Life Challenges

Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Reducing Stress

Trauma: Enemy or Partner? Kathryn D. Cramer, Ph.D.

I have identified two major no-win styles of approaching stressful traumas that I want you to think about: the victim and the aggressor.

If you adopt the style of the victim, you will cower and crumble under pressure. Because you are intimidated by the trauma, you will look to outside forces for a remedy. Then, because no one and nothing can rescue you, you will eventually become frustrated or perhaps depressed over the impotency of your approach.

If you adopt the style of an aggressor, you will feel like physically attacking or in some way annihilating the force responsible for your upheaval. You will take action, even decisively, but to no avail. Then you will become depressed over the impotency of that approach....

Anyone who fails to take responsibility for healing and growing in the face of major change, anyone who adopts the helpless course of either the victim or the aggressor, has chosen a path that leads first to worry, sleepless nights, confusion, frustration, and aches and pains, and eventually to major mental, physical, or emotional setbacks....(pp. 20-21)

You do not have to choose either of the two helpless positions in the face of traumatic change...Instead, you can choose to view a trauma as a champion would. You can view your trauma as a challenge to be mastered, rather than as an enemy to be dominated or to be fled.

To make any of life's traumas work for you, it is fundamental for you to believe that any trauma can be a challenge. You must be willing to create a clear and specific vision of the benefits present in a stressful situation. You must make the trauma your partner and identify the personal rewards mastering it could bring you. Finally, you must plan and implement a strategy for earning those rewards. (p.29)

From Staying on Top When Your World Turns Upside Down, Kathryn D. Cramer, Ph.D., Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc., New York, NY 1990, pp. 20-21, 29.

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