have post-traumatic growth, but what do I do? Okay. You have to be very courageous. And I understand it's very painful. It really is very painful. So to sit there with yourself for a moment and say, yes, I recognize it. It requires a lot of courage and requires a lot of strength. So that's the first step. It also seems to go against our kind of our typical mode when we're dealing with trauma, which is usually kind of denial.

So explain why kind of radical acceptance is almost the opposite of denial. It is right. The opposite is saying like, oh, how do we deal with trauma? We kind of disconnect from it. We avoid it. This is like the very thing that keeps us surviving. of disconnect from it. We avoid it. This is like the very thing that keeps us surviving. So we might have to be in denial for a while until we are in a safe space to say, I'm ready to look into this. If I'm in the middle of war, if I'm right now in Ukraine or in the Middle East and I want to go into radical acceptance, no, sorry, that's not the place. The people there have to be in survival mode. You have to still be in denial in order to stay alive. So it's only when you feel that you're in a safe space and only when

your body actually recognizes a safe place, that's when you can begin to go into this radical acceptance. So it's really, it takes time. And that was nicely kind of going through this idea of a safe space. I mean, another step that you have found is really important is the idea of finding a different narrative. And so what is narrative and why is it so important? Yeah, so really not just a safe space for you, but bringing a safe space to reaching out for help. Once you're able to do that, then there's the opportunity to say, okay, since I'm being

validated with my experiences, I can begin to construct and build a new narrative about who I am. Maybe I understood life in a certain way. Maybe I, you know, that innocence of life of like, okay, it's predictable. It's controllable. I need to begin to understand life in a different way. Or I could never imagine that I would lose all of my sisters and brothers at the same time in the building collapse. How is that possible? You can't even understand something like that. So it's almost like your mind begins to expand and say, let me look at new belief

systems. Let me try out new ways of looking at the world, looking at myself. This is the stage when people begin to read new books. They get into listening to podcasts and to getting into workshops or travel the world or get new friends. Or I had a patient that was very, very sexually abused and she began to paint and paint and paint. And it's through that story of painting and she almost had an alter ego. That was a new story for herself that that's how she told a new narrative of life and of her life. So then the next step is integration. How does that involve our identity? What is integration? So integration is taking all the new lessons and identities that you have for yourself and the old ones, all the traumas and really embracing it all. In some ways it's saying I

can talk about the deaths and the loss that I had without reliving the traumatic experience. And I also can recognize that I am this person now. I am, I don't know, a divorced woman that went through a difficult traumatic experience of divorce. And I'm also a professional and I, you know, have a new relationship and I'm there. And, but I can say that I can say both and I can integrate it both into myself. And then the final step that you talk about is your favorite step, which is wisdom. And you talk about this concept of the hero.

You know, what is this concept of the hero and how is it involved? Right, it's like going through the hero's journey and finding a way of understanding life with a mission, with a purpose, the appreciation for life, the strength, the meaningful relationships. And what I see in the people that I work with is that the woman that went through childhood sexual abuse has become the woman that opens non-profit

organizations to help other women in the world. And the alcoholic becomes the mentor for all the other people with alcoholic addictions. And these are all true examples. Like, I mean, I wish we had more time. I give you fascinating examples of what people do with their lives. This is what makes me cry in my office. It's like, wow, wow, wow. How can you do this?

How you go from the most painful adverse situation to then you being the person that is in service and is giving the back to the world in a very meaningful way, because it comes from the inside. It comes from a true experience of going through it yourself, of knowing what it's like and saying, I did it. I can do it. I want to give it back to somebody else. Edith's description of post-traumatic growth as a hero's journey really helped me better understand the story that started this episode. When Karen Guggenheim lost her husband Ricardo 11 years ago, she was devastated. But thanks to strong family bonds and a powerful sense of

purpose, she was able to heal her shattered sense of self. Her hero's journey began when she became curious about the very process she'd undergone and began to study the science behind happiness. Karen reasoned that if she could find joy after trauma, it was probably her duty to share that knowledge with people in need. And that's how the World Happiness Summit was born. At the most recent summit in London, I asked Karen if she'd felt that she'd passed an important milestone in her recovery from trauma. Today, I felt proud of myself. It's taken this long. I actually felt genuine pride of my work and what I would have done.

And so definitely that resilience, I really felt it today. And that's, I think, a nice example, too, with post-traumatic growth, is that often that growth comes, but it might not come not come you know the Tuesday after some terrible traumatic event it's like it kind of has to take time to sort of grow and incubate but the final results at the end are so important I'm wondering if you think your husband could be looking back and seeing all that's happened since he passed like what he would say about your path today I think about that all the time and not only do I think about it I actually feel it. Because for those of you out there who are experiencing any kind of loss and are new to the loss, especially, and even ones that are longer. Because it never goes away. It never

goes away. But you know what? Some of us think that holding on to the loss is holding on to the memory, right? But what I learned in letting go of the intense pain, and it's not that it's not painful sometimes, and sometimes more than others, is that then you're able to experience something else. And what I experience now is love. It's not romantic love because my husband's dead, but it's a different kind of love. I can see him in my children. If I am in pain, in deep pain, I can't see him, right? And so it has opened up another opportunity to have a different kind of relationship with the memory of my husband. And also, I also like to quote Mogadad, which is our friend.

And, you know, he lost his son, Ali, tragically. And he says, you know, Ali lived and Ali died. And he focuses on the part that Ali lived. So I took that on. Yes, he died. And he lived. And like, it was amazing. And he was an amazing person. And so for me, with the summit, I get to carry his legacy of who he was as a person. And so much of what we do at the summit is the kindness and compassion that he had because he was a doctor and so he was a healer. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab and for sharing your story.

And thank you so much, so much gratitude for what you do. And I look forward to seeing you again at Wahasu in Miami, 2025, maybe. Maybe. Stay tuned. And you can stay tuned for more episodes of The Happiness Lab, too. We'll be back next time with a show to mark Digital Wellness Day. We'll have tips on how to achieve a healthier relationship with your devices

and how we can reap the benefits of new technologies without all the drawbacks. 50% of the time we pick up our phone, nobody's actually called or messaged us. We're picking it up because the need to be needed is actually highly addictive. And the second time you reach for your phone, 50% of the time, it's within two minutes of picking it up the first time. And the downside of that is that we're a little bit less connected with other people in our lives. We're less productive. We're feeling less happy about the way that we interact with the world around us and how tuned in we are to ourselves

and other people as well. All that next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.