A new study suggests children who endure trauma grow up to be adults with more empathy than others.
The effect is not universal, however. Only one kind of empathy was greatly effected.
The study may lead to further investigations into how people cope with trauma and lead to new ways to help victims bounce back.
A new study published in PLOS One suggests that enduring a traumatic event in childhood can lead to higher levels of empathy as an adult. While it doesn’t apply to every form of empathy, it does show how hardships can be overcome and even turned into growth opportunities.
How did they find that out?
The first experiment asked 387 of adults if they had experienced childhood trauma, such as the death of a close friend or family member, a divorce in the family, being subjected to violence, or sexual abuse. Subjects were then asked to fill out an EQ quiz to determine how empathetic they were. A second survey involved 442 participants and used the IRI test to measure empathy levels.
But while both studies found that the test subjects who had endured trauma showed traits of affective empathy, defined as “the ability respond to another person’s mental state with an appropriate emotion”, only the second test showed them scoring higher than those who didn’t suffer trauma on cognitive empathy, explained by the researchers as “the ability to understand another’s thoughts and feelings.”
The authors suggested that the differences between the two tests used might account for this, but they also proposed that cognitive empathy might not be used as frequently when recovering from a traumatic event as affective empathy.
What are the caveats to this study?
The study relies on self-reporting and retrospective accounts of trauma. It also relies on people judging how well they agree with questions like “I can tune into how someone else feels rapidly and intuitively.” Lead author David M. Greenberg said that this was an issue and that “Future studies need to use a longitudinal approach.”
The authors also warn that they have found a correlation between experiencing trauma and having greater levels of empathy. While they propose that correlation is caused by individuals who can develop these skills to avoid the more horrid effects of childhood trauma, they cannot rule out another mechanism being the cause.
So, does this mean what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger?
The negative side of these experiences shouldn’t be overlooked. People who go through these traumas as children are more likely to suffer a range of mental and emotional issues. These findings do suggest, however, that there is a way forward after a traumatic event or a severe loss. Dr. Greenberg summated the findings by saying “Readers of this study should take away that there are pathways to personal growth and resilience after experiencing a trauma.”
Christmas was heavily influenced by the Roman festival of Saturnalia.
The historical Jesus was not born on December 25th as many contemporary Christians believe.
Many staple Christmas traditions predated the festival and were tied into ancient pagan worship of the sun and related directly to the winter solstice.
In the depths of darkness covering the entire Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice has marked the shortest day of the year. It has always held significance in many culture’s religious festivities and holidays. A great deal of religions have made the celestial moment a holy day. It is darkest day of the whole year and for the ancients that meant a lot more to them then it does to us today. Sun worshippers and pagans have venerated this natural cycle for millenia.
Christmas as we know it today is a relatively new holiday. Many traditional elements we associate with Christmas pre-date Christianity by many centuries. There is also a lot of debate as to how much corporate and commercial interests have influenced this holiday as well.
Nowadays there’s a lot of hand waving when it comes to the Christian origins of Christmas. Inarguably, however, is the fact that the holiday’s modern iteration has been influenced by many pagan and secular festivities.
Early human celebrations and customs during the Winter Solstice
You’ll find plenty of pagan customs in Christmas that were adopted during the early Christian spread around the Roman Empire. We can look back to both the Romans and the Celts for a whole lot of our modern day Christmas traditions.
Celts began celebrating once the winter solstice arrived and rejoiced that the days were slowly getting longer, which meant that spring and the harvest was around the corner. This was most pronounced in their holiday of Yule. Early Christians, who, at that time, were seen by many as being members of an urban cult, worked hard to try to convert and ban old Pagan customs. But the rural pagan inhabitants of those lands were not convinced. Eventually the church realized they needed to co-opt some of these traditions.
Around this time, the Church came up with the idea that Jesus Christ, their savior, was born on December 25th. In the 4th century CE, Christianity had begun to draw heavily upon Roman festival of Saturnalia. Christian leaders succeeded in transposing these festivities on to their new made-up holiday.
The first mention of the Nativity feast and other early Christmas traditions appears in a Philocalian calendar dated around 354 CE. It was because of this pagan origin that celebrating Christmas was banned by the Puritans and made illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.
Saturnalia as the ultimate midwinter festival
Romans during the Decadence – Thomas Couture
Saturnalia was an ancient pagan holiday that honored the Roman God Saturn. It took place sometime between December 17th and 24th. It was a week of revelry, decadence and the inversion of social and moral roles.
The festivities consisted of drinking, eating lavishly and giving presents. The first-century poet Gaius Valerius Catullus said that Saturnalia was “the best of times.”
Wealthy Romans paid for the destitute and masters would swap clothes with their slaves. Lucian of Samosata speaking as the god Cronos, boasts about this exuberant time in his poem titled Saturnalia:
During my week the serious is barred: no business allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping… an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water – such are the functions over which I preside.
