People do sometimes report that something valuable came out of the worst thing that happened to them. That is not the same as the thing having been worth it.
Trauma & recovery
Post-Traumatic Growth, Without the Platitudes
People do sometimes report that something valuable came out of the worst thing that happened to them. That is not the same as the thing having been worth it.
What the construct actually claims
Post-traumatic growth was defined by Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004) as the experience of positive change arising from the struggle with highly challenging life crises. They described it appearing in several domains: a greater appreciation of life, more meaningful relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential or spiritual life.
Two details in that definition get lost when the idea is repeated casually. The growth comes from the struggle with the event, not from the event. And it is described as an ongoing process rather than a state you arrive at.
Why the idea gets misused
In its popular form, post-traumatic growth becomes an obligation. Everything happens for a reason. What does not kill you makes you stronger. Said to someone in the middle of it, this is not encouragement. It is a request that they stop making other people uncomfortable.
It also quietly implies a failure condition. If growth is what is supposed to happen, then someone who is simply still injured has now failed at recovering correctly.
What sits underneath it
The finding that people often do well after terrible events is real, and it is separate from the growth literature. Bonanno (2004) argued that resilience is the most common outcome after loss and potentially traumatic events, and that the field had underestimated it. But resilience in that sense means continuing to function, not being transformed. Most people who come through something hard are not improved by it. They are intact, which is a different and more modest claim.
The epidemiology supports the same modesty. Trauma exposure is common and PTSD is not (Kessler et al., 1995), which tells us that recovery is normal. It does not tell us that benefit is normal.
A more useful framing
The version of this idea that survives contact with clinical reality is narrower and more honest:
- Some people, some of the time, report that grappling with what happened changed what they value.
- That report belongs to them. It is not a standard anyone else can hold them to, and it is not available on request.
- It says nothing about whether the event should have happened. Meaning found afterwards does not retroactively justify anything.
- The absence of growth is not a treatment failure. Getting your life back is a complete outcome on its own.
Wanting your life to work again is a sufficient goal for therapy. Anything beyond that is yours to discover, not yours to produce on schedule.
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References
- Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20
- Kessler, R. C., Sonnega, A., Bromet, E., Hughes, M., & Nelson, C. B. (1995). Posttraumatic stress disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey. Archives of General Psychiatry, 52(12), 1048–1060. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1995.03950240066012
- Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01
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adamgordon
Thanks for sharing this information is useful for us.