You touch on one of the most essential qualities to posttraumatic growth: making more meaningful sense of the world. Sense making can be a highly spiritual process.
Cole Bitting´s last blog ..Phenomenal Guest Post

Thank you for such an interesting read, I’ve read it a few times and enjoyed just as much.

I have experienced many changes in my life recently, where I’ve had to had to change my thoughts about things. Many changes that I thought I wouldn’t be able to make. However, by allowing things to happen and become more accepting; realisng they were happening for a reason has made life easier. I’ve learnt to become more accepting and understanding. You post has been very helpful, thank you for sharing it.

Regards

Paul
Paul´s last blog ..It’s only skin deep

I have too much experience with significant distress to have much faith in the idea that we can “control how things impact us.” At some point in time in most peoples lives, something happens which rips down their biggest emotional defense and they feel helpless and without control. And many people have this magnitude of experience several times. I often call it “hitting a 10 on the pain meter.”

Two of the hardest lessons of all are to learn how little control we have and how random life is. Virtually all of our beliefs require a sense of control and predictability. So virtually all of our beliefs can be violated, and we suffer trauma.

However, there is a system of experience, and the better we understand it, the more we might trust the necessary, painful process which can guide us through our dark nights of the soul. I believe “understanding” is a better mindset than “control.”

An interest sub-point: just as we are programmed to seek knowledge, we are programmed to accomplish. So we have a “know” part of the brain and a “do” part of the brain. My point about “understanding” v. “control,” reflect my internal, and largely unconscious preference for “know.” Your brain might be wired to prefer “do.” Regardless, it could well be that my wordsmithing only satisfies a my hidden value rather than makes an insightful observations.
Cole Bitting´s last blog ..Computer Disaster!

Spirit and knowing are one of my favorite topics. I touch on it in Furies! The short of it is that our brains are built to seek out understanding and sense making. This orientation has its distinct emotions – surprise, curiosity, awe, terror, feeling idiotic or clueless – its own brain systems, neuropeptides etc. Spirituality is reality this desire for knowing on its grandest scale.

My focus is on the recovery and growth from trauma. Trauma is at its core a violation of what we know – our beliefs, schemas, scripts, values, etc. Posttraumatic growth, in a significant sense, is the emergence of a new, better understanding to replace the one which was violated and lost. For many, their traumatic experiences are a gateway to spiritual development, insight and practice. The search for knowledge (which is a very spiritual notion) is literally built into our DNA.
Cole Bitting´s last blog ..Computer Disaster!