POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH
Loss and trauma are part of life. Many people have heard of PostTraumatic Stress, a normal response to an awful experience. But not many recognize the struggles and hardships of trauma can also mean opportunities for growth. Post-Traumatic Growth is a positive change we can experience as a result of our struggles with highly challenging life events. In fact, Post-Traumatic Growth is just as common an experience as Post-Traumatic Stress. The benefits of Post-Traumatic Growth are stronger relationships, greater awareness of new possibilities, increased personal strength, spiritual enhancement, and deeper appreciation for life. Post-Traumatic Growth can help us find a “new normal” that’s different in a positive way.
What causes Post-Traumatic Growth?
Post-Traumatic Growth can occur after having experiences that most would consider traumatic such as cancer, terrorism, sexual assault, domestic violence, natural disasters, car crashes, or combat. However, Post-Traumatic Growth can occur from any experience that challenges our core values and beliefs about the world and what we are capable of including the nature of the world, the nature of others, our philosophy about life, goals, etc. This can include living through a pandemic, a period of social isolation, watching disturbing events on the news, having been
narcissistically discarded, abused, betrayed, or a history of childhood abuse and neglect
Healing is a process of diving deep into understanding the dynamics and motivation for being attracted to toxic situations and our own misunderstandings about our True Nature. Without this healing process, not much can change. In choosing to change, we’re choosing growth and we can start embracing our healing.
Growth comes on slowly. Sometimes, we won’t realize that we are actually in a healing process until we take a few minutes to quiet our minds and re-assess where we are compared to where we were. Post-Traumatic Growth happens naturally, often as a result of therapy, including education, self-disclosure, narrative reconstruction, emotional regulation, and selfless service.
Education might include formal education courses, books, seminars, workshops, podcasts, and other online presentations. It may be anything that teaches us how to understand what we survived and how that survival and our perceptions of it affects our lives and our choices moving forward.
Education supports self-disclosure. Self-disclosure, being able to express where we are emotionally, mentally, and physically, creates new narratives of our personal, professional, and interpersonal trauma experiences and how they have affected and highlighted our lives.
Self-disclosure encourages us to share our narratives. We begin owning and appreciating our story in a healthy, empowering and meaningful way. We begin to learn that shame holds no place in our lives, and that our True Nature is worthy.
Experiencing ourselves as worthy supports easier and effective emotional regulation. As we move through healing, we begin to understand our emotions on a deeper level. We learn how we have avoided vulnerable emotions through self-sabotage. We gain insight into shame, anxiety, depression, and the ways we avoid difficult emotions.
When we become more stable inside our own Self, we may look for opportunities for selfless service. Selfless service is about connection to others, human unity, paying it forward to help others understand that they are not alone as they struggle with the fears associated with trauma.
Trauma and growth often go hand in hand. Struggle with trauma can create opportunities where we can gain strength and perspective, which then results in growth. We don’t feel just stress or growth from trauma, but both. The experiences of PostTraumatic Growth and Post-Traumatic Stress aren’t mutually exclusive.
Essentially this involves embracing paradox. The most fundamental paradox is that we are simultaneously Human and Divine. A similar paradox is that Post Traumatic Stress and Post
Traumatic Grow manifest together. Growth doesn’t only happen for people who are most resilient. It’s a misunderstanding to think only the weak experience struggles while the strong experience growth. In fact, we have discovered that when you have more coping skills to start with, you might not experience as much growth. Those who have a more natural neurobiological resilience might have fewer chances than others to experience the positive changes of Post-Traumatic Growth.
What are the signs of Post-Traumatic Growth?
Our Priorities Shift. When we’re caught up in survival mode, our priorities are based on self-preservation, self-interest, and preventing being alone. This is common for those of us who’ve experienced insecure attachment or abandonment early in life, repeated abuse, or love relationships that were based in narcissism and codependency. People in survival mode will often say, “I’m fine.” While running away from being vulnerable and continuing to embrace misery. Many of us have spent years being stuck with the suffering that is familiar rather than awakening to liberation that is unknown. We attract (and are attracted to) what is toxic for our growth, and keeps us numb, distracted, and emotionally disconnected. We may blame our family for creating these traumatic patterns of relationship without realizing that, even in adulthood, we may be carrying on the epigenetic traditions of trauma.
When our priorities start shifting during Post-Traumatic Growth, Self-preservation becomes Self-discovery. Surviving becomes, thriving. We start wanting to understand who we are, and why we are the way we are. We toss out self-interest for self-awareness. We are more comfortable enjoying our own company instead of chasing after another toxic relationship or more self-betrayal. We become more comfortable in our own skin, and we become more selective about who we let into our lives.
