Hurricanes, house fires, cancer, white-water rafting accidents, plane crashes, vicious attacks in dark archways. Nobody asks for any of it. But to their surprise, many people find that enduring such an ordeal ultimately changes them for the better. Their opinion might be something like this: “I wish it hadn’t happened, but I’m a better person for it.”We love to hear the stories of people who have been transformed by their tribulations, perhaps because they testify（1）a psychological truth, one that sometimes gets lost amid endless reports of disaster; there is a built—in human capacity to flourish under the most difficult circumstances. Positive reactions to profoundly disturbing experiences are not limited to the toughest or the bravest. In fact, roughly half of the people who struggle with adversity say that their lives have in some ways improved.In a dark room in Queens, New York, 31-year-old fashion designer Tracy Cyr believed she was dying. A few months before, she had stopped taking the powerful immune-suppressing drugs that kept her arthritis （2） check. She never anticipated what would happen: a withdrawal reaction that eventually left her in total body agony and neurological meltdown. The slightest movement-trying to swallow, for example- was excruciating. Even the pressure of her check on the pillow was almost unbearable.Cyr is no wimp-diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at the age of two, she’d endured the symptoms and the treatments (drugs, surgery) her whole life. But this time, she was way past her limits, and nothing her doctors did seemed to help. Either the disease was going to kill her or, pretty soon, she’d have to kill herself.As her sleepless nights wore on, though, her suicidal thoughts began to be interrupted by new feelings of gratitude. She was still in agony, but a new consciousness grew stronger each night: an awesome sense of liberation, combined with an all-encompassing feeling of sympathy and compassion. “I felt stripped（3）everything I’d ever identified myself with,” she said six months later. “Everything I thought I’d known or believed in was useless-time, money, self-image, perception that was so forcing.”Within a few months, she began to be able to move more freely, thanks to a cocktail of steroids and other drugs. But as her physical strength came back, she did not return to her old way of being as a feisty, demanding “sex-in-the-City, three-inch-stilettos-and-fishnets” girl. Now quieter and more tolerant, she makes a point of being submissive in a tum-the-other cheek kind of way. Cyr still takes a pharmacopoeia of drugs every day, but she says there’s no question that her life is better now. “I felt I had been shown the secret of life and why we’re here, to be happy and to nurture other life. It’s that simple.”Her mind-blowing experience came as a total surprise. But that feeling of transformation is in some ways typical, says Rich Tedeschi, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who coined the term “post-traumatic growth”，His studies of people who have endured extreme events like combat, violent crime or sudden serious illness show that most feel dazed and anxious in the immediate aftermath. They are preoccupied with the idea that their lives have been shattered. A few people are haunted long afterward by memory problems, sleep trouble and similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. But Tedeschi and others have found that for many people—perhaps even the majority life ultimately becomes richer and more gratifying.Something similar happens to many people who experience a terrifying physical threat. In that moment, our sense of invulnerability is pierced, and the self-protective mental armor that normally stands between us and our perceptions of the world is tom away. Our everyday life scripts---our habits, self-perceptions and assumptions-go out the window, and we’re left with a raw experience of the world.Still, actually implementing these changes, as well as fully coming to terms（4）the new reality, usually takes conscious effort. B