In psychology, posttraumatic growth (PTG) is positive psychological change experienced as a result of struggling with highly challenging, highly stressful life circumstances. These circumstances represent significant challenges to the adaptive resources of the individual, and pose significant challenges to the individual's way of understanding the world and their place in it. Posttraumatic growth involves "life-changing" psychological shifts in thinking and relating to the world and the self, that contribute to a personal process of change, that is deeply meaningful.
History
The general understanding that suffering and distress can potentially yield positive change is thousands of years old. For example, some of the early ideas and writing of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and early Christians, as well as some of the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and the Baháʼí Faith contain elements of the potentially transformative power of suffering. Attempts to understand and discover the meaning of human suffering represent a central theme of much philosophical inquiry and appear in the works of novelists, dramatists and poets.
Traditional psychology's equivalent to thriving is resilience, which is reaching the previous level of functioning before a trauma, stressor, or challenge. The difference between resilience and thriving is the recovery point – thriving goes above and beyond resilience, and involves finding benefits within challenges.
The term "posttraumatic growth" was coined by psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. According to Tedeschi, as many as 89% of survivors report at least one aspect of posttraumatic growth, such as a renewed appreciation for life.
Variants of the idea have included Crystal Park's proposed stress related growth model, which highlighted the derived sense of meaning in the context of adjusting to challenging and stressful situations, and Joseph and Linley's proposed adversarial growth model, which linked growth with psychological wellbeing. According to the adversarial growth model, whenever an individual is experiencing a challenging situation, they can either integrate the traumatic experience into their current belief system and worldviews or they can modify their beliefs based on their current experiences. If the individual positively accommodates the trauma-related information and assimilates prior beliefs, psychological growth can occur following adversity.
Causes
Posttraumatic growth occurs with the attempts to adapt to highly negative sets of circumstances that can engender high levels of psychological distress such as major life crises, which typically engender unpleasant psychological reactions. Growth does not occur as a direct result of trauma; rather, it is the individual's struggle with the new reality in the aftermath of trauma that is crucial in determining the extent to which posttraumatic growth occurs. Encouragingly, reports of growth experiences in the aftermath of traumatic events far outnumber reports of psychiatric disorders, since continuing personal distress and growth often coexist.
