Post-traumatic growth
Positive psychological change reported after struggling with highly challenging life events: closer relationships, new possibilities, greater personal strength, deeper appreciation, spiritual change.
What drives it
Making meaning of suffering helps people reorganise their lives around it; claimed growth can also defend against admitting continued pain.
How it shows
Work
After a near-failure of the company, a founder who changes their leadership style for good, delegates more and describes priorities differently, with behaviour that matches.
Relationships
Deeper friendships and more honesty after an illness or loss, with the person able to talk about both the pain and what changed.
Self
You can name concrete things you do differently because of what happened and can still acknowledge the grief or harm.
What tells it apart
Resilience: Resilience returns to baseline after adversity; growth claims to surpass it. A resilient person says 'I got through it'; a person reporting growth says 'I'm different now'.
Spiritual bypassing: Genuine growth still makes room for pain and loss; bypassing insists the trauma was 'a gift' and becomes uncomfortable when the harm is mentioned.
Reaction formation: Reported growth that is loud and insistent, with no visible behaviour change and no acknowledgement of the damage, may be a defence against still-raw pain.
A test
Ask for specific behavioural changes since the event and how others would describe them; real growth shows in actions and can sit alongside an acknowledgement of loss.
Questions to carry
- Since the event, which specific changes in behaviour would others describe, and how much loss is still named?
- What changed in how I live after a hard time, and what still hurts alongside it?
How strong the research is
mixed. Many people report growth after trauma, but self-reported growth correlates poorly with measured change over time and may partly be a way of coping rather than actual change.
Where it comes from
Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, 1996; Patricia Frazier and colleagues, 2009 (critique)
Sources
- Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen) (1946)