The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  Then, one day, he was poring over data when he found an interesting correlation: people who said that they had experienced a major trauma in their childhood but had kept it a secret were significantly more likely to report health problems as adults than those who had spoken to others about the experience. This sparked a question: Would encouraging the secret-keepers to anonymously open up about the event improve their health?

  For the past thirty years, Pennebaker has been trying to answer this question by asking people to come into his lab and spend fifteen minutes each day, for three or four days in a row, writing about “the most upsetting experience in your life.” He encourages his subjects to “really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts” about the experience and how it has affected them. In the studies he has run, people have written about being raped, being mugged, losing loved ones, and attempting suicide. It’s not uncommon, Pennebaker told me, for research subjects to leave the writing room in tears.

  Pennebaker has found that those who wrote down their thoughts and feelings about the trauma went to the doctor less often. They also reported better grades after the experiment, displayed fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, registered lower blood pressure and heart rates, and enjoyed better-functioning immune systems. Expressive writing, in other words, is healing. But why was writing about a trauma in this specific way so powerful?

  When he analyzed the writing of his research subjects across his various studies, Pennebaker found that those in the expressive writing condition didn’t just recount what happened to them during the trauma or use the exercise to blow off steam and vent their emotions. Rather, they were actively working to make sense of what had happened to them—and that search for meaning helped them overcome the traumatic experience both physically and emotionally.

  The writing exercise helped Pennebaker’s subjects forge meaning in several ways. First, by probing into the causes and consequences of the adversity, the subjects eventually grew wiser about it. They used more of what Pennebaker calls “insight words”—words and phrases like “realize,” “I know,” “because,” “work through,” and “understand”—in their narratives. A father might realize, for example, that his son’s suicide was not his fault—and understanding that could bring him some closure.

  Second, over the course of the three or four days, they showed a shift in perspective, which Pennebaker measured through their pronoun use. Instead of writing about what happened to me and what I am going through, they started writing about why he abused me or why she divorced me. In other words, they stepped away from their own emotional turmoil and tried to get inside the head of another person. The ability to look at the trauma from different perspectives, Pennebaker said, indicates that the victim has put some distance between himself and the event, which allows him to understand how it shaped him and his life.

  The third characteristic that set the sense-makers apart was their ability to find a positive meaning in their traumatic experience. Pennebaker gave me one example: “Let’s say that I have been mugged in an alley. Someone hit me with a tire iron and took all my money and it’s really shattered my trust in the world. I could write, ‘This was a horrible experience. I don’t know what to do,’ and so forth. So I’m talking about the event, and may even be coming up with meaning: ‘I now realize that the world is a dangerous place and I have to be careful.’ Or I might say, ‘This event was shattering for me in many ways, but it also made me realize how lucky I had been in the past, and fortunately, I have some stable close friends who have been able to help me through it.’ ” The second interpretation, Pennebaker said, leads to better health outcomes. Other research has shown that those who find some good that resulted from their trauma, though they continue to have intrusive thoughts about the experience, are less depressed and report higher well-being.

  Consider a story that the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl tells about consoling an elderly doctor whose wife had died two years earlier. The doctor dearly loved his wife, and losing her led him to fall into a severe depression that he was unable to lift himself out of. Frankl encouraged the doctor to change his perspective. “What would have happened, Doctor,” Frankl asked him, “if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” The doctor responded: “Oh, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!”

  Frankl then pointed out the benefit of the doctor surviving his wife: “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering—to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” After Frankl said this, the doctor rose from his chair, shook Frankl’s hand, and left his office. Frankl helped this doctor find a positive meaning in his wife’s death, and that gave him peace.

  In Pennebaker’s research, the subjects who benefited the most after the experiment were those who demonstrated the greatest progress in sense-making over time. These were people whose initial responses were emotionally raw and their stories disjointed, but whose narratives became smoother and more insightful as each day passed. Venting raw emotions and falling back on platitudes, he has found, does not lead to health benefits. But sustained and thoughtful writing does. It helps us move beyond our initial emotional reactions to something deeper.

  In fact, Pennebaker found that expressive writing is uniquely healing—subjects asked to express their emotions about a traumatic experience through dance didn’t benefit as much as the writers did. Pennebaker argues that’s because writing, unlike many other forms of expression, allows people to systematically process an event, bringing order to it. Through writing, they discover new insights and come to understand how the crisis fits into the broader mosaic of their lives. Sense-making and narrative are thus effective ways to make meaning from trauma and, ultimately, overcome it. But they are not the only tools we have to recover from difficult experiences—as a growing body of research on human resilience has shown.

