Coping with COVID-19: The three stages of post-traumatic growth

2020 was supposed to be the year of the book for me. After the release of my book The Power of Suffering in March, my year was booked out with promotion, public appearances, meeting readers, running workshops and responding to new opportunities. I envisioned the book being embraced by an ardent and grateful audience. But instead, someone shut the doors.

The coronavirus pandemic, bushfire disasters and other life-upending events wake us up to a new reality. The pandemic has shown how interconnected the world is and how global cooperation is required to achieve better health outcomes in the future. The most recent bushfire season, too, has showed us that climate change is real and it is here now.

Life upheavals disrupt our tightly held beliefs about how the world works and our place in that world. This is our ‘storied Self’. Before disaster strikes, we may have believed terrible things could only happen to other people, that we have control over our life outcomes, that life is largely predictable. We believe that if we behave well, life will return us the favour. But the current pandemic has shown us that life is unfair, unpredictable and it can be harsh.

The pandemic has, for many, led to the loss of life dreams, goals, and our expectations for how things would turn out. There is grief and with it may come anger, despair, hopelessness, sadness, indecision, disorientation and self-blame. This is suffering, but we can ease suffering and even grow in positive ways through the struggle.

There are three stages to this process: survival, recovery and growth.

This a time of distress and we need to do the following to get through it:

• Meet our basic needs of food, shelter and safety.
• Find those who understand what we are going through, tell our stories and share in theirs.
• Manage strong emotions, intrusive thoughts and images. Understand that we are responding in a normal way to abnormal circumstances.
• Self-soothe: meditation, self-compassion practices, massage, body meditations like yoga, swimming, walking, running and tai chi.
• Physical exercise. This rids the body of tension and increases mental well-being.
• Find moments of joy and pleasure, however small.
• Eat healthy and notice the tendency to crave comfort foods and alcohol.

There is no universal timeframe for the survival period, or the other stages. Every individual responds in their own way, dependent upon their resources together with their willingness to connect with others and look within themselves.

Recovery begins with the acceptance of what is happening and then acting in a manner that is in accord with this reality. There is a movement to reflection – asking oneself, ‘What do I need? What is good for me? What now?’ This leads to the growth of insights. There is the development of new routines and ways of living.

Based on our reflection, growth involves making decisions knowing we can’t go back to how things were. It's letting go of past losses and opening to the new. Personal growth is not the same as coping. This is a period for creating new meanings, new purpose and new ways of being.

There are six aspects in which people may grow:

1. Recognition of our personal courage and resilience: if I can get through that, then I can get through anything life might throw at me.
2. Greater appreciation of life. Recognising that life is precious and fragile. Enjoying simple pleasures, slowing down, changing life priorities, nurturing gratitude.
3. Opening to new possibilities, seeing new opportunities and being adventurous.
4. A deepening and valuing of relationships. Knowing that connection with others is necessary for our well-being and that offering our connection to others is a gift.
5. Spiritual development. Seeing beyond superficial day-to-day existence and apprehending the bigger picture with less ego and self-indulgence.
6. Increased compassion for the suffering of others and a desire to reduce this suffering.

After I experienced a stroke during the global financial crisis, I lost everything: my health, my career, my house, our life savings and, temporarily, my family. Acceptance was hard-won. At night I would dream of how things used to be, but in the morning I’d wake to the knowledge, as if anew, that everything had gone. Morning after morning, it rolled on like earthquake aftershocks.

But I survived this period of upheaval and went on to experience each of these six domains of growth. When I learned about the field of post-traumatic growth, it was validation that I had changed and was a better version of the person I had been before. We need validation like this. That’s why I have gathered stories of other people who have survived disaster and how they achieved post-traumatic growth in The Power of Suffering.