It's Not All PTSD ... Posttraumatic Growth Exists Too

It’s the first weekend out of the longest lockdown in the world and my family and I make the trip up to Mount Dandenong. It’s a beautiful drive. The sun shines through overhanging ferns and the cold air feels fresher up here. Once we arrive, my ten-year-old zooms his remote-control car all over the place while my six-year-old tags closely behind. My wife and I smile—today will be a good day.

We watch the ducklings, hike the dirt tracks, get our boots muddy. Lunch is on an outdoor mat we’ve brought. Once eaten, I drop my wife home and travel to an indoor skatepark with the boys. The kids have been hanging to visit ever since we first got locked down. I sign the waiver and take them inside. My youngest needs supervision so I stick with him while my eldest goes off on his own. After about ten minutes of chasing him around I check to see where his brother is. I spot a blue helmet on the other side of the place. There, chatting with some kids.

I smile.

I walk down to him and lose sight of his blue helmet given the ramps and stairs and other elevations. A few seconds, then … a big thud. I crock my head and call my youngest as I hear an ‘Ooooooh,’ and speed towards the noise with wide eyes. Where is he? I think. Then: There! I usher my youngest along and see my eldest below, walking, dazed, looking about, searching. His scooter lies on the ground behind him as he stumbles forward. Has he fallen and winded himself? I reach the bottom of the elevation and rush the steps. Distracted, confused, I reach him.

‘What—’ I start …

‘I’ve cracked all my teeth,’ he interrupts. My breath catches in my throat. Then I see it—his chin; it’s a gaping bloody hole.

‘Oh no,’ I choke and clamp one hand firmly under his chin. I rush him around the ramps all the while calling out my other boy’s name to confused stares around the place. I can’t see him. Shit, I think.

‘Do you want me to get one of the guys?’ says a teen donning long blonde hair and a skateboard. My son tries to move my hand away from his chin. Blood spills between my fingers and stains my wedding ring.

‘Yes, please,’ I tell the guy and scan the place again. Where in the name of … Where is he?!

We arrive at the corridor near the entrance and are met by another teenage kid who works the front counter. He leads me to the First Aid room. ‘Can I see?’ he says. I remove me hand and am met with a chunk of gaping flesh shining up at me against the light, blood pooling slower now. God that’s messed up, I think. ‘Uh, I think we need to call an ambulance,’ the guy says.

‘Yep,’ I say and get on my phone and dial my wife. ‘Babe?’ I say.

‘Yeah?’

‘Can you come? Cas’s hurt himself pretty bad.’

‘What?’

‘We need to get an ambulance.’

‘Oh, God. Wait. I’m coming now.’

All the while, my son does not appear too worried as he lies down with his head propped up on a pillow. ‘It’s all good, Sweety,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll get you fixed up real soon.’ My hands tremble as I watch the guy on the phone to 000, chatting with the operator, responding to all sorts of questions by way of triage. Is an ambulance necessary or should we drive him?

Questions about his neck and fingers and toes and so on.

My bloody fingers tremble as I ravage the First Aid kit for a bandage. I find one—a butterfly-clip—and press three on his chin.

Where the hell is Micah?

I hope he, too, isn’t lying around in a puddle. My hands are sticky, but in the end I manage to patch him up. Then, my wife arrives.

‘I don’t know where Micah is,’ I say as soon as I see her. ‘Can you go look for him?’

She nods and rushes out of the room.

‘Can you please fill out this incident form?’ says the teenage boy, eyes wide.

An incident form? Really? Right now? ‘I’ll do it later,’ I tell him. He puts it away, perhaps noticing his unreasonable request.

About fifteen minutes later, I’m in the car waiting, preparing for the hospital. In the back seat, Cas is more concerned with a scrape on his knuckle than the chasm on his chin. ‘I’m tired,’ he says, looking as if he’s about to zonk out.

Is he in shock? Better get there quick. ‘Don’t close your eyes. We’ll be there soon.’

I wait, hoping and praying that my wife exits already.

