Table Of ContentLifelong Learning Book Series 30
Melanie Munroe
Michel Ferrari Editors
Post-Traumatic
Growth
to Psychological
Well-Being
Coping Wisely with Adversity
Lifelong Learning Book Series
Volume 30
Series Editor
Karen Evans, UCL, Institute of Education UCL, London, UK
Editorial Board Members
Andrew Brown, Insitute of Education UCL, London, UK
Chiara Biasin, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Richard Desjardins, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Kitty te Riele, Peter Underwood Centre, University of Tasmania,
Hobart, Australia
Yukiko Sawano, University of the Sacred Heart, Shibuya-ku, Japan
Maria Slowey, Dublin City University, Higher Education Research Centre,
Dublin, Ireland
Maurice Taylor, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa,
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Ann-Charlotte Teglborg, Ecole Supérieure Commerce Paris, Paris, France
Rebecca Ye Rongling, Stockholm University, Norrköping, Östergötlands
Län, Sweden
Dayong Yuan, Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences, Beijing, China
Competing visions and paradigms for lifelong learning co-exist at national as well
as international levels. The fact that one ‘official’ discourse may be dominant at any
one time does not mean that other ways of thinking about learning throughout the
life course have disappeared. They are alive and well in a range of critical traditions
and perspectives that retain their power to engage and persuade.
In this series, contributors critically analyse issues in lifelong learning that have
important implications for policy and practice in different parts of the world.
Evidence, ideas and the polity can mobilise political thinking in new directions, as
policy makers search for the new ‘big idea’. In turbulent times, ideas for better
connecting system worlds and life worlds in the pursuit of broader and more just
forms of meritrocracy can focus compellingly on learning as a lifelong process
which links, rather than separates, the older and younger generations and incorporates
the realities of working lives.
The series aims to engage scholars, practitioners, policy-makers and professionals
with contemporary research and practice, and to provoke fresh thinking and
innovation in lifelong learning. Each volume is firmly based on high quality
scholarship and a keen awareness of both emergent and enduring issues in practice
and policy. We welcome work from a range of disciplines and, in particular, inter-
and multi-disciplinary research which approaches contemporary and emerging
global and local challenges in innovative ways. Through advocacy of broad, diverse
and inclusive approaches to learning throughout the life course, the series aspires to
be a leading resource for researchers and practitioners who seek to rethink lifelong
learning to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Please submit your proposal for this Series to the Series Editor: karen.evans@
ucl.ac.uk or the Publishing Editor: [email protected].
Melanie Munroe • Michel Ferrari
Editors
Post-Traumatic Growth
to Psychological Well-Being
Coping Wisely with Adversity
Editors
Melanie Munroe Michel Ferrari
Department of Applied Psychology and Department of Applied Psychology and
Human Development at the Ontario Institute Human Development at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education for Studies in Education
University of Toronto University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada Toronto, ON, Canada
ISSN 1871-322X ISSN 2730-5325 (electronic)
Lifelong Learning Book Series
ISBN 978-3-031-15289-4 ISBN 978-3-031-15290-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15290-0
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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Series Editor Foreword
The Lifelong Learning Book Series was launched in 2004, and by 2022, it has
reached 30 volumes on topics of international significance. Lifelong learning
debates are refreshed and renewed when scholars bring forward fresh perspectives
and critical analyses of emergent and enduring issues that have important implica-
tions for policy and practice development in societies around the globe.
This landmark 30th volume, edited by Melanie Munroe and Michel Ferrari, aims
to deepen understanding of the ways in which people develop through and after
significant trauma. Its focus, on development of a framework that can better help
individuals who experience significant stressors in their life to cope well and develop
wisdom, is timely and internationally more important than ever, important at a time
of disruptive societal changes that can turn lives ‘upside down’ and disconnect peo-
ple from contexts and people they love and trust.
