The Downside Risk of Failing to Transcend Extraordinarily Negative Experiences: A Narrative Analysis

American service members who survived a trauma like a prisoner of war (POW) experience and successfully rebounded afterwards present outcomes of resilience that merit further exploration. Difficulties in defining or measuring human resilience in the clinical setting have been acknowledged for some time, with a call for greater openness to lessons from other disciplines. Transcendence as an identity-enhancing experiential process of meaning-making may offer insights that complement medical and psychological care. If a person fails to make meaning of an extraordinarily negative event, he may experience anti-transcendence, or an anti-process that results in by-products that are antonymous to transcendence, like destabilization of one's sense of self or the fracturing or disintegration of connections within and beyond the self. Such outcomes may trigger a crisis of identity.

Eight memoirs of resilient American POW survivors from two time periods and the text were digitized and converted using optical character recognition software (Foxit PhantomPDF) to enable scanning for repetitious word patterns and themed searches. As passages were selected, sorted, and tagged, I designed a database in Microsoft Access to enter and query the fragments. Everyday baselines were established for each memoirist, and instances of transcendence and anti-transcendence were analyzed.

While evidence was found across all memoirists for transcendence of personally relevant, extraordinarily positive and negative events, instances of failure to transcend extraordinarily negative events were found in only three of the narratives. Given that the sample consisted of resilient service members who appeared not only to rebound but also to thrive after their experience, this scarcity of failure to transcend personally relevant, extraordinarily negative events is not surprising. Types of personally relevant, extraordinarily negative events discussed included multiple instances of forced desecration of local graves to make way for construction projects by captors and breaking points after torture.

Transcendence as an experiential meaning-making process may utilize existential resources that enable one to make sense of personally relevant, extraordinarily positive, and negative events. If identity-relevant experiences are more powerful predictors of distress and well-being than those not relevant to one's sense of identity, then there should be greater focus on those kinds of experiences when working with service members struggling to bounce back from trauma. There are many contexts in which this can be done. Military chaplains, for example, are potentially very well suited to help service members reconnect with existential resources to help them make meaning of a traumatic event. Military psychologists can make space in their conversations discuss identity-relevant experiences. Examining written narrative can also help narrow the focus on identity-relevant experiences, both positive and negative. Written narrative about traumatic experiences as a form of self-narration carries with it an interpretive aspect that may help the person make meaning of it in way that he or she could not in a clinical setting. Although assessment of the potential therapeutic effect of written narrative was beyond the scope of the study, this might be one area to investigate.