Trauma changes people.
And for someone who just wants life to return to “the way it was,” this can be difficult to accept.
But in some cases, people have not only been able to bounce back following trauma, they’ve also been able to experience growth.
In the video below, researcher and author Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD offers her insights into what contributes to post-traumatic growth.
Take a look – it’s just about 4 minutes.
For expert strategies to help clients thrive after trauma, have a look at this short course on how to foster post-traumatic growth featuring Stephen Porges, PhD; Marsha Linehan, PhD; Steven Hayes, PhD; Sue Johnson, EdD; Pat Ogden, PhD; and other top experts.
Now how will you use these ideas in your work? Please leave us your thoughts in the comment box right below.
I have experience extreme trauma.
In 2004 I woke up in hospital after experience a brain Hammorage.
I came out of a coma after several weeks too tubes hanging out of my head a hearing loss and a shunt in place in my head.
I certainly experience trauma.
my life had changed completely.
After a few yrs recovering I launched an invisible Disibility awareness campaign.
That how I dealt with my trauma .
By simply explaining what happens in the brain, that they are not the only ones, the first ones or the last ones overcoming a trauma, they just start to feel better. They become more open to experience new strategies that helps them recover they lives back.
I am struggling with triggers from one incident bringing back all my pain all the time and need to get past this.
Kim I am experiencing the same thing as well right now. It’s extremely overwhelming for me, even simple tasks are becoming hard to manage and to know I have to wakeup tomorrow and do this all over again really is giving me anxiety to life.
I would like to thank Dr. Ruth for this knowledge on the subject which I have accumulated over the years and which has helped me in every way, especially personally. In my story, I am in a stagnant phase of my life where I no longer look at the future as a change that will distribute something better. I am a simple present, wife, and colleague and I feel completely delighted. Recently I made a sudden acquaintance with a young man of spirit and very intelligent, which is quite the opposite of my husband seven years older than me. Overwhelmed with fear, but also undecided, the health and mental problems that I have, I had a concussion at the age and 32 years in the workplace are like a daily problem to be overcome. I am in therapy and I am disappointed that therapy alone cannot help. I even think of turning in on myself and not focusing on what allows me to maintain stability for our family although it seems to be a sacrifice. It’s been many times that I have feelings for other men when being married. I don’t think being married is a choice for me. How and what makes you think when there is PTG?
What this makes me wonder about both professionally and personally is those people who go through life and never have a traumatic experiences. (Though this day and age every day has some small trauma in it.). I find that people who have not experienced trauma have little compassion and their meaning in life comes from more superficial things like their next vacation.
I am a survivor of severe child abuse, and work with survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Regarding the comment that it is obscene to live life as before, I found in myself, and in some of those I work with a reluctance to let go of the trauma and move on because what is obscene is to “Forget”. To let go, felt like being dismissive of what happened, making it seem as though it never happened.
All the logic in the world didn’t solve my need to not trivialize what I had been through by letting it go. But eventually I realized I didn’t need the open, oozing wound. I just needed a healed scar to memorialize what I had been through. At 16 I had my appendix out and I have a light scar. It serves to acknowledge that I had surgery, but it doesn’t hurt me…. it’s not open or bleeding, and it doesn’t cause me any pain or difficulty. I didn’t poke the incision to keep it hurting and relevant …. I worked to help it heal, and let it heal.
I looked at my scar one day and realized that I didn’t need an open, bleeding psychological wound to memorialize what I had suffered. I just needed a little scar of some kind. So I allowed myself to fully heal, and memorialize my past in a way that seemed fitting ….. for me it was in poems that both expressed the darkness I had been in, and light that I made my way to.
When I work with clients who struggle with this, I explain wounds and scars, and help them find a way to memorialize their suffering and “create a scar” in a way that allows them to let the wounds heal. I think we do this with big events…. deaths, mass shootings, holocaust. But for an individual who has suffered, often in lonely silence and obscurity, where is the monument, memorial, or acknowledgement of what happened to them? Usually there is none, so I help them create one.
Often processing a life of complex trauma, and the traumas within that life that have been indelible, comes as a series of therapeutic encounters from which the individual may draw. This individual is often an adult of mature years who yearns to move-on from the most imprisoning elements that still block them from breaking-through to live a more satisfying life as a more authentic self. Often they have already experienced “resilience”, but it has not set them free – enough. It has allowed them to engage in what they have known, but still they find they run into the same old stumbling blocks. To offer the very realistic opportunity to ask what does the self need, what does the self deserve to be free of (in terms of what remnants still haunt them) and how does the self move-on with new information and permission to a new level and experience, is a new and welcome horizon.
The likelihood of PTSD developing increases with inability to report. Reporting requires support people to report the incident to. The likelihood of post traumatic growth increases when a victimised person can report, attain justice and experience success and thus overcome feelings of helplessness with feelings of self empowerment. How much communal support, and so the social dialogue around such events, is a strong indicator as to the development of post traumatic growth. The likelihood of repeat victimisation is reduced as the post traumatic growth increases.
I experienced more happiness because I realized I had recovered physically and spiritually. My level of gratitude for God and others had increased.
Mary Zwez, retired teacher
Being a lucky one bouncing back after secret childhood trauma, causing eating disorder psychosis and many hospital stays. I am lucky having my kids has. pulled, me through to spit out my secret and slowly realising the great life i have.
i don’t get this – having a child with down syndrom or ferting divorced – why do you see it as trauma?