Growth after trauma seems to be more common than prolonged traumatic stress reactions.
"[H]uman strengths are frequently born in encounters with life difficulties. Strength is often fired in the crucible of adversity"
What is best in life often is shown when people rise mightily to an occasion. Crisis may not be a prerequisite for all strengths of character. It certainly is for those strengths that philosophers deem corrective. People may come out of a crisis better off than those who never had the crisis. To be sure, we would not want to program crises for our children in the hope that they will surmount them to become better people. But neither should we eschew all risk. Positive psychology should recognize that there are lessons to be learned from failure and disappointment, even from crisis and stress...'" (35)
The relationship between life satisfaction and character is relentlessly monotonic. Said another way, the place where life satisfaction is notably absent is at the lower end of a strength. Aristotle notwithstanding, the typical problem with a virtue lies in its deficiency and not in its excess.
Personal Growth is "Profounded Grounded" in Adversity (Ryff & Singer)
Purpose in life, the capacity to find meaning and direction in one's experiences, as well as to create and pursue goals in living, is profoundly grounded in confrontations with adversity...Similarly, personal growth, or the capacity to continually realize one's talent and potential, as well as to develop new resources and strengths, frequently involves encounters with adversity that require one to dig deeply to find one's inner strength. When are people most likely to discover these strengths? Ironically, paradoxically, it is when they are most down and out that inner resources are frequently found and exert their powers of renewal... Self-expansion through challenge quintessentially illustrates the human spirit's remarkable capacity to survive loss, recover from adversity, and thrive in the face of overwhelming obstacles...
In sum, it is not the absence of negative experience or negative emotion that defines the good, well-lived, richly experienced life, but how challenges and difficulties are managed, responded to, dealt with, and transformed. Returning to the theme of irony, we note that the deepest levels of human meaning and connection are frequently found when individuals come face to face with their vulnerabilities, insecurities, or pain...
Wellness comes from active encounters with life's challenges, setbacks, and demands, not from blissful, conflict-free, smooth sailing" (Ryff & Singer, 277-279).
Restoring Meaning: reinvent, gained a new view of, replace with something better :)
The most desirable outcome of development... a point at which a person comes to accept his or her past, no longer seeks to change or achieve the impossible, yet is vitally connected to the immediate environment.
"In his longitudinal study of male adult development, Vaillant (1993) theorized that a key to mature adaptation to life is the ability to replace bitterness and resentment toward those who have perpetrated harm with gratitude and acceptance. Gratitude is part and parcel of a creative process whereby self-destructive emotions are transformed into ones that permit healing and restoration. According to Vaillant, 'Mature defenses grow out of our brain's evolving capacity to master, assimilate, and feel grateful for life, living, and experience'"
A peak experience, is "a state of deep focus that occurs when people engage in challenging tasks that demand intense concentration and commitment. Flow occurs when a person's skill level is perfectly balanced to the challenge level of a task that has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
Making these a constant part of our lives can enhance our work, personal relationships and leisure time.
Maslow thought, Peak experiences were more frequent among self-actualizing persons since they had 'relatively permanent gratification' of their basic needs for safety, love, affiliation, identity and self-esteem and were able to function at higher motivational states of integrated activity.
As the process of need gratification increases, more integrative experiences occur leading to greater strength in personality, identity, and active mastery unless thwarted by frustration, blocks, deprivation, threat, trauma, or other types of experience that maintain focus on lower needs thereby preventing the development of more robust self-actualizing states.
In this way acute identity episodes [peak experiences] are positive in nature and can mobilize growth and personality development in self-actualizing directions.
The person in the peak experience feels more integrated (unified, whole, all of a piece) than at other times. He also looks (to the observer) more integrated in various ways, e.g., less split, dissociated, less fighting against himself, less split between experiencing self and observing self, more on-pointed, more harmoniously organized, more efficiently organized with all his parts functioning very nicely with each other, more synergic, with less internal friction, etc.
It is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes.
Acceptance and surrender recognize the inherent wisdom of letting go of things that are beyond one's capacity to control. Acceptance and surrender in the recognition of superior forces and events is healthy acknowledgement of limits.
