Stronger After Trauma (What the Research Says and What It Actually Looks Like) with Christina DiChiara | Ep 495
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In this episode, I explore the powerful science of post-traumatic growth and share why healing after trauma isn’t just about reducing PTSD symptoms, but also about discovering new strength, meaning, and hope.
In This Episode, I’ll Share:
- How post-traumatic growth differs from simply “thinking positive” and what the research actually says about healing after trauma.
- Why some people develop PTSD while others recover differently, and the surprising role that avoidance, support, and processing play.
- The five areas where growth often emerges after trauma, including stronger relationships, renewed purpose, and a deeper appreciation for life.
- What my own PTSD recovery taught me about letting go of hypervigilance, embracing uncertainty, and living by my values instead of fear.
- Why it’s never too late to heal, even if your trauma happened years or decades ago, and how recovery and growth can happen side by side.
- Practical, compassionate insights that can help you move from simply surviving your trauma toward building a meaningful and fulfilling life.
From Surviving to Growing: What Post-Traumatic Growth Really Means
Trauma changes us.
If you’ve experienced trauma, you may have wondered whether you’ll ever feel like yourself again. You may even have caught yourself grieving the person you used to be before everything changed.
I understand that feeling personally.
In this episode, I shared something I don’t often talk about publicly: I have PTSD. And while healing wasn’t quick or easy, my recovery taught me something I wish every trauma survivor knew:
Healing isn’t just about reducing symptoms. It can also be about discovering growth you never imagined possible.
That doesn’t mean trauma is a gift. It isn’t.
But it does mean that trauma doesn’t get to write the final chapter of your story.
Today, I sat down with licensed psychologist and trauma specialist Dr. Christina DiChiara to discuss the science behind something called post-traumatic growth, and why it’s one of the most hopeful concepts I’ve encountered in trauma research.
Content
First, Let’s Be Clear: Trauma Is Not a Gift
Before we go any further, I want to emphasize something that both Christina and I felt was incredibly important.
Sometimes people hear the phrase post-traumatic growth and immediately think:
“Are you saying I should be grateful this happened?”
Absolutely not.
Trauma is painful.
Trauma is unfair.
Trauma changes lives.
No one should ever have to experience it.
Post-traumatic growth isn’t about pretending something terrible was actually wonderful.
It’s about recognizing that even after something devastating, the human mind has an incredible capacity to rebuild, adapt, and sometimes discover new strength.
What Is Post-Traumatic Growth?
Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a psychological concept developed by researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun.
It describes the positive psychological changes that can emerge after struggling through highly distressing or traumatic experiences.
Notice one very important word:
Struggling.
Growth doesn’t happen because trauma happened.
Growth happens because of how we gradually process, wrestle with, and make meaning from what happened.
That’s a very different idea than simply “looking on the bright side.”
PTSD and Post-Traumatic Growth Can Exist Together
One of the biggest myths we discussed is that you either have PTSD or you’ve grown from your experience.
The research doesn’t support that.
In reality, people may experience:
- PTSD without post-traumatic growth
- Post-traumatic growth without PTSD
- Both PTSD and post-traumatic growth at the same time
- Neither
These experiences aren’t mutually exclusive.
Someone can still struggle with painful memories while also discovering new purpose, stronger relationships, or greater appreciation for life.
Why Do Some People Develop PTSD While Others Recover?
This is one of the most common questions people ask.
If two people experience the same traumatic event, why does one develop PTSD while another seems to recover?
There isn’t one simple answer.
Trauma recovery depends on many factors, including:
- The support someone has after the trauma
- Whether they have space to process what happened
- Their current life circumstances
- Their ability to experience painful emotions rather than avoid them
- Whether they’re dealing with ongoing trauma or chronic stress
One of the strongest themes throughout our conversation was this:
Avoidance often keeps trauma alive.
When memories feel unbearable, our brains naturally try to push them away.
That makes sense.
Avoidance often helps us survive in the short term.