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  The question resilience researchers ask is why—why do some people handle adversity better than others, and go on to lead normal lives despite their negative life experiences, while others are derailed by them? In the early 1990s, the psychologist Gina Higgins tried to answer that question. In her book Resilient Adults, she profiles individuals who have experienced profound trauma and come out remarkably whole.

  One of those people is Shibvon. Shibvon grew up in dire poverty and her parents had a fraught relationship. Though her father loved his children, he was a remote figure. He suffered from mental illness and attempted suicide when Shibvon was seven. Her mother, meanwhile, was a terror. A large woman with a booming voice, she regularly beat Shibvon and her three younger siblings and tied them to their beds at night. Twice, she sent them to orphanages to get rid of them, though she later took them back. And when Shibvon was nine years old, the abuse became even more nightmarish. Shibvon’s mother allowed her boyfriend to rape Shibvon on a regular basis. He threatened to kill Shibvon’s father if she told anyone—so Shibvon stayed quiet.

  The word Shibvon uses to describe her childhood is “chaos.” She remembers “a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling, getting thrown across the room.” She has no memories of receiving love or affection from her mother, who constantly thundered that Shibvon was “stupid” and “rotten.” On multiple occasions, her mother told Shibvon that she had tried to abort her—and that the only reason she married Shibvon’s father was that she got pregnant with Shibvon. “I felt like it was another way of saying how much she hated me,” Shibvon said of her mother’s role in her sexual abuse, “and how much I just was a piece of excrement, a sacrificial lamb.”

  It should go without saying that the consequences of this kind of abuse are devastating. Childhood trauma is one of the most difficult forms of adversity to overcome, and it can also leave lasting psychological and physical scars on the victim. When children experience severe and unpredictable stress, their brains and bodies rewire in a way that makes them
hypersensitive to other stressors later in life and more susceptible to disease. Childhood adversity has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and cancer in adults. And adults who faced serious stressors as children are also more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, suffer from depression, develop learning problems, commit violent crimes, and be arrested.

  This is what makes Shibvon’s story so remarkable. Though she struggled at times with depression and anxiety as an adult, she was ultimately resilient. Her life was not shattered by the perpetual stress and chaos of her childhood. Shibvon went on to have a career as a pediatric nurse, working in a neonatal intensive care unit. When she was twenty-one, she married a man she deeply loved, with whom she had three sons. Together, they built a happy family.

  Systematic research on resilience began around 1970 with the study of children like Shibvon. Initially, psychologists and psychiatrists were interested in understanding the origins of mental illness. Because childhood adversity was one of the predictors of psychological disorders, they began studying children who were experiencing poverty or living in troubled households. As the researchers tracked the at-risk children over time, they made an unexpected discovery: While many struggled or fell apart psychologically, a subset emerged that beat the odds and did not experience significant mental health problems. They were emotionally healthy, formed strong relationships, and did well in school. What set them apart?

  Over the years, researchers have answered that question by closely studying children and adults who manage to lead healthy and productive lives after their experiences of adversity, stress, and trauma. Steven Southwick of the Yale School of Medicine and Dennis Charney of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, two experts on resilience, have spent the last three decades studying people who have endured traumas like abduction, rape, and captivity as prisoners of war—and emerged from them bent but not broken, as they put it. These resilient people not only bounced back, but some actually grew: “In fact,” the two psychiatrists write of the prisoners of war they studied, “many of them reported having a greater appreciation of life, closer connections with family, and a newfound sense of meaning and purpose because of their prison experience.” After extensive interviews with such individuals, Southwick and Charney found ten characteristics that distinguish the resilient from the rest.

  One was purpose, which the researchers defined as “having a worthy goal or mission in life.” Another, related to purpose, was having a moral compass tied to altruism—or selflessly serving others. Each of these themes played a role in Shibvon’s story. When her mother sent her and her siblings to the orphanage, ten-year-old Shibvon helped the nuns in the nursery care for babies who had been abandoned. There, the nuns and the babies showed her affection and care, which was healing for her, as was thinking more broadly about her life’s purpose. “I pretty much thought I was going to become what the nuns at the orphanage were, and that’s how I would take care of kids: come back and help these little kids who have had their bad troubles and make their lives better,” she said, “so that was my first goal in life.” Reflecting on and planning for that future gave her hope for a better life. She realized that she could help others by cultivating love and warmth around her instead of the hatred and hurt that was her mother’s currency. “I don’t have much to offer,” she would think, “but I have myself.”

