healthmedicinet

Discomfort

I guess post-traumatic growth (PTG) is the technical term for “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” To be honest, every time I start to write about it, I feel uncomfortable. I get a sense that I’m betraying my clients, all survivors of sexual violence, to talk about the benefits of being assaulted. It’s not a phrase we throw around much where I work. It’s completely intuitive that there will be growth after any hardship, it’s just that there are also scars.

Any trauma survivor has experienced minimizing comments made by other people who usually have the best intentions:

“It could have been worse.”

“At least it wasn’t X, like happened to me/this other person I know.”

“Time heals all wounds.  You’ll get over it.”

Talking about post-traumatic growth sometimes feels the same to me: “Sorry this thing happened—but it’s entirely possible you’ll feel an improved sense of connection to others!”

And yet…

…studies do show that a lot of people—40-70% of trauma survivors—report improvements in their outlook and functioning, particularly in areas of self-perception, interpersonal relationships and life philosophy.  Even more interesting, survivors of severe trauma report more growth than survivors or less severe (single incident, not prolonged, etc).  Not surprisingly it appears that people with more severe PTSD symptoms report less post-traumatic growth.  For some reason survivors of medical conditions, particularly cancer, are a popular group among researchers of PTG.  Of the top 10 Google Scholar results of “post traumatic growth” published in 2010 or later, 5 are studies of cancer survivors and 7 are of medical conditions.

Post-traumatic growth in the course of therapy

It is now widely accepted that evidence-based trauma therapy for complex trauma has three stages: safety and coping, revisiting the trauma, and integration. The evidence-based therapies for more conventional trauma also tend to follow this progression and ending in a “putting it together” kind of step.  This last stage, involves incorporating the work done into the survivor’s “new normal” and requires the survivor to ask the question, “who am I as a survivor? how do I move forward?”

This manifests in many different ways, but generally each person is choosing how to identify and integrate the experience of being a survivor.  Perhaps this means they volunteer as a mentor or advocate with survivors of a similar exposure, or contribute a piece of writing to an anthology about trauma survivors, or they simply don’t have to think about their event every day anymore. But in choosing these actions there is a development in identification, the knowledge that the survivor has a voice, can connect with others, choose how to live life. It is perhaps in this stage that a focus on growth is beneficial.

 

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And they are apparently too stupid to realize how easy it is to ensure they are called out for their bad behavior.

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    Last reviewed: 26 Mar 2014