But over time, continually avoiding painful memories can prevent the brain from fully processing what happened, allowing PTSD symptoms to persist.
Feeling Your Feelings Isn’t Weakness
Many of us have been taught that strength means staying busy, staying distracted, or “getting over it.”
Trauma recovery asks something very different.
Healing often requires allowing ourselves to:
- Feel grief
- Feel fear
- Feel sadness
- Tell our story
- Receive support
- Make sense of what happened
This doesn’t mean reliving trauma forever.
It means giving your brain permission to process what it’s been desperately trying to avoid.
Is It Ever Too Late to Heal?
This may be one of my favorite parts of the conversation.
Many people assume that if trauma happened years ago, they’ve missed their chance.
That simply isn’t true.
Some people recognize PTSD immediately.
Others don’t realize what’s happening until decades later.
Christina shared examples of Vietnam veterans whose symptoms didn’t fully emerge until retirement, when work and constant activity no longer kept painful memories buried.
The encouraging news?
Recovery is possible no matter how long ago the trauma occurred.
Your brain remains capable of healing.
It’s never “too late.”
Recovery and Growth Are Related, but They’re Not the Same
This distinction changed the way I think about trauma.
Recovery focuses on reducing PTSD symptoms.
Growth focuses on how your understanding of yourself and the world evolves afterward.
You don’t have to choose between the two.
In fact, many people experience both.
Treatment helps reduce fear, avoidance, and distress.
Growth helps create meaning, purpose, wisdom, and new ways of living.
My Own Experience with PTSD Recovery
During our conversation, I shared one of the biggest shifts that happened during my own treatment.
Before therapy, my belief sounded something like this:
“Bad things can happen at any moment, so it’s my responsibility to prevent them.”
That belief fueled constant hypervigilance.
I felt responsible for protecting everyone I loved.
Through treatment, something changed.
The reality didn’t become:
“Nothing bad will ever happen again.”
Instead, it became:
“Bad things can happen… and it isn’t my job to prevent every possible tragedy.”
That subtle shift changed everything.
I stopped living as though danger was constantly around the corner.
Instead of spending every day preparing for disaster, I could finally return to living my life.
The Five Areas Where Post-Traumatic Growth Often Appears
Researchers have identified five common ways growth can emerge after trauma.
Not everyone experiences all of them, but many people notice one or more.
1. A Greater Appreciation for Life
Many survivors describe realizing how precious everyday life really is.
Things that once felt urgent suddenly seem much less important.
Priorities shift.
Life becomes less about perfection and more about meaning.
2. Stronger, Deeper Relationships
Trauma often reveals who truly shows up for us.
While some relationships may fade, others become much deeper.
Sharing your story with compassionate, supportive people can create profound emotional connection.
Sometimes relationships become fewer, but far more meaningful.
3. Discovering Your Inner Strength
Many survivors underestimate what they did to survive.
Recovery often involves recognizing the courage, resilience, and resourcefulness that were there all along.
Not because you’re invincible.
But because you’ve learned that you’re capable of facing incredibly difficult experiences.
4. New Possibilities
Trauma sometimes reshapes what matters most.
People may change careers, deepen relationships, volunteer, advocate for others, or pursue dreams they once postponed.
The trauma didn’t create those values.
But surviving it often clarifies them.
5. Spiritual or Existential Growth
For many people, trauma prompts deeper questions.
What matters?
What kind of life do I want to live?
What gives my life meaning?
These questions don’t erase pain.
But they often become part of rebuilding a life that feels authentic and purposeful.
One of the Most Powerful Healing Tools: Telling Your Story
One moment in our conversation really stood out to me.
I shared that one of the most healing experiences wasn’t someone fixing my thoughts.
It was simply someone sitting with me while I told my story.
No judgment.
No rushing.
No minimizing.
Just presence.
Research continues to show that sharing traumatic experiences with a safe, compassionate person helps our brains process what happened in healthier ways.