We Re-evaluate Relationships. When we start down the path of Post-Traumatic Growth, a natural part of growth is in reevaluating the relationships in our lives. This may include a compassionate look into patterns, habits, or generational trauma we were handed from our family or culture that was never our baggage to own. It may include separating ourselves from family members for our own peace of mind. It may include walking away from shallow friendships or toxic intimate relationships ruled by hypocrisy and narcissism. This compassionate insight shines a light into the relationships we’ve chosen in the past, the relationships we have now, and how they’re connected. We can gain awareness into what attracted us to certain personalities, and why we chose certain people in our lives. We will no longer be giving our time or energy to people or situations that deplete us. We begin seeing that we can’t “save” anyone who won’t save themselves. We can’t “fix” anyone who doesn’t want to help themselves. We start putting our needs and
our growth, first. We start separating our sense of Self, from the situations we have no control over.
We Understand Our Boundaries. If we grew up with severe abuse or neglect, we often have very poor boundaries, or they are missing altogether. Parents or caregivers, operating out of a world view of insecure attachment or narcissism, tend to make the rules up as they go along, often betraying a child’s sense of trust, safety, and autonomy. If children learn that they don’t have any safe space to call their own, they become hyper-vigilant, defensive, and self-protective. They learn that they have no privacy, that their body or personal space will be violated, and they aren’t given a voice to advocate for themselves.
When trauma takes our sense of safety from us, the first boundary we need to re-establish is a sense of security. This means learning to say “No!”, and to be OK in saying it. It means to turn inward and to begin learning how to trust ourselves. It means to be willing and able to walk away from what violates our sense of safety. This is an essential step self-care.
We Build Self-Reliance. Setting boundaries will naturally lead to more self-reliance. We begin seeing the patterns of self-betrayal that we were taught early in life. When we’ve experienced trauma, our sense of Self gets lost.
As kids, we learn to react on instinct. We learn “clinginess” as normal because we’re taught that we need others. Maybe our
parents raised us to be totally reliant on them while shaming us for trying to gain our autonomy. If mom couldn’t be alone and was always in some relationship, the message kids see (and learn) is that they need to always chase relationships and rely on others. Maybe the trauma we’ve carried with us has scarred us into not being able to trust ourselves, so we wind up putting our trust in others who betray us. We are taught and learn self-sabotage and co-dependency. As adults we carry this toxic conditioning into our relationships where we often find ourselves going from one toxic relationship to another, none the wiser. We’ve been conditioned to fear being alone, and to fear relying on ourselves.
When we begin advocating for ourselves through Post-Traumatic Growth, the fog lifts. The blinders come off; and we start learning to separate the toxic messages we were conditioned to believe, from the truth. Instead of hiding from the world and fearing our sense of Self, we learn to feel less needy on others, less lonely with ourselves, and we begin embracing our time alone to continue our healing.
Post-Traumatic Growth is a gift. Yet, we usually don’t see it this way as we’re trying to work through trauma, abandonment wounds, or other painful experiences. We start recognizing it as a gift only as we heal, and as we grow and evolve past the pain.
We
Build
Stronger Relationships. Traumatic Growth events often allow us to discover the care and concern others, who have been through a similar journey, might be willing to show during our recovery and awakening. Many people report experiencing better choices, growth, and improvement in their relationships. Accepting support from healthy others, reaching out for help, expressing emotions, and learning we can count on healthy others during times of trouble all serve to strengthen the connection we might feel to those around us.
We Gain Awareness of New Possibilities. Sometimes trauma closes the door to goals that we set out to accomplish. Traumatic Growth can help us to reestablish priorities and identify new goals, new pathways and possibilities for our lives that we never knew existed. When we experience trauma, we often find opportunities to learn more about how to manage hard situations, which can result in discovering strengths we might never have imagined.
We Have a Greater Appreciation for Life. Trauma often threatens what we value most in our lives, and the Traumatic Growth recovery process can result in a greater sense of gratitude for things that often go unnoticed. Traumatic Growth might shift our priorities and increase our appreciation for the value of life as well as the everyday things we otherwise take for granted. Trauma is often accompanied by our efforts to make sense of what and why things happened. The Traumatic Growth process of
struggling to adjust our worldview can lead to greater clarity about life’s meaning and purpose. When we have experienced trauma and then the healing of Post-Traumatic Growth, we may also develop a deeper sense of connection to something larger than ourselves, whether religious, spiritual, creative, a deeper connection to the natural world, and the rest of humanity.
REFERENCES
Courtney Armstrong: Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory, Reconsolidation, and Resilience
James Gordon: Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing
Rick Hanson: Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness
Judith Herman: Trauma and Recovery
Kristin Neff: Self-Compassion
Richard Tedeshi: Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research, and Applications
David Treleaven: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing