Post Traumatic Growth — How PTSD makes us stronger!

Hi, this week’s video is all about post-traumatic stress disorder, and goodness knows, that’s a very scary subject. It’s real. The world is messed up right now. There’s a pandemic, and there’s fear, there’s a pandemic of fear along with a real disease, and there’s all the usual stuff too. I mean, like relationships that implode, recovering from abusive parents or having an abusive boss, and the economic stuff that’s going on right now. There is real trauma, and I could define trauma almost as any really very challenging life circumstance. That stuff is hard, and it’s real, but this video, given that I’m a positive psychology expert, is about post-traumatic growth. How we can be in places of great trauma and still get a benefit out of it.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, what is post-traumatic growth? It’s this idea that we can get benefit from the things that have hurt us deeply, that have caused us great emotional pain. In the short term, that post-traumatic stress disorder phase can be super debilitating, very depressing, anxiety provoking, causing flashbacks, and it’s very, very serious. Of course, some people never really recover, or recover only halfway, but more often, the research shows we get post-traumatic growth, and we get that when we’re benefit-seeking, when we’re looking to the traumatic event to see what it’s doing for us that’s helpful.

There are kind of stages that we all go through as we do this most naturally through anything that we’ve been through in our past. The first stage, it’s kind of about self-awareness, it’s the discovery phase, it’s figuring out what occurred, why it occurred, how it occurred, what it meant to me, and it’s a deep reflection. Often, in more serious traumas in our society, we benefit from therapy in order to do that self-awareness and self-discovery piece, but it could also be through journaling. We do it often very naturally, just talking with friends and family, and kind of sharing our lives. We’re processing, and that processing not only helps us discover where we’ve been, but the process of disclosure, the sharing of our story, is not only therapeutic in and of itself, just to get it out. But for many of us, it’s that narrative that helps us to understand what it is that we’ve been through.

The narrative allows us to tell a new story that as we’ve processed adequately, we start to understand that the thing we’ve been through has grown us somehow. We’ve become stronger in some fashions, we maybe have become more aware, we’ve often developed new skills in order to cope, and so that new narrative is the thing that causes the post-traumatic growth. We emerge from it with a number of known benefits from post-traumatic growth. One is improved relationships, where we just have more compassion, we get along well with people, we see into their lives through the lens of our own suffering. In addition, we know that there’s spiritual growth associated with post-traumatic growth. We know that people’s personal strengths tend to ramp up, and we become bigger to the world, we have greater gifts, and then finally, I think there’s a higher appreciation of life.

So, as we go through these hard times together, I have to worry about what the generation that’s just coming of adult age now is going to learn and experience from this. What will it be for them a generation from now? Of course, under one scenario, it’s going to be just bad news, that they’re going to enter adult life damaged from it, but there’s an option that we hope can be the case, where there’s post-traumatic growth, and that these young people come out stronger and better than ever. So, that’s it for this week. I appreciate you all watching. If you like this kind of content, click the like button. If you want to get videos like this every single Sunday morning, press the subscribe button, and you’ll get a new video in your main box. Thanks so much for watching. Catch you next time.