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This book explores 'why some people experience post-traumatic growth leading to greater wisdom and others do not' and suggests that a critical variable is how one copes with that trauma: individuals who actively reflect on their experiences of trauma should develop higher levels of self-transcendent wisdom. This same dynamic has been shown both in research studies of post-traumatic growth and by therapists working with people who have experienced trauma, but these two bodies of work have rarely been brought into direct conversation with each other. In this volume, wisdom researchers and therapists with direct experience with trauma survivors comment on each other's ideas about how coping with adversity can lead to wisdom, and how their proposed models of developing wisdom incorporate the act of coping with a stressful or traumatic event. Based on a synthetic integration of the recommendations in each chapter, the book concludes with the introduction of a new conceptual framework that can better help even individuals who experience significant stressors in their life to cope well and develop wisdom that will be both theoretically robust and practically useful.
About the author
MELANIE MUNROE recently received her PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto for her thesis on wisdom and adversity. Melanie's research focuses on how individuals cope with traumatic events and how to improve long-term outcomes and well-being in trauma survivors.
MICHEL FERRARI is a professor in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. He leads the Wisdom and Identity Lab, which explores understandings and teaching of personal wisdom in people of different ages (from children to the elderly) in different countries around the world. He has edited or co-edited 11 books, most recently Child and Adolescent Resilience within Medical Contexts (Springer, 2016, with Carrie DeMichelis). He is currently leading a study of how wise life management can help Muslim immigrants and refugees acculturate more easily life in to Toronto; in applied practice, he and his students are studying the experience of wisdom and personal identity in marginalized populations, such as those diagnosed with autism.
