In the middle of the night, 10th May 2002, I woke up, lay in my bed for a moment or two. Then I heard the soft padding of feet. Perhaps that sound had woken me up. A subtle sound that seemed to come from the kitchen. Could that be my three-year-old daughter’s little feet as she padded about the house? But what was she doing up? Getting a midnight snack? No.
Then a spoon (or was it a knife?) clattered to the floor. A cat, perhaps knocking cutlery to the ground? But, I didn’t have a cat. I got out of bed with only mild curiosity; no dread, no fear. Bad things don’t happen to me.
I walked down the short, dark hallway and was nearly as far as the kitchen when I met the dark outline of a tall, wiry frame. A man with a curly head of hair, his face obscured.
It wasn’t my daughter. It wasn’t a cat.
There was the slim thread of hope that it might be my partner Paul (who at the time didn’t live with me), but the shape was all wrong.
He was a man I didn’t know.
And there, at that moment, the myths I didn’t know I treasured; that bad things don’t happen to good people, that life is ordered, reasonable and fair, collapsed in on themselves.
When I sat in the counsellor’s clinic around three weeks after the assault, I found myself saying to her, “I think losing my faith in humanity is worse than the assault.”
Capital “T” trauma is a very varied thing. One person’s trauma can be another person’s minor setback. It’s not helpful for us to get tangled up in the “trauma olympics” of whose suffering is worse. Post-traumatic growth researcher and advocate Richard Tedeschi says in this paper that “the challenge to [a] core belief system ... can be a new way to define trauma, rather than making reference to certain types of events.”
For me, prior to 10th May 2002, before this home invasion catastrophe was visited upon my head, my life had been ordered, reasonable and calm on the whole. I wrestled with the loss of my belief that life is fair. I wasted time wondering what I may have done in a previous life to deserve this.
Maya Shankar, author of The Other Side of Change has this to say in the PDF accompanying her audiobook; “you may be able to endure a negative change far better than you think at the outset, and that’s because you’re underestimating your own ability to evolve as a result of that change. The relevant question to ask yourself isn’t, How will I navigate this change? But rather, How will I, with potentially new capabilities, values, and perspectives, navigate this change?
Or as Tedeschi says in this 2025 article, “When that [belief system] infrastructure is shattered through trauma, it needs to be rebuilt, and it is best rebuilt to accommodate future disasters.”
What I pieced together over the months and years after 10th May 2002, is that shit happens. To anyone. And that when that shit happens, I will probably be OK, over time. And that to me is Post-traumatic Growth.