Sometimes healing begins simply because someone was willing to stay with us while we felt what we’d been carrying alone.
Hope Is Part of Healing
If I hope you take away one thing from this episode, it’s this:
Trauma does not automatically determine the rest of your life.
You can wish it never happened.
You can grieve what you’ve lost.
You can still struggle.
And…
You can also grow.
Growth doesn’t erase pain.
It grows alongside it.
You may become more compassionate.
More connected.
More values-driven.
More present.
More aware of what truly matters.
That’s what post-traumatic growth is really about.
Final Thoughts
Trauma changes us.
There’s no denying that.
But change doesn’t always have to mean permanent suffering.
Recovery is possible.
Growth is possible.
Healing isn’t about pretending the trauma never happened.
It’s about allowing yourself to move through it, gently, courageously, and with support, until you discover that while you may not be the exact same person you were before, you can become someone who lives with greater wisdom, deeper connection, and renewed purpose.
And perhaps that’s one of the most hopeful truths of all.
Transcription: Stronger After Trauma (What the Research Says and What It Actually Looks Like) with Christina DiChiara
Kimberley: I wanna start today with something I don’t say out loud very often. I have PTSD. Not in the vague, I’ve-been-through-hard-things way. I mean clinically diagnosed, the kind where your body keeps a record of things your brain would really prefer to forget. And for a long time, I wondered if I would ever be the same me again.
I had seen trauma impact so many of my clients’ lives. So many clients would say, “I’m not sure I will ever get back to the version of me who I was before.” So many with PTSD do not know there is another possibility. What if going through it, not around it, not away from it, but actually through it, could actually change you in ways you didn’t expect?
Not because trauma is a gift, I definitely do not want that to be the message here. Trauma is not a gift. But because the human capacity to grow inside and after something terrible is real. It’s documented, it’s researched, and it has a specific name. It’s called post-traumatic growth. Now, today, I’m sitting down with Christina DiChiara, a licensed clinical psychologist.
She’s a certified trauma specialist, and she’s the director of education at the Center for Anxiety and Behavioral Therapy. And together we talk about what the research actually says, what it actually looks like in real life. So welcome, Christina.
Christina: Oh, thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here.
Kimberley: Yeah, I love this topic so much.
It’s not a topic we talk about a lot, but… So I wanna get into that and really get to this important distinction, one in which I think us, even therapists get wrong, is that post-traumatic growth is not the same as being positive or looking on the bright side. It’s a completely different thing than that.
Can you please explain what exactly post-traumatic growth is and what the research says?
Christina: Yes. So I think that is a really important distinction, and I think that when we have this idea of post-traumatic growth being this, like, “Just be grateful for what you’ve got,” or, you know, “Just make lemon- lemonades out of lemons,” it can feel really invalidating, and it can feel really gaslighting, and that’s actually not really what the, the definition of post-traumatic growth is.
So post-traumatic growth is this interesting concept that has been around for millennia. Like most of human civilization, we have these sort of philosophies or even spiritual teachings that when something terrible happens, something life-threatening or just something really bad in life, there is a way that something good can come out of something bad, kind of like the flowers that grow out of the cracks in the sidewalk, or even there’s this really beautiful Japanese cultural practice of taking broken pieces of pottery, really precious things that have been made by people, and then fusing them back toba- together with precious metals, and so they become even more beautiful, but the cracks are highlighted.
Post-traumatic growth is not a new concept, but it was codified by, um, some researchers at University of, um, North Carolina, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, around 1995, 1996. They really defined it in the psychology literature as this idea that we could experience positive psychological change emerging from Terrific struggle.
So they didn’t necessarily define traumatic struggle in the same way that we do in the DSM-5, and we can get into that if that’s interesting. But they did have this idea that there are tremendous and terrific struggles that people survive, and that, yes, we can be traumatized and we can be really set back and stuck by those struggles.
