MINDSET & RESILIENCE

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You More Dangerous

Before I reached my teens, my brother and I had already survived close to a dozen near-death experiences. But trauma came in other forms too — the fear that my mother would walk out the door and never come back. She was fighting the mullahs in Iran, and she lived a dangerous life.

I remember one time clearly. She held me in her arms, breathed in the scent of my hair, and said: I have to go now, but I will come back. And if, against all odds, I don't — another woman will take care of you. She will be kind to you.

I nodded and swallowed the tears. I tried to memorise her — the face, the green-brown eyes, her soft hands holding mine, and the safe scent that let me fall asleep.

She came back. But the memory stayed. In my body, not only in my head.

Two kinds of crying

I learned early to distinguish between two kinds of crying. The first was a child's cry: loud, unapologetic, full of demand for comfort. The second belonged to adults — and to children who were not allowed to be children: silent, inward, often behind a closed door.

As an adult, I think about the women around me growing up. My mother's friends. Women whose bodies had been raped and tortured. Whose sons had been executed. And who, despite unbearable pain and grief, chose to transform it into fuel for the fight for freedom.

What fascinates me most is that they straightened their backs and continued the struggle with a smile.

That shaped me in ways I am still working to understand.

The science your trauma doesn't want you to know

Most people have heard of PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder. Few have heard of its opposite: PTG, post-traumatic growth. In the 1990s, Richard Tedeschi at the University of North Carolina showed that roughly seventy percent of people who survive extreme trauma develop strengths they did not have before. Greater resilience. Clearer priorities. The ability to function in chaos.

Your trauma does not have to be a flight across a mountain range. It can be the day the business collapsed. The day your partner left. The day the diagnosis arrived. The mechanism is the same.

This is not a comforting message. It is data. And it is uncomfortable. Because it means that people who have been through the worst are not fragile resources in need of protection. They are often the ones who build — companies, movements, ideas — while others are still counting their losses.

The armour or the burden

No child is born brave. There are only children who are forced to become it. But there is a choice in how you carry what you were forced to become. You can carry it as a burden. Or as armour.

I chose the armour.

We are often asked: what is the secret behind your success, despite everything you have been through? My brother Saeid — professor of chemistry and serial entrepreneur — usually answers: It is not "despite." It is probably "because of."

That answer is uncomfortable for Swedish corporate culture, which assumes that stress should always be minimised and that trauma belongs in the therapist's office. Both assumptions are wrong.

Stress without recovery breaks us down. Trauma without language destroys us. But people who have learned to navigate trauma develop a robustness that no MBA programme can replicate.

That robustness is not a consolation prize. It is a competitive advantage.

I have also seen the alternative. People who let trauma win. Who wrap themselves in victimhood and never take it off. That frightens me more than any traumatic memory.

My mother taught me this without words. By always — always — walking out through the door with her back straight, no matter what waited on the other side.

What doesn't kill you does not automatically make you stronger. It gives you a choice.

Choose the armour. It might give you superpowers.

— Mouna