Saturnalia began as a rural farmer’s festival to mark the end of the planting season and midwinter.
Both psychologically and cosmically, this is was a unique time of the year for the ancients. The darkness must have affected them tremendously as without the modern advent of artificial lighting, lessened sunlight would have taken a toll on their mental health. During this time sun and stargazers would have also seen the change in the sun’s position.
All of this led to many religious spectacles and spiritual festivals. After all, they were now only relying on their summer food stores of grains and other crops to get them through the winter until they could, again, plant in the new season.
This led to a number of traditions we still take part in today.
Christmas traditions with other pagan origins
Even before historical record, Pagans would worship the trees in the forest and even bring them into their house and start to decorate them. Mistletoe for example was also a plant revered by the Celts and the Norse.
Celtic Druids believed that mistletoe would protect them against the elements of thunder and lightning. These druids would cut off a piece of mistletoe from the trees and then distribute that amongst their people for protection. It was also considered a symbol of peace and joy. Meeting under the mistletoe would call for enemies to put down their weapons and have a truce.
Ivy on the other hand was the great symbol of Bacchus, the Roman equivalent of Dionysus – God of wine, fertility and ritualistic madness. Ivy is a symbol of eternal life.
Traditional Christmas colors like green and red represent fertility. Burning Yule logs was representative of the returning sun as the days began to get longer again.
Christmas revelers, commercial shoppers and devout religious types can all thank the rich traditions and pagan history stretching back thousands of years this holiday season.
Monument Valley, Utah, last month.CreditRick Bowmer/Associated Press
My older brother Michael taught me many things.
He taught me to hold vinyl records gingerly at the edges, so I wouldn’t smudge them, and how to wipe them down with a soft cloth before returning them to their sleeves.
He taught me to love classical music, to conjure 1001 Arabian Nightstales while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” And he taught me about jazz and the wondrous Fats Waller.
He took me to the American Film Institute to see “Shane” and “An American in Paris,” sparking a lifelong love affair with vintage movies. And he gave me “Dracula,” written by the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, sparking a lifelong love affair with vampires.
Even before I could drink, he taught me never to buy wine that didn’t have the words “Appellation Contrôlée” on the label.
Michael, 17 years older, taught me how to tie my shoes, scrub under my fingernails, parallel park, brew loose tea, play bridge and Scrabble, and how to differentiate between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” He taught me that Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco and Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans were the epitome of cool.
He could not teach me not to be terrified of roller coasters. But in everything else, I was an eager student.
We were always very close. But when George W. Bush was president, a chill entered the relationship. At family holiday dinners, Michael, a conservative like most of my family, would mock me about my critical columns on the Iraq invasion.
“If there was a hurricane, you’d blame it on W.,” he’d say.
When Michael died after a bout with pneumonia in 2007, I sat on my couch for days and grappled with how my job had hurt our relationship. I never wanted to go through that again.
And then Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.
My brother Kevin had been his basketball coach at Georgetown Prep in suburban Maryland. They stayed friends for the next 35 years, and he sometimes referred to Kavanaugh as “half a rung below my own sons.” Kevin gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and The Times, describing how the teenage Kavanaugh willed himself to be a better shooting guard and showed leadership on the basketball court.
Months before, I had planned a trip for Kevin’s birthday to Monument Valley, the dramatic landscape on the Utah-Arizona border where John Ford made his iconic westerns with John Wayne. Kevin is a huge film buff; at the first sign of an often imaginary sore throat, my mother would pull him out of first grade and take him to the movies.
We were due to fly out there the first weekend in October. Then, just like Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford was dragged into the spotlight after telling her story to Democrats. Her scalding accusations against a man about to ascend to the Supreme Court riveted a rived nation.
The Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep, where Kevin had coached for 25 years and where his three sons had gone to school and where Neil Gorsuch also went, morphed from being heralded as a Supreme Court feeder school to being depicted, as Kevin disgustedly put it, as “a drunken roadhouse overflowing with testosterone.”
Friends of Kavanaugh say they approached Blessed Sacrament, the Chevy Chase church where my sister sometimes sits behind the Kavanaughs at the 5:30 p.m. Mass, to see if they could offer a “show of support” Mass for the beleaguered judge. The Mass didn’t happen; perhaps the church considered it too political.
Kevin was distraught. He went on local TV to defend Kavanaugh, saying, “I used to kid Brett that he was 30 when he was 16.”
My sister told me that if I sided with Blasey, Kevin would cancel our trip west. I disagreed with Democrats who said that women should automatically be believed. Think about Rolling Stone and the “Jackie” story it entirely retracted because it was based on a made-up account of gang rape and some of the later
Kavanaugh accusers whose stories fell apart. But women have an absolute right not to be disbelieved without further examination.