But also there’s these cultural and spiritual teachings and phenomenon that we’ve observed for a very long time that people can actually grow the experience of trauma, and it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. So just to put a definition on it, that’s really the concept that we think about when we’re like, “What’s the literature on post-traumatic growth?
Like, what is the science behind this? What do we know?” In psychology, it’s really this idea that there can be a sort of positive psychological change, growth, and development out of really impactful, terrifying, traumatic experiences, and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. So people can survive traumatic experiences and experience post-traumatic stress disorder.
They can really be disturbed by those traumatic experiences and simultaneously experience post-traumatic growth, or they can just experience post-traumatic stress disorder, or they can just experience post-traumatic growth. There’s really no, like, one-size-fits-all model for that.
Kimberley: So Why do some people develop PTSD and be completely debilitated by it?
Yeah. Why do s- like, we know the research even as a clinician, like let’s say 10 people experience the same trauma event. Mm-hmm. What determines who comes out with PTSD? Who comes out with some post-traumatic growth? Who comes out with a combination of both? Like, what are the differences for each person in those outcomes?
Christina: Yeah, this is a really great question. So because we know, not just nationally but worldwide, the epidemiological studies tell us that somewhere between 60 to 80% of human beings will experience what we call in the DSM-5 a criterion A traumatic event. I mean, we could write a book. Like, there are lots of terrible things that can happen to people.
Some are hassles, some are daily stressors, you know, some are really tragic events, like the expected timely death of a loved one. That’s tragic. It’s life-altering. But when we think about traumatic events, these are really, as defined by the DSM, very life-threatening, you know, life-threatening experiences.
Someone could have died, you could have died, something like that, or sexual assault-related experiences, and the majority of us are gonna experience them. So if we say like in the averages, somewhere around 70% of people are gonna experience a traumatic event over the course of their lives. But relatively few people then get stuck with post-traumatic stress disorder, somewhere between 6 to 8, 6 to 10% of people.
And we know that there are variations based on identity demographics, right? People with different racial or ethnic backgrounds. We know that African Americans and Latino Americans and Indigenous populations are more likely to get stuck with PTSD than, you know, Caucasian counterparts, at least in, um, America.
We know that women have higher rates than PTSD than men. We know that the LGBTQ+ community has higher rates of PTSD, and so on and so forth. But even still, in comparison to the rates of traumatic exposure, the rates of PTSD are relatively low. And the good news is, at this point, we have some really clear ideas on why some people get stuck and don’t experience recovery from traumatic experiences, because obviously, some people do.
We don’t absolutely want that to be like the shame and blame game. Like, “You could’ve gotten better and why didn’t you?” And actually, you know, trauma survivors hear that. They tell that to themselves. They hear that from family members. Like, “My gosh, this happened so long ago. Like, why haven’t you gotten past this by now?”
Which is really unhelpful. Um, but we have some ideas, and some of these ideas come across what we actually know works in treatments as well. And so many of the most effective treatments that we have for addressing post-traumatic stress disorder replicate what we know happens in this natural recovery process.
So just to simplify it a little bit, if you’re exposed to a traumatic experience and you survive, in the first couple of weeks after a traumatic experience, most humans look like they have some version of PTSD, right? We’re kind of haunted by what we’ve experienced. We can’t get those memories, um, and emotions off of our mind.
It’s really jarring and upsetting, so we experience this kind of hyperarousal in our nervous system, hypervigilance. Your head is on a swivel. You can’t let your guard down. You can’t sleep very well. It’s very agitating and disturbing, and it really messes, most importantly, with our appraisals of ourselves and the world around us, right?
That’s really what traumatic experiences shake up, right? Tedeschi and Calhoun in their work on post-traumatic growth call this, like, seismic life events, like a earthquake. You know, I’ve heard other PTSD researchers talk about traumatic experiences like a lightning strike event. These are, like, threatening life as you know it kinds of experiences, and they really shake up the way we understand ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
And so these seismic experiences mess with our appraisals. And in those first couple of weeks after exposure to a traumatic event, some people have available to them the resources that we know help with reconciling what has happened, why it happened, and now what it means about me and the world around me in a at least healthy and balanced way.
