Healers on the Fault Lines: Trauma as a Risky Opportunity for Growth, Mental Flexibility and the Penchant for Healing others

What eyes the future view aright

Unless by tears anointed?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning “To Bettine”

George Anis Awad, MD , one of the major theorists of human rights in Canadian psychoanalysis liked to humor people who inquired about his ethnic origin by mentioning being born to a Palestinian-Christian family in Acre, escaping with his family to Lebanon at the age of 6, following the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 (“AI-Nakbeh”), and now living in an “exile of an exile” in Canada, practicing the Jewish profession of psychoanalysis (e.g. Awad 2003). This paper is an attempt to consider current theories and research regarding the growth potential underlying traumatic experience, and its association with mentalization, empathy and altruistic inclinations, as inextricably tied to post-traumatic symptoms. Far from being a posthumous analysis of Dr Awad himself, this paper nonetheless draws inspiration from his published and unpublished conceptualization of individual and national trauma as a source for both mental symptoms and strengths.

Ever since Freud's emphasis on the pivotal role that trauma plays in the etiology of mental disorders (Freud, , , p. 94; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967, pp. 465, 469), the negative psychological sequelae of trauma were given center stage in psychopathology. Modern psychological science has repeatedly established the links between childhood trauma and a host of mental disorders including mood and anxiety disorders (e.g. Kendler et al., 1999; Heim & Nemeroff, 2001; Gilmer & McKinney, 2003), dissociative disorders (e.g. van der Kolk, 1994; Kihlstrom, 2005), aggressive behavior, including homicide (e.g. Widom & Maxfield, 2001) and drug abuse (e.g. Najavits et al., 1997; Gordon, 2002) — to name but a few.

Early psychoanalytic focus on trauma and psychopathology continued to loom large over modern psychopathology theories for the past 100 years. In