In our July/August 2013 issue, writer Mark Obbie explored the possibility that traumatic experiences—a death in the family, a health scare, even a local tragedy—result not in a downward spiral of anxiety, but in a rebirth (“The Upside of Trauma”). Some trauma survivors, Obbie wrote, “engage in a struggle for psychological survival that reroutes the direction of their lives in a way they ultimately acknowledge is for the better.” A book released this June, Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success, written by psychologist David B. Feldman and journalist Lee Daniel Kravetz, reaffirms the scholarly consensus that trauma is not always for the worst.
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