Most of us have heard the old adage that goes, “into each life some rain must fall.” Well, the saying really is true. Everyone goes through periods of adversity in their lives, experiencing trauma, or living through times of high stress. The range of these experiences varies from automobile accidents, to the loss of jobs, to severe personal illness or illness in our family, to the deaths of loved ones, to the extreme shock of incidents like nine-eleven in 2001 or the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. We can expect traumatic events to occur in the course of our life and those of people we love. Remarkably, though, most of us never develop intense stress symptoms because of these experiences.
