Growing Through Adversity Workshop
Date: 12 August 2023
Time: 9am-5pm
Location: MST (5 Burwood Hwy, Wantirna)
Research shows that trauma survivors often identify positive outcomes from their trauma experience.
These include a new appreciation for life, a newfound sense of personal strength, and a new focus on helping others. Researchers have identified this as Posttraumatic Growth (PTG). The most significant contribution of PTG research is in creating a scientifically recognised link between trauma experience and religious, spiritual, and existential concerns.
Adversities can induce trauma. Trauma shatters our life assumptions, replaces our orientation with disorientation, ease with disease, and coherence with incoherence. But human beings cannot live continuously in a state of confusion, uncertainty and not knowing. To find some form of meaning to life’s experiences is a compelling human need. We search for meaning even in the darkest and most depressing moments of our life.
People subjected to traumatic experiences, find coherence by employing certain Explanatory Strategies. These interpretations and rationalisations based on the individual’s or community’s life assumptions provide explanations of why they suffered. However, not all explanatory strategies provide meaning or coherence. Shattered assumptions can create further confusion and uncertainty.
We learn and grow through adversities by re-examining our life assumptions and explanatory strategies which form the very foundation on which we have built our lives. From a biblical perspective we may identify three different kinds of life assumptions or orientations. These are consequential orientation, naturalistic orientation, and grace orientation. The explanatory strategies we adopt and the growth we experience during and after a trauma experience are related to our pre-adversity orientation.
We learn and grow through adversities by re-examining our life assumptions and explanatory strategies which form the very foundation on which we have built our lives. From a biblical perspective we may identify three different kinds of life assumptions or orientations. These are consequential orientation, naturalistic orientation, and grace orientation. The explanatory strategies we adopt and the growth we experience during and after a trauma experience are related to our pre-adversity orientation.
This workshop is aimed at non-professional caregivers and explores the link of current scientific literature on Trauma and Posttraumatic Growth with Biblical narratives and teachings on the same. People of faith can learn much from these comparative studies in both understanding and applying the lessons gleaned from the Bible and scientific research.
During this workshop you will:
Learn how adversities challenge us to re-examine our life assumptions and what happens when we are unable to find meaning for our experience in life. How shattered assumptions lead to disorientation and incoherence.
Examine the trauma experiences of Job to learn how the life assumptions of caregiving friends can create disorientation in times of adversities.
Learn that the way we understand the character of God is significant to the way we interpret and respond to adversities in life.
Grow in your pastoral care awareness and skills so that you can effectively assist people in their trauma healing journey by learning and growing through adversities.
Gain insight into various growth factors and growth indicators so that you can facilitate growth when caring for people in times of their trauma induced distress and disorientation.
Presenter: Dr Sunny Philip
Dr Sunny Philip is a key facilitator at CTP. He is trained in Leadership, Conflict Management, Relationship Counselling, Grief Counselling, and Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience. For his doctoral thesis, Sunny researched the topic of Burnout in Medical Doctors. Sunny currently serves as Director of Transform4Life, a non-profit organisation aimed at enabling the local church to make Christ Known by caring for those in their spheres of influence.