  Beyond purpose, another critical predictor of resilience is social support. For children, especially, a healthy relationship with an adult or caregiver can be a buffer against the harmful effects of adversity. Though Shibvon’s mother rejected her and made her feel like she “didn’t belong,” Shibvon received love from her father and from a paternal aunt who lived nearby. Her relationship with her aunt, she said, was especially important, even though they didn’t see each other very often. But Shibvon remembers that her aunt “always” came to visit her and her siblings when they lived at the orphanages and took them out to dinner. When they were home with their mother, she brought them food and clothes, and when Shibvon visited her aunt’s house, her aunt made Shibvon feel secure, safe, and valued. “She really made me feel like I mattered,” Shibvon said. The love and care of her aunt gave Shibvon the strength to muddle through her horrible circumstances and, in time, overcome them.

  Transcendent sources of meaning also play a role in helping people cope with trauma. For example, Southwick and Charney studied Vietnam War veterans who were held as prisoners of war, some up to eight years. These men were tortured, starved, and lived in horrendous conditions. But one of the things that kept them going was a connection to God. Some prayed regularly in their cells and others found strength in remembering that God was by their side, which meant, “We can handle this thing together,” in the words of one former POW. The prisoners also gathered together for religious and patriotic services at the infamous prison camp nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton. Not all of these men were devout, Southwick and Charney found, but many of them relied on spirituality to help them endure their ordeal. In the words of one, “If you can’t tap into a source of strength and power greater than yourself, you’re probably not gonna last.”

  Research has shown that some people naturally resist adversity better than others; scientists now know that our capacity for resilience is determined, in part, by our genetic makeup and early life experiences. But the good news is that resilience is not a fixed trait. Though some people are inherently more sensitive to stress than others, all of us can learn to adapt to stress more effectively by, Charney has said, developing a set of psychological tools to help us cope with stressful events.

  The fact that resilience can be taught was revealed in two studies published in 2004 by Michele Tugade of Vassar College and Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Tugade and Fredrickson invited research subjects into the lab and recorded their baseline heart rate, blood pressure, and other physiological indicators. Next, the participants were presented with a stressful task. Each participant was asked to quickly prepare and deliver a three-minute speech on why he or she is a good friend. They were told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated.

  Even though the participants in this study were presented with a minor stressor compared to the ones we’ve covered in this chapter, they still became anxious—their heart rate and blood pressure spiked. But some people in the study returned to their baseline levels more quickly than others. The researchers took note of which people showed more resilience, as measured by their physiological recovery rate, and which showed less. Tugade and Fredrickson then examined how the more resilient and less resilient people approached the task. The naturally resilient people, the researchers found, took a different attitude toward the speech task. They did not view it as a threat the way the nonresilient participants did; they saw it as a challenge.

  With that in mind, the researchers conducted a separate experiment to see if they could transform less resilient people into more resilient ones. The researchers invited a new set of subjects into the lab and repeated their earlier experiment. Then Tugade and Fredrickson added a twist. The researchers told some people to see the task as a threat, and they told others to see it as a challenge.

  What the researchers discovered is good news for more resilient and less resilient people alike. People who were naturally resilient recovered quickly whether they saw the task as a challenge or a threat. But for those who were less resilient, reframing the task as a challenge erased the gap: those who were told to approach the task as an opportunity rather than as a threat suddenly started looking like resilient people in their cardiovascular measures. They were able to bounce back.

  Though it’s difficult for researchers to study adverse experiences in the lab, one way they can understand how people cope with long-term stressors is by monitoring them over time during a stressful period of their lives. That’s what Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen of Stanford University did in a study published in 2011—they followed a group of college students over three years to see how they h
andled the difficult but important transition from high school life to adult life. Their findings reveal how the pillars of meaning help people weather adversity more effectively.

  When freshmen come to college, they are thrown into a new world, which can be disorienting. They have to figure out what classes they want to take and what groups to join, and they often need to find a new set of friends. As Walton and Cohen point out, that transition can be particularly difficult for African American students. Though all students worry about fitting in at school, black students often feel especially alienated, Walton explained. As minorities on most college campuses and the target of racial discrimination, they might worry about whether “people like me” belong here. Their need to belong becomes threatened—and, as the researchers note, this can change how they interpret their experiences. When they get a bad grade or receive negative feedback, rather than acknowledging these setbacks as a normal part of college life, they might think there’s something wrong with them and, even, people like them.

  The researchers invited a group of black and white students into the lab and gave them several stories to read. The stories had been written by older students, and they were meant to protect the subjects’ sense of belonging. The narrative thread among the stories was that adversity is a common but temporary part of the adjustment process for freshmen. If a student faces setbacks or feels like he does not belong, the participants in the experimental condition of the study learned by reading these stories, that’s a natural part of the transition to college; it does not mean that they themselves are flawed in some way, or that people don’t like them because of their race or ethnic background. The narrative was meant to change the story students told themselves about college.