"[H]uman strengths are frequently born in encounters with life difficulties. Strength is often fired in the crucible of adversity"
What is best in life often is shown when people rise mightily to an occasion. Crisis may not be a prerequisite for all strengths of character. It certainly is for those strengths that philosophers deem corrective. People may come out of a crisis better off than those who never had the crisis. To be sure, we would not want to program crises for our children in the hope that they will surmount them to become better people. But neither should we eschew all risk. Positive psychology should recognize that there are lessons to be learned from failure and disappointment, even from crisis and stress...'" (35)
The relationship between life satisfaction and character is relentlessly monotonic. Said another way, the place where life satisfaction is notably absent is at the lower end of a strength. Aristotle notwithstanding, the typical problem with a virtue lies in its deficiency and not in its excess.
Personal Growth is "Profounded Grounded" in Adversity (Ryff & Singer)
Purpose in life, the capacity to find meaning and direction in one's experiences, as well as to create and pursue goals in living, is profoundly grounded in confrontations with adversity...Similarly, personal growth, or the capacity to continually realize one's talent and potential, as well as to develop new resources and strengths, frequently involves encounters with adversity that require one to dig deeply to find one's inner strength. When are people most likely to discover these strengths? Ironically, paradoxically, it is when they are most down and out that inner resources are frequently found and exert their powers of renewal... Self-expansion through challenge quintessentially illustrates the human spirit's remarkable capacity to survive loss, recover from adversity, and thrive in the face of overwhelming obstacles...
In sum, it is not the absence of negative experience or negative emotion that defines the good, well-lived, richly experienced life, but how challenges and difficulties are managed, responded to, dealt with, and transformed. Returning to the theme of irony, we note that the deepest levels of human meaning and connection are frequently found when individuals come face to face with their vulnerabilities, insecurities, or pain...
Wellness comes from active encounters with life's challenges, setbacks, and demands, not from blissful, conflict-free, smooth sailing" (Ryff & Singer, 277-279).
Restoring Meaning: reinvent, gained a new view of, replace with something better :)
The most desirable outcome of development... a point at which a person comes to accept his or her past, no longer seeks to change or achieve the impossible, yet is vitally connected to the immediate environment.
"In his longitudinal study of male adult development, Vaillant (1993) theorized that a key to mature adaptation to life is the ability to replace bitterness and resentment toward those who have perpetrated harm with gratitude and acceptance. Gratitude is part and parcel of a creative process whereby self-destructive emotions are transformed into ones that permit healing and restoration. According to Vaillant, 'Mature defenses grow out of our brain's evolving capacity to master, assimilate, and feel grateful for life, living, and experience'"
A peak experience, is "a state of deep focus that occurs when people engage in challenging tasks that demand intense concentration and commitment. Flow occurs when a person's skill level is perfectly balanced to the challenge level of a task that has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
Making these a constant part of our lives can enhance our work, personal relationships and leisure time.
Maslow thought, Peak experiences were more frequent among self-actualizing persons since they had 'relatively permanent gratification' of their basic needs for safety, love, affiliation, identity and self-esteem and were able to function at higher motivational states of integrated activity.
As the process of need gratification increases, more integrative experiences occur leading to greater strength in personality, identity, and active mastery unless thwarted by frustration, blocks, deprivation, threat, trauma, or other types of experience that maintain focus on lower needs thereby preventing the development of more robust self-actualizing states.
In this way acute identity episodes [peak experiences] are positive in nature and can mobilize growth and personality development in self-actualizing directions.
The person in the peak experience feels more integrated (unified, whole, all of a piece) than at other times. He also looks (to the observer) more integrated in various ways, e.g., less split, dissociated, less fighting against himself, less split between experiencing self and observing self, more on-pointed, more harmoniously organized, more efficiently organized with all his parts functioning very nicely with each other, more synergic, with less internal friction, etc.
It is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes.
Acceptance and surrender recognize the inherent wisdom of letting go of things that are beyond one's capacity to control. Acceptance and surrender in the recognition of superior forces and events is healthy acknowledgement of limits.
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