After cheating death, the real challenge of living begins

I supposed that I must be part of the two thirds considering the worst experiences to be life changing for the better. I am not as insane as that sounds. For me, each time changed me, made me more loving, living in the moment and above all, more forgiving. I value the people in my life more because I know that at any moment something can change all of it. Someone else may worry about it to the point where they stop living and enjoying the living but this is a story about what is possible after trauma and it is possible for anyone. Even people with PTSD can heal if not be cured and the next set of changes for them can be for the better.


After cheating death, the real challenge of living begins
How trauma can upend lives and, wondrously, transform some for the better


By Jennifer Wolff Perrine

When Julia Ferganchick learned storms had delayed her connecting flight from Dallas to Little Rock, Arkansas, she found a seat at an airport bar and ordered a Bloody Mary. The 30-year-old writing and rhetoric professor had just spent Memorial Day weekend on Coronado Island, off the coast of San Diego. She was eager to return home to start the summer semester at the University of Arkansas, where she had applied for tenure. Now she was irritated; the bad weather would push her arrival close to midnight.
Two hours and 12 minutes behind schedule, American Airlines flight 1420 took off. Once above the clouds, the flight was relatively smooth, but as it neared Little Rock, they flew into lightning and severe thunderstorms. “Quite a light show off the left-hand side of the aircraft,” the pilot announced. “I’m going to have to slightly overfly the airport in order to turn back around to land.” As the plane circled and dipped, it jolted in the wind. “I knew—all of us knew—that this wasn’t the feeling of a plane touching down,” Ferganchick says.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 slammed into the ground going 184 miles an hour, careening off the end of the runway into a flood plain, where it smashed into a steel light stanchion and split in two just four rows behind Ferganchick’s seat. Her seat belt kept her torso in place, but the impact ripped her blue clogs from her feet and wrenched her back so badly she herniated a disk in her spine. Still, she was alive. And as fire enveloped the cabin, she could see a way out, through a jagged gash in the plane’s ceiling. Ferganchick clawed her way over mangled seats and carry-on bags until she found herself in the open air in the middle of a hailstorm, standing barefoot atop a plane that seemed ready to explode.

Some never recover. But most do. In fact, nearly two thirds of trauma victims, even those who had extreme pain, say they ultimately benefited from the aftermath of their experience, according to the research of Richard G. Tedeschi, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Tedeschi and his colleagues have tracked outcomes for people who survived accidents and other traumas, such as life-threatening illnesses or the death of a child, and identified a phenomenon they call post-traumatic growth: Some survivors grow closer to people they love; others develop a sense of personal strength or appreciation for life. Still others deepen their spiritual beliefs or change their career and life goals. Women are more likely than men to report these benefits, and even those who are most impaired at first can find their way, as Ferganchick did, to feeling enriched by their ordeal.
What can these women teach the rest of us? As researchers learn more about what makes people resilient, they hope to develop therapies that could lessen negative responses and promote post-traumatic growth instead. “It’s not about getting over it‚ it’s about processing it in the most meaningful way,” Tedeschi says. “You still have your fears and grief and suffering, but you have made your suffering meaningful. If you can learn to do that, you can get through the bad stuff in life and find value in the struggle.”
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After cheating death, the real challenge of living begins