"Something good comes from everything," said Bernstein, whose cancers have been manageable. "You just have to know where to look or how to look."
Bernstein is an example of what psychologists call posttraumatic growth (PTG), the lesser-known sibling of post-traumatic stress disorder.
While the more dramatic PTSD has gotten far more publicity, a cadre of researchers has been studying the positive side of trauma and grief: that most people bounce back to baseline, and some emerge from disaster stronger and better, at least in some ways.
Psychologists are squabbling about how to measure growth and foster it and whether that is a good thing.
In research prompted by talks at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, the Army is looking for growth in soldiers who have been to battle. The National Cancer Institute's Office of Cancer Survivorship has made studying posttraumatic growth a priority. Researchers at a recent meeting in Philadelphia of the International Positive Psychology Association reported growth in grandparents of disabled children and in new mothers.
Richard Tedeschi, who with research partner Lawrence Calhoun coined the term in 1995, concedes that the idea that pain can beget strength is hardly revelatory. Still, he said, growth, benefit-finding, wisdom, transformation, whatever you call it, is a "core aspect of human experience" worthy of study.
"This is ancient," said Tedeschi, who, like Calhoun, teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "This is what all religion is based on: how you deal with suffering. . . . It's just that psychology for one reason or another didn't want to deal with it and found it suspect."
