Dr. Chris Xaver is many things. She has a Ph.D. in leadership, has been a professor, a trainer, a cooking show host, and a radio personality—and in 2004, she survived one of the most deadly natural disasters of all time. While in Thailand with her then-teenage son, exploring the country’s martial arts resources as the son fought his first professional boxing match, Chris faced a wall of water before the tsunami’s waves pulled her under.
Having endured this tragedy, Chris has rare insights into resilience and community strength that few share. I spoke with her to better understand how an experience like this can change someone’s perspectives and what it can teach all of us about growth.
Chris’ story is intense: “It felt as if a wall of water was coming,” she shared. “It’s very hard to know how long I was under the water. It was the slowest and longest moment of my life. [When] I could stand up, I came up and was the only person where I was.” In just a few moments, Chris went from enjoying the view from her bungalow to fighting for her life.
Although Chris was alive, both she and her husband suffered significant injuries. She healed over several weeks of hospitalization and treatment. With open eyes, she describes the many people she came to trust in those critical days: “When we got to the hospital, there was a man in a white lab coat with a sticky note on his shoulder that said ‘Hendrick the Swedish doctor.'”
She specifically names “Hendrick the Swedish Doctor” as an example of someone she came to rely on almost instantaneously because she saw his authentic wish to help. These experiences galvanized her sense of meaning in relationships.
Yet that outlook did not come all at once. “I had a very hard time [when I was] back here, moving on with my life,” she said—especially when “there are children who are no longer on this planet and families that no longer have their loved ones.”
A total of 225,000 people died as a result of the tsunami. For ages, Chris wrestled with a sense of wrongness that she would be among those who lived when so many others died.
She reflects on a conversation with a colleague who asked her, “How many times have you told this story? How much do you think this is helping?” She stated, “He had language to help me understand that I had a purpose for surviving this. I needed that moment to break that tough exterior to hear him say, ‘This isn’t your fault; you have no guilt here. You don’t have the weight of those 200,000 people on you.”
This chat with her colleague and friend introduced freedom and added purpose to sharing her story. Connection with others was vital to her healing. She notes that this can be found with a therapist or a companion. Since the disaster, she has built on these revelations.
“It was no longer a social or economic climb, or where could I go or how could I make my life better. It was to help others… It’s not all about me. I can do for others, I can receive from others in ways that I had never done before.”
Moving to Post-Traumatic Growth
Post-traumatic growth is the idea that we can sometimes change in positive ways after extreme adversities like a natural disaster. It’s a topic with relatively little research, at least when compared to the attention that has been given to the many painful outcomes that can occur after trauma. Yet research does suggest that social support and connection are common themes in resilience (Brooks et al., 2020).
For Chris, post-traumatic growth meant, in part, looking beyond herself to find a greater purpose in connection with others and a desire to help. As we talk, she glows with compassion.
In an individualistic and sometimes self-focused culture like ours, it’s natural to struggle with accepting and giving help. Still, as fellow humans, support in our shared realities is often essential to healing.
“I refused to be a victim,” she told me. She did not choose to be in a tsunami, but she has decided to embrace survivorship over victimhood.
She is not alone. Finding meaning is also a shared thread among many who report self-growth after a traumatic experience (Kashdan and Kane, 2011), whether that event is a terrorist attack (Park et al., 2012), a cancer diagnosis (Park et al., 2010) or a natural disaster. Such development is usually made in the company of others.
The Desire to Help
When we see others suffer, most people want to help. Dr. Chris Xaver believes that donating to organizations engaged in disaster response is usually more effective than jumping into a vehicle to head toward the affected area because often, already overwhelmed disaster areas become swamped with volunteers and physical donations.
She also shares a troubling reality: Laws can sometimes get in the way of disaster response sharing, “If I’m a New York doctor not licensed in the Carolinas, I cannot go down there to assist.” Legislation regarding medical licensure can make it a liability for competent professionals to lend a hand, including psychotherapists who might offer counseling services. Multiple agencies are fighting to remedy this problem.
Dr. Chris Xaver’s story is featured in the forthcoming National Geographic documentary “Tsunami: Race Against Time.”