This volume makes a distinct contribution to the Series in bringing together
researchers and therapists with direct experience with trauma survivors to
exchange and elaborate ideas about how wisdom develops. The editors have
expertly curated a collection that addresses a core lifelong learning theme, of how
people can build narratives about themselves and the world that allows people to
experience life in a deeper, fuller way. The book shows how, and under what con-
ditions, the critical variable of reflection on their experiences of trauma can lead
to the development of self-transcendent wisdom. At the same time, the collection
contributes to the Series’ mission of increasing the circuitry of lifelong learning
by connecting scholars and practitioners with new perspectives and inter-disci-
plinary insights.
v
vi Series Editor Foreword
In creating a framework that can better help individuals who experience signifi-
cant stressors in their life to cope well and develop wisdom, the volume offers not
only a stimulating read but also a unique set of intellectual tools that are both theo-
retically robust and practically useful.
Lifelong Learning Series Editors Karen Evans
UCL Institute of Education
London, UK
August 2022
Foreword
Understanding the antecedents and development of wisdom has been a lifelong pas-
sion for me. As an undergraduate, I had the good fortune to attend Clark University,
which was one of the few programs in psychology at the time that was not behav-
ioristic but instead emphasized German theories of development across the lifespan
(e.g., Werner, 1957). I was very much influenced by a book by Robert Graves
(1960), called Watch the North Wind Rise, in which he argued that adversity was
absolutely necessary for positive development for both people and societies. What I
really wanted to do was to understand why and how exceptional adults became
exceptional, and I suspected that adversity had something to do with it – certainly
not an original thought, but one that occurred more in the domain of religion and
philosophy than in psychology, as several of the authors in the current volume
have noted.
In my first year graduate school in adult development at UC San Francisco (over
40 years ago!), I read everything I could about exceptional development by authors
such as Vaillant, Levinson, White, Jung, Gough, and, of course, Erikson’s psycho-
biographies of Gandhi and Luther. All of these authors described exceptional adult
development, but used different terms, depending upon the assumptions of their
academic discipline. None provided a way of defining and measuring exceptional
development. I did some coding of life histories for Marjorie Fisk Lowenthal, who
was looking at commitment, and it occurred to me that the individuals I thought
were exceptional (i.e., wisest) in the sample were often very modest and probably
wouldn’t describe themselves as wise. So I was at a loss as to how to measure wis-
dom, but came across an old talk by Bernice Neugarten and Bill Henry that said
that, if you want to know what a person’s personality was really like, look at it under
stress. Aha, I thought, perhaps wisdom is an outcome of how individuals cope with
stress! So I went to study coping with Richard Lazarus, and discovered that we
didn’t know much about how to measure coping, either, so I ended up focusing
on that.
As a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine, I worked with Dan Stokols to develop a
new theoretical model on stress. Literature was starting to emerge on the long-term
vii
viii Foreword
adverse effects of childhood stress, but neither Dan nor I, who had both lost a parent
as children, thought that was the whole story – that childhood stress did not neces-
sarily result in a lifelong calamity, and that positive things could also arise from
experiencing stress. We reviewed everything we could find that mentioned positive
outcomes of stress (which were largely dismissed by psychiatrists as denial), and
developed a deviation amplification model of stress – that stress could result in
either positive or negative outcomes, depending on contextual and personal charac-
teristics (Aldwin & Stokols, 1988).
Given how hard we all had to work at the time to convince the biomedical com-
munity that psychosocial stress had adverse health effects, to turn around and say
that it could have positive effects was, to say the least, controversial, and our pre-
liminary work on the positive outcomes of combat exposure provoked a great deal
of contention (Aldwin et al., 1994). Luckily, other researchers were also starting to
work on this, such as Affleck et al. (1987), Calhoun and Tedeschi (1990), Folkman
and Moskowitz (2000), and Yalom and Lieberman (1981).
At that time, it was even more heretical to study such “squishy” subjects as wis-
dom. Thus, I was very grateful that luminaries in the field, such as Clayton and
Birren (1980), Holiday and Chandler (1986), Sternberg (1990), Alexander and
Langer (1990), and Baltes and Staudinger (1993), among others, were able to use
their stature to introduce the scientific study of this extremely important topic.
About this time, my husband, Michael (“Rick”) Levenson was working on a
model of exceptional adult development he called the “liberative” model (Levenson
& Crumpler, 1996; Levenson et al., 2001). A graduate student of ours, Tish Jennings,
pointed out that my work on stress-related growth (SRG) and Rick’s on exceptional
development could (and should) be combined into a theory of wisdom. Thus, we
wrote a piece on stress as a context for development in adulthood (Aldwin &
Levenson, 2004). This was extended into our foray into the self-transcendence
model of wisdom (Levenson et al., 2005; Aldwin et al., 2019). Tish’s dissertation
testing our model showed that it wasn’t exposure to combat per se that led to wis-
dom in later life, but rather how one appraised and coped with it (Jennings
et al., 2006).
