Misogi Is Voluntary Trauma. Here's Why That's Good.

The psychology of doing hard things.

Trauma can make us better.

I know how this sounds. Trauma, after all, is traditionally seen as entirely negative. But stay with me.

Research shows that intense experiences—traumatic ones included—rewrite our identity, mindset, and how we navigate life. Sometimes the rewrite is harmful. Sometimes we recover. But sometimes we grow.

That idea can help us understand the value of doing hard things—why they break us down so they can build us back better.

I started thinking about this last week, after talking to two very different people: a trauma psychiatrist, and Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame.

The psychiatrist told me that his work involves getting people who’ve been suffering from PTSD to reframe the events in a different light. The goal is to reshape their story around the traumatic event—to help them see that the event doesn’t have to be the whole story of who they are.

The next day, I went on The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe. He asked me about Misogi and why it matters.

Misogi, for those who are new here, is an epic challenge we take on once a year to grow. The rules are simple:

1. Make it really hard. We define this as a 50/50 chance of success.

2. Don’t die. Pretty self-explanatory. Be safe.

As I drove back to Las Vegas, I noticed a connection between the two conversations.

The trauma psychiatrist was talking about how reframing events can lead to new stories about ourselves. Mike was asking about why voluntarily doing hard things can teach us something important about ourselves.

It occurred to me that Misogi—and the other hard things we choose to take on in life—is almost a form of “chosen trauma,” or “positive trauma.” It’s an experience so intense that it opens up new ways of seeing ourselves, uncovering powers and potential we didn’t know were there.

This post is me thinking through that idea. I hope you’ll weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments.

Today’s post covers:

• How psychology traditionally sees trauma, and what that misses.

• A new way to think of trauma and the three possible outcomes of trauma (one of which helps us grow).

• The five critical life domains that trauma can improve, and what posttraumatic growth research leaves out.

• How to engineer voluntary trauma to expand your capabilities and improve the five life domains.

Quick housekeeping before we begin

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Traditional Definition of Trauma: All Bad All the Time

Psychology has traditionally seen trauma like this: A highly stressful event happened, and it left you worse off in the long run.

For example, SAMHSA¹, the federal substance abuse agency, had a board of psychologists define trauma. They say it:

“[results] from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

Trauma generally involves three “E’s.” The event, experience, and its effect. Trauma comes from how the person experienced the event and what effect it had afterward.

Another Way to Think of Trauma: Deep Learning

The problem: When we think of trauma and stressful events as entirely negative, we miss a much more expansive and useful way of thinking.

Broadly speaking, intensely stressful events like trauma are powerful learning events: Things were normal. Something intense and unordinary happened. That experience changed how you saw yourself and how you behaved afterward.

Our brains, for obvious reasons, don’t store all of our experiences equally. Intense events with elements of stress and risk get flagged as being more important for future survival and encoded differently. The learning is deeper, more generalized, and more identity-shaping. If we didn’t have this, we’d do a lot more dumb stuff.

E.g., if a kid who touches the stove doesn’t learn—deeply—that a red stove can burn, he’d end up getting burned throughout life. That learning is useful.

Not All Trauma Is Bad

If we think about traumatic stress as deep learning after a trying event, the aperture opens. Yes, some events are more likely to lead us to learn things that make our lives worse afterward. But some events might lead to positive insights.

The research shows that when a highly-stressful event happens, learning can happen a few ways:

1. Negative Trauma: A stressful thing happened. It impacted us in a harmful way. I.e., we started at 1, the stressful thing happened, and we were brought down to 0 and stayed there.

2. Resilience: A stressful thing happened, but we bounced back to normal. I.e., we go from 1, down to 0 immediately during/after the event, but eventually return to one.

3. Posttraumatic Growth …

Posttraumatic growth is different than resilience. It’s when the stressful event happens, and we take a momentary hit, but we learn something along the way that makes us come out better and stronger.