Hurry up hurry up hurry up.

After a while, I see her make her way to us, both scooters in tow … our youngest too.

What a woman.

Once inside, we take off. I am eternally conscious that I have a boy fading out in the backseat while the other cries ’cos he never wanted to leave. Cas’s head rests against the window.

‘Keep him awake,’ I say. ‘Can you keep an eye on him?’ I press hard on the accelerator but it matters not since we’re stopped at Every. Single. Traffic light. I mean every bloody red light! I run a red around the corner to the hospital, park the car, and rush to Cas’s side. ‘I’m going to carry you.’ He nods. I run. Inside, we have our temperature checked, slap on a face mask, and are triaged. An eternity. My son looks like he’s close to nodding off. Concussed? No idea. Thirty minutes later, a nurse calls us in. Again, Cas is not yet worried about his chin, but every few moments he spits out tiny chips of tooth—the same I’d forgotten he had spit into my hand at the skatepark earlier. Come to think of it … I’ve still got some in my back pocket.

The nurse removes the makeshift bandaging as Cas whimpers. Painful. I brush up against his knuckle (that also looks like it has lost skin) for an umpteenth amount of times, and each time I do he flinches and pulls back. Excellent reflexes. After a bit of back-and-forth (including Cas’s declarations that he doesn’t want stitches as he’s afraid of needles) the decision is made to refer him to plastic surgery as the wound is too grievous a few simple stitches. We both get COVID swabbed and wait on the call.

They clean the wound despite his flinching. My wife had driven my youngest home and I, ordinarily clueless in situations like this, carry the torch for the both of us—comforter and encourager. He, on the other hand, is doing well … touching medical implements, exploring the room, chatting away, asking questions. Then, Gabriela calls. After that, my parents. Then the doctor. All the while, I’m beside my son with a smile.

‘I wish it happened to me!’ says my youngest on the phone. ‘I don’t want him to be hurt.’ I’m heartbroken. Micah is always saying things like that. I tell Castiéll what his brother said and am met with the most empathetic and heartbroken expression. He asks for the phone.

‘Micah,’ he says. ‘It’s okay. I’m okay. You don’t need to say that.’

I journalled the event so as not to forget. As I remember it, I think to my same son’s fall years earlier that led to anxiety and avoidance of riding at the skatepark. Little by little he put himself into slightly more difficult challenges until he could say, ‘I don’t have trauma anymore, Dad!’

This is posttraumatic growth.

At the time, I recall one of the nurses telling my son on examining him, calming him: ‘When a bone is broken, it gets even stronger as it heals.’ Castiéll suffered no broken bone but the lesson was not lost on me.

In his book Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela said the “policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced … men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. … Time and again, I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea. I have seen men stand up to attacks and torture without breaking, showing a strength and resiliency that defies the imagination. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. … The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.[i]

Without fear, what is courage? Are we too proud to say we cannot learn from the hurts of our past? Yes, if we would have known better we would have done differently. If we could have. But rumination without control and opportunity is a fool’s errand. Mandela used the pain of his past to shape his life and orient his understanding of the world. So too do many of us who choose to see the good in the world post-trauma. This is what I mean by posttraumatic growth. And growth is possible when trauma is used as a catalyst rather than an end in itself.

Years before, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine (Neil) where I touched on this theme. ‘Ee all know people who try to sugar-coat suffering as a way of drawing some kind of elaborate lesson, or excuse. This is often done by people who haven’t really been through suffering themselves. I don’t think that’s the best way to think about it.’

‘How would you put it, then?’ he said.

‘Well, it’s not about putting a good spin on it. It’s about meaning. If suffering has no meaning, it quickly turns into despair, which is not good for anybody. The person who suffers must draw meaning from it. Without that, you suffer uselessly. With that thinking, if your suffering is useless then, oftentimes, you think … “Well, so am I.”.’

Viktor Frankl: If you lose hope and cannot draw meaning from suffering, you sign your own death warrant.

[i] Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Little, Brown and Company.