There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who have been through a life-changing traumatic experience, and those who will go through one in the future. If you are a living, human being, you will experience sickness, deaths of loved ones, accidents, and all manner of ups and downs someday.

Mark Epstein calls this The Trauma of Everyday Life.

Ask the happiest, most well-adjusted, most successful or most alive person you know—that friend or mentor who seems to have it all together, who seems to sail through life.

Ask them if they’ve ever had a traumatic experience.

You might be surprised. You’ll hear stories of being orphaned, diseases, divorces, bankruptcies, car accidents and natural disasters. You might even hear stories far beyond the “everyday” traumas we all experience: stories of child abuse, violence, war and genocide.

Of course, if you ask the most dysfunctional, disgruntled, misanthropic person you know about their experience of trauma earlier in life, they’ll have similar stories.

So what makes the difference? How can you experience post-traumatic breakthroughs instead of hardening your heart, spirit and life around your traumas?

Some say the key is to experiencing post-traumatic growth is to tell a new story about your trauma. I agree that this is the first step of the process, but I believe it’s only the first step.

I’ve learned that post-traumatic breakthroughs happen when we allow the experience to make us into something new, something different than we were before. Something much less perfect, much more real, more nuanced, stronger and more sensitive. Something which has new capabilities and beauty, less fear and frivolity.

There is tons of precedent for this trauma-sparked transformation in art and in science:

• There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pieces of pottery are rejoined with gold, creating in pieces more cherished than the originals ever were.
• There are self-healed quartz crystals. After being damaged in the ground, these gems grow hundreds of new crystals over the damaged area, creating wild new inner landscapes, complexity and brilliance.
• Then there’s David Bowie, whose magically wonky eyes were not actually different in color. His pal George Underwood punched him in the eye when they were teens. From that day forward, Bowie’s right pupil was paralyzed in the open condition, making it look like one eye was blue, and the other black. Early on, Bowie later recounted, he felt embarrassed at the imperfection. But later in life, he thanked his childhood friend and lifelong collaborator for the injury and the career-enhancing “mystique” his imperfect, asymmetrical look created.

I’ve found three common threads in basically every post-traumatic breakthrough story I’ve heard (or lived). For good measure, I’ll phrase them in terms of what you must do if you want to engineer your own post-traumatic breakthrough.

1. Reframe the situation, and tell a new story. I recently read a blog post where the writer took great issue with the sentiment that things happen for a reason. He railed at this concept, on grounds that it makes the victims of life’s terrible, traumatic events feel guilty or somehow at fault when they can’t find that meaning.

And he’s right: really bad things happen to good people all the time. It’s not their fault if they can’t find any meaning to make out of it. But there’s nothing wrong with seeking meaning or perspective out of bad things that happen in your life. Why limit your life to just having bad things happen and feeling terrible about it, if you are open to finding inner development or new perspectives instead?

Martha Beck has an exercise where she asks readers to think of their most cherished experiences or favorite things in life, and then reflect back on how they came to have them – including at least one “bad” thing that happened along the journey.

This “reframing” is a skill we can cultivate and use anytime we want, after any trauma, small scale or large.

Two of my dear friends lost their parents – one her mother, the other her father – in very traumatic early-life experiences. They are two of the best wives and mothers I know, and I know their families agree with that.

Coincidental? Maybe. But I know that my friends cherish their children and relish the moments of their lives with a lighthearted, reverent gusto I’ve rarely seen, even among other great parents I know. They live their lives along a narrative of joy, delight and engagement with their children. This, in the wake of circumstances that could easily and justifiably have cemented around mourning and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that every trauma is just as easy to recover from as every other trauma, or that if someone doesn’t have a breakthrough that’s their fault or they’re doing it wrong. Everyone has a path and a process, and sometimes it’s not pretty – sometimes it never gets pretty. But if you are open to – or committed to – finding or creating a post-traumatic breakthrough, you must search for new meaning in the old trauma story.

2. Be transformed. I watched a film recently in which someone who had witnessed a friend’s murder expressed what many of us feel after even much “lesser” traumas, wondering aloud if she would ever be the same person she was before.

The answer is no. Experiencing the end of the world as you know it equals experiencing the end of the you you once were.

When it comes to finding or creating post-traumatic breakthroughs, the single most important element of the new story you seek to live out is the character you cast for yourself in in that story. Specifically: will your role be defined as the person to whom this terrible thing happened? e.g.,: Orphan. Sick. Loser of jobs. Loser – period. Bankrupt. Divorced.

Or, in this new story, will the traumatic experience be a factual circumstance, a contextual element, that is helpful in understanding the character you have become, will become, are becoming, are now?

e.g.,: Mom of the Year, influenced by having lost her mother early on. Visionary leader of your own company or life, after recovering from years of victimization, losing jobs or co-dependency. Lover of life and of people, powered by compassion, after deep healing from a childhood of disconnection and abuse. Responsible money manager, lessons learned from the recession and subsequent fallout.

To get to your post-traumatic breakthrough, you must pick a path: who do you want to be?

3. Practice your new identity. This is not magical thinking. Okay, maybe a little bit – there is some willful magic in deciding you will not be defined by something that could very well have been the end of you, literally or otherwise. After the magic, though, comes the work. Whether the trauma you’re healing from is a life disaster you had a hand in creating, or some heinous act of humanity, going from trauma to breakthrough requires work.

The power of surrendering to the transformational power of trauma, and naming your new character in the new, breakthrough story of your life, is that implicit in this story is clear guidance and direction as to what you need to do. Character and story necessarily imply context, landscape, ability. What skills and capabilities will you need to become this character? What resources and relationships will you need?

That work could be internal: therapy, meditation, belief rehabilitation, and the like. It could be developing interpersonal skills to manage your grief, overcome your struggles with confidence or survive broken family dynamics. It could be external: a change of place, learning how to do something new professionally, creating powerful, healthy relationships with mentors or supportive friends.

The real power of claiming a new character in your new, post-traumatic story is that it points you to the who/what/where/why of your breakthrough, so that you can begin to create the capabilities and context for it to come to life.

Closing Caveats.

My final caveat is that you might find this identity shift to be very hard, or very scary. This is normal – it takes courage to release elements of the way you’ve always seen or described yourself, even though they may be dysfunctional or limiting. When you pick an identity different from what you’re currently living into, you will be forced to take some behaviors and even conversations that you have engaged with for decades off the table.

No matter how justified your grievance may be, if you keep telling that old story, you’ll block your breakthrough.

In no way does it diminish or minimize the traumas of your life to seek meaning. Neither does it disrespect what you’ve been through to recast your traumas as circumstances—context that adds layers of beauty, nuance, sadness and strength to your fully glorious, fully powerful being.

This is true whether your personal trauma is a lifetime of criticism from the people you love, or a wartime experience of death and destruction.

One of our most powerful capabilities as humans is that we can search the darkest nooks and crannies somehow extract something good, something useful, something meaningful or beautiful. Practice conducting this search in the wake of your own traumas, and what you’ll find one day is a new version of your beautifully broken self.