I.e., In postraumatic growth, we go from 1 down to 0 immediately during/after the event, but then, because of the event, we go up to a 2. The event changes us in ways that make us better.

This idea first hit academic circles in the 1990s. Two researchers, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, noticed that people sometimes emerge from stressful events better than they were before. They called the idea “Posttraumatic Growth” and explained²:

[Posttraumatic growth] is manifested in a variety of ways, including an increased appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life.

They found five “life domains” that posttraumatic growth can improve:

1. Improved relationships with others: People report being empathetic and compassionate to others. Important relationships became deeper, while trivial ones mattered less.

2. New possibilities for life: They said adversity freed people from a life they were sleepwalking through. They often changed careers or moved.

3. Greater appreciation of life: They said ordinary life became more vivid. Everyday experienced became richer and more appreciated.

4. Greater sense of personal strength: People said they realized they were more capable—they found a new gear that helped them do and tolerate more afterward.

5. New perspectives on spiritual and existential issues: People reported deeper engagement with questions around meaning, mortality, and what actually matters.

The Missing Factor in Posttraumatic Growth

But here’s the thing: The posttraumatic growth literature looked at people who didn’t choose their stressful event.

My question: if stressful events can alter us for the better, why do they have to be involuntary?

The more open definition of trauma, plus knowing how humans learn from intense experiences, suggests it doesn’t matter if we did or didn’t choose the event.

What matters is the event’s intensity, stress level, and the lessons it gives us afterward.

A Case for “Chosen Trauma”

I think we can get many of the benefits of posttraumatic growth on our own terms. By voluntarily doing something big and hard. I.e., something “traumatic,” if we think of trauma as a stressful event that changes us.

I’ve seen it in myself, after big trips to wild places. And I’ve seen it in thousands of people who’ve gone out and done something beyond what they thought was possible, and reported that it changed their normal life.

This idea isn’t unique or new. People have been doing this for a very long time. The posttraumatic growth researchers note³:

The idea that human beings, when forced to struggle with major life crises and serious challenges, can be transformed in highly positive ways is ancient. There are myths, stories, religious texts, and literary works that reflect this perspective.

Consider rites of passage. A person chooses to exit normalcy and enter an unknown, highly challenging world, and the experience changes them. They return better off, having demonstrated capabilities and learned things they couldn’t in their normal, less stressful life.

It’s also why many ancient myths feature people who undertake grand, challenging adventures and return better off. In the myths, people were often sought an item (e.g., the Holy Grail), but it was only a symbolic representation of the psychic change they’d undergo during their quest.

Rites of passage were a regular practice in most cultures. But we lost them somewhere in time.

How to use it

Don’t sit on the sidelines and wait for stress you didn’t choose to change you.

Go out and find yourself some positive trauma, voluntary adversity that borrows the upsides of posttraumatic growth.

Enter Misogi.

Explore your edges—because once you get out to the edge, you don’t fall off of it. The edge expands, and you grow to meet the terrain. Then you walk back to normalcy with a different mindset that makes you better.

The beauty of Misogi is that it’s 50/50. My 50% is different from yours, which is different from someone else’s. That framework ensures the stress will be high enough to lead us to dig deep and learn.

Afterward, reflect and ask yourself what you learned. The posttraumatic growth research consistently found that reflecting on the event is key to having it help us. And we also see it in rites of passage—after the person returned, there’d usually be a long debrief with wise community members.

The psychiatrist I mentioned at the start helps people rewrite their story around events they didn’t choose. Misogi lets you write a new chapter on your own terms.

Have fun, make it hard, don’t die, debrief afterward,

Michael

1. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach (HHS Publication No. SMA 14-4884). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

2. Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence.” Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01

3. Finsterer, J., Kim, H. S., Radzik, L., & Nachtigall, R. (2023). Posttraumatic growth. In H. S. Friedman & C. H. Markey (Eds.), Encyclopedia of mental health (3rd ed., pp. 796–800). Elsevier.