Thus, I was absolutely delighted to learn that Melanie Munroe and Michel Ferrari
were putting together a book, entitled Post-traumatic Growth to Psychological Well-
Being: Coping Wisely with Adversity. In many ways, this book has shown how far
we have grown in the field in the acceptance of adult development, especially in the
form of wisdom, and the book addresses many important issues.
Some of the chapters point out the relevance of constructs currently popular in
positive psychology for the study of wisdom, especially aspects of self-compas-
sion, including self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness (Bluth et al.,
this volume). The importance of mindfulness as the basis for not only the reflec-
tion necessary for wisdom development but also for the importance of non-attach-
ment cannot be overemphasized (Levenson & Aldwin, 2013). Awe and humility
may be especially important in the development of wisdom (Vanhooren, this vol-
ume), as is meaning making. As Mansfield (this volume) argued, “If adversity is a
fulcrum, narrative meaning-making is a lever applied to the fulcrum that can
Foreword ix
create developmental force toward wisdom.” Webster (this volume), in his
H.E.R.O.E. model of wisdom, reminds us of the importance of humor and open-
ness to experience. I am reminded of that delightful video showing the Dalai
Lama and Archbishop Despond Tutu joking and laughing like school boys (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0hR5cpHLg).
Many chapters address some very fundamental issues in the field of wisdom
research. Blevins and Tedeschi (this volume) draw firm parallels between post-
traumatic growth (PTG) and wisdom in that both entail “the ability to think dialecti-
cally, appreciate paradox, and synthesize cognitive and emotional aspects of
experience.” However, these authors point out that PTG is often perceived as the
process of change as well as the outcome, while wisdom is thought of more as a
capability. One could also think of wisdom as an outcome of the PTG process
(Aldwin & Levenson, 2004). A related construct, resilience, has also been thought
of as a trait or precursor, an outcome, and a process at various points in its theoreti-
cal development (Luthar, 2006). Indeed, several of the chapters in this book also
seem to be struggling with whether wisdom is a capability, process (wise coping),
or an outcome. Masten’s (2016) brilliant synthesis of this conundrum was to argue
for a developmental systems approach to resilience, which is echoed in Mansfield’s
call for a similar approach to the development of wisdom. Thus, looked at over time,
wisdom may be a capability, a process, and an outcome. However, just as Erikson
(1950) warned that his developmental “stages,” including ego integrity, should not
be considered as achievements, but rather as issues that are revisited time and time
again over the lifespan, so too is wisdom also not necessarily an achievement but
rather a dynamic process which arises in many spheres at different points in time.
Further, PTG is strongly correlated with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
(e.g., Park et al., 2009), and wisdom may also be correlated with measures of psy-
chosocial distress. Lewis’ chapter reminds us that wisdom may develop even from
injurious processes. As Grossmann (2017) and Zachry et al. (2018) noted, wisdom
may be contextual and is certainly not static.
Zachry and Jayawickreme (this volume) do the fields of post-traumatic growth,
resilience, and wisdom a great service in counteracting arguments against the verac-
ity of self-report and narrative accounts, even if they are unrelated or only modestly
related to quantitative assessments. This “epistemological injustice” is evident to
anyone who has spent time interviewing individuals about extremely difficult life
periods. While it is undoubtedly true that some denial can be seen, this is most likely
to be the case in the early stages, and we have argued that growth, resilience, and
wisdom take time to develop – sometimes decades (Igarashi et al., 2018), and along
different developmental pathways and timelines (Bonnano et al., 2004).
I was very pleased to see the development progression in Gluck’s (this volume)
MORE model. As she noted, the M in the model used to stand for mastery, but, as
some have observed, individuals who are high in mastery often adapt well and thus
do not have the assumption shattering which often form the context for development
of wisdom (Igarashi et al., 2018). Thus, the M now stands for managing uncertainty
and uncontrollability, which I think is a very nice theoretical development, tying
back more closely to Baltes and Staudinger’s (2000) classic model of wisdom. This
