Amplifying Deviation

I am reading Posttraumatic Growth: Positive Changes in the Aftermath of Crisis, by Lawrence G. Calhoun, Richard G. Tedeschi, and Crystal L. Park. 2008.

In a chapter titled “A Developmental Perspective on Posttraumatic Growth,” Carolyn Aldwin and Karen Sutton discuss a “deviation amplification model” of posttraumatic response.  They note that previous researchers suggested two types of post-trauma processing.  “Deviation-countering processes” provide negative feedback that seeks to return a system to the previous (aka “normal”) state.  The authors point to a thermostat and furnace as a simple example of such a process.  Aldwin and Sutton note that “if a phenomenon deviates too much from baseline, negative feedback loops become activated to return the organisms to homeostasis” (page 44).

Another set of processes, however, “results in intensification of the change.”  These processes are the “deviation-amplifying” variety.    These amplifying processes might produce positive or negative long-term change.  For example, continuing rumination on a loss may well plunge a person down the descending slope of dysthymia and into the deep darkness of real depression.  Taking walks or working out to deal with loss-related anxiety, on the other hand, may produce an increasing cycle of positive affect that begins to feed itself and produce even more physical and emotional well-being.

The part of the chapter that really caught my attention, however, was a small comment on the long-term impact of multiple events in a relatively short time period.  Stressful events that have a low to moderate severity and are spread out over time and are limited to one area of a person’s life generally don’t produce long-term personal change.  However, “those which have a rapid onset, affect multiple domains, and are more severe are more likely to result in amplifying processes.  Certainly,” Aldwin and Sutton conclude, “traumatic processes fit this definition” (page 44).  This cascade effect is more likely to produce long-term changes in self-identity and life goals.

I have been studying Job and the challenges of suffering since my senior year in seminary.  Often I thought that the cascade of horrific events in the book were simple poetic hyperbole.  Then I lived through 2010: Ben Larson’s death, burying an infant with beloved parishioners, living through the misery of the homosexuality civil wars in the Church, leaving the parish and taking a new position, Anne’s death and the complete disruption that followed.  Suddenly, Job’s story seemed all too familiar.  It didn't seem like an exaggeration at all.

Job’s response begins now to make more sense as well.  The writer of the book seems to be very sophisticated in understanding what it would take for Job to move from the slumber of self-satisfied safety to a genuinely transformative path in life.  I don’t believe that the Book of Job is some sort of prescription.  I don’t believe for a moment that it says something like “Take five big gulps of trauma in order to get a new life.”  Instead, it is descriptive.  A cascade of catastrophe can have the effect of moving Job to a deeper, more real, more honest experience of God.  God doesn't make us suffer to move us to grow.  God does, however, equip us to grow in the aftermath of suffering.

A number of similar articles refer to a 1991 piece by Seymour Epstein entitled “Cognitive-experiential Self-theory: Implications for developmental psychology.”  In that article Epstein describes trauma as the “atom smasher” of personal identity.  “Trauma tends to ‘smash’ basic assumptions about personal security, a just world, and the like,” note Aldwin and Sutton.  “The process of healing a traumatized personality thus involves the reconstruction of a new self—the individuals ‘pick up the pieces,’ as it were,” they continue (page 57).

I wonder if that is part of what we get to watch as we read the dialogues and debates in the Book of Job.  Job declares that he has been stripped as naked by trauma as he was on the day he was born.  Do we observe as he is clothed with a new sense of identity, purpose and direction?  Do we witness the reconstruction of goals, purpose and direction as God leads him forward?  Perhaps.  Let us see.