Invisible Heroes: The Healing Power Of Tragedy

''Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. '' -Kahlil Gibran

It’s in moments of profound suffering that you realize just how much more inner strength you thought you’d had.
I believe that each one of us will go through a tragedy in our lives, and it will demand us to use all the possible resiliency we can muster.

Creating for ourselves a new normal after we have been struck by the loss of a loved one, a devasting illness, sexual assault, or a profound heartbreak, requires an infinite amount of strength.
In yesterday’s post, I was stating how research has shown that we all have a personal baseline for happiness. Research on resiliency has indicated that the same applies for resiliency: we each have an innate capacity for it.

If we train ourselves in small ways on a regular basis to exercise our mental strength, it can serve us as a reservoir, the moment a painful event comes along. Because it will one day. And as much as we can try to escape the pain and avoid it in all sorts of ways, one day, we will have to face the music.
Talking from my own experience, I had to learn the hard way. We can only turn off the switch for so long.

We’re all climbing our own mountain.
But sometimes, it helps to have someone holding your hand along the difficult parts of the trail. All 7 billion of humans on earth are in the same boat. We’re all on the same team. Inside the same soup. Name it lol! When you see someone walking in the street, remember that they have a story to tell. They most likely experienced hardships. Suffering is an occasion for us to unite ourselves together.

On another note, elephants 🐘 (which are my favorite animals) have been known to demonstrate a lot of emotional intelligence attributes, such as empathy. When they lose a member of their tribe, they grieve. And it has also been said that they can shed tears.
Here is such a touching passage, which illustrates their profound sensitivity:
''Upon seeing the bones or carcass of another elephant, a family will stop and investigate them, even if the elephant was unrelated to the group. The ritual includes touching the bones gently with their trunks while remaining very quiet, covering the body with leaves and grass, and if the elephant belonged to their own, staying with the body for days or weeks at a time. ''

I remember once reading that when we suffer, and we resist to the pain, we swim against the current.
However, when we let go of control and we start to accept what is, we finally let ourselves flow with the water.

Hedonic adaptation has shown that we have an innate tendency to adapt to happy events, but as I’ve mentioned before, also to painful ones. Here is a quote taken from the book ''The upside of irrationality'' (don’t quote me on this one, because I’m not 100% sure):
''In your unhappiness and grief, you don’t understand how extraordinary flexible you really are. Time heals all wounds precisely because, over time, you will partially adapt to the state of your world. ''

In my own experience, I believe to have had experienced my (quote me on this one 😉) ''fair share of suffering. ''
I don’t think I can allow myself to use the ''fair'' part though, because life really is not meant to be fair, and some of us get handed a bad hand at life, but we have to keep pushing through, to not make it turn our soul black.
We may be powerless to external events that come around, but we still have the power to react to them.🔥

You probably have heard before of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is a mental disorder one can develop after having faced or witnessed a life-threatening event.
The good news is that there is a ray of hope for the survivors of such tragedies.

Posttraumatic growth is a phenomenon in which human beings who experience trauma report having collected positive changes from their painful experience, and sometimes, to an extent which non-trauma survivors have not experienced.
In an awesome book which I finished reading recently called ''The power of moments -Why certain experiences have extraordinary impact'' (by Chip Heat and Dan Heat), here is a touching passage written by a Geology professor named Sally Walker, who survived an airline crash that killed 83 humans:
''When I got home, the sky was brighter, I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie… [Now] Everything is a gift. ''

Here is another passage contained in the same book, of a cancer survivor:
''After my first cancer, even the smallest joys in life took on a special meaning – watching a beautiful sunset, a hug from my child, a laugh with (wife) Dorothy. That feeling has not diminished with time. After my second and third cancers, the simple joys of life are everywhere and boundless, as I cherish my family and friends and contemplate the rest of my life, a life I certainly do not take for granted. ''

It has deeply touched my heart to read small glimpses of stories of trauma survivors.
It is not that the pain is not there no more, but it is more that sometimes, tragedy present itself into our lives as an invisible gift, to make us grow, but also to help us reframe our life philosophy, our values, our relationships, what matters to us the most. The universe/a higher power, or whatever you want to call it, throws at us precisely what we need at this time being.

Story telling can help us to overcome adversity. Writing has always been my therapy, and hence why, when we go through an extremely painful experience, writing on how we feel, and how our emotional states change over time, can help us heal better. The story we tell ourselves about what has happened can make the process either a bit easier or more difficult.

It does not change the fact that some traumatic experiences can leave a scar that will stay engraved in our heart for the rest of our life. Grief will change over time, as we learn to have and accept it as a part of our lives.
Sometimes, life just does not give us the choice.

Last year, I had the chance to work with an incredible human being, and he was a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. One day, he told me his story. I will never forget that day at work. My eyes were filled with tears as I was standing in front of someone who embraced with each part of his soul the power of being mentally strong.
His dad was killed in front of his eyes as a child, during the genocide. Nothing can take away the pain of something like this. I could not believe it. And here he was, telling me that ever since then, he never allowed the mundane problems of existence to get to him. And from the time I have worked with him, I can tell you that he was such an optimistic person. My boss at the time was very crude, but he did not allow him to take away his inner strength and kind soul.

One lesson I have learned through tragedy is that no matter which curveball may come our way, in the end, we will always have ourselves. Our inner child will remain and won’t be destroyed. We can depend on ourselves.

We are the way.
We are the light. 💫
And the most beautiful thing we can create for ourselves and hold on to is hope.
And one day, just like a butterfly looking for light, we will shed our cocoon, and we will learn to fly and live again. ✬