You mentioned in your intro, and I really wanna highlight this, like your intro is chocked full of really interesting points, but you said trauma is not a gift, and you are 100% right. Traumatic experiences, like all of our life experiences, are learning experiences, but trauma is life-threatening. We would never, ever want to prescribe that people learn the lessons of life by surviving traumatic experiences.
If you can avoid living through a traumatic event, you should, right? You, you do– Right? That’s not… Your living through traumatic events are not a good thing. I wanna make that really clear. Yeah. But given that most of us can’t avoid living through trauma, trauma does teach us, traumatic exposure teaches us about what can happen in the world.
It teaches us about what human beings can do to one another. You know, they are life lessons, and the people who have the resources To do the things we know help pe- people kind of naturally reconcile what has happened, make meaning out of what has happened, deal with the emotions that are generated from what has happened, and come to a healthier, more balanced place with this, eventually will recover.
And recovery is different than post-traumatic growth. Recovery means I looked like I had PTSD. I was really disturbed and unsettled by this for a couple of weeks, but I came back to baseline. That’s really what recovery means. I kinda get back to normal. Or resilience, we can use resilience in that way, too.
And so these things are really simple, actually. They have a lot of folk wisdom to it. People who are able to allow themselves to digest and process what has happened, they can think about what has happened. We know that people who develop PTSD, the memory of what has happened feels so intolerable that they have to push those memories aside and push the associated emotions away.
But people who, either because of their life circumstances or often because of the supportive environments around them, they can allow themselves to kind of sort through what has happened and di- and struggle with it, grapple with it, struggle with it, digest it. They can allow themselves to feel their feelings, which of course are incredibly painful.
This is one of the most horrifying things that has ever happened in your life. It is, of course, associated with terrible, painful emotions But some people are capable either because they have the capacity within themselves within that moment, or they have the support of people around them to feel those feelings in the moment.
So they allow themselves to think about what happened and make sense of it. They get feedback from other people. So when people who experience traumatic events, it’s really common to have kind of misinterpretations of what has happened. Like, “If only I hadn’t done this thing, gone to this place, said yes to this invitation, then none of this would have happened.”
When you talk with a supportive other person, a really healthy, helpful other person, and they get to say, “Wait a second, Kimberly, that doesn’t make any sense. How could you have seen this coming? How were you supposed to know?” You get to incorporate this reappraisal and this corrective information, and that really protects people from developing PTSD.
But the people who wind up getting stuck, to get back to our our point, often either don’t have the resource and the capacity, right? They don’t have the safety to be able to really unpack and wrestle with what has happened so that they can make meaning in a healthy, balanced way and/or they’re surviving other traumas, right?
So they have to keep on stuffing it, as we say. They have to keep on avoiding it because they have to live through the next day. There’s other things that they have to survive. So they don’t have the bandwidth to feel their feelings, to let themselves, you know, deal with the mess, and then they wind up getting stuck.
Avoidance is really a huge reason- Yeah … why people get stuck, and a lot of people don’t have a choice but to avoid. I wanna make that really clear.
Kimberley: Yeah. Okay, so, so there’s so many questions I have. So I’m wondering if people are listening thinking, “Okay, that happened 20 years ago. I didn’t have the resources in that moment.”
Mm-hmm. “It’s still affecting me today. Is it too late?”
Christina: Oh, well, the good news is it’s not. The simple answer is it’s not. You know, and, and that some people might not have known that they had PTSD for 20 years too, because sometimes it’s very obvious. You know, we have this recovery period. That’s why in the DSM we have this diagnosis of acute stress disorder.
You actually can’t diagnose PTSD within the first four weeks of surviving a trauma because we know that that natural recovery period is available. And the bottom line is people who are capable in that time of not avoiding, of feeling their feelings, and getting some corrective information and feedback, right, so that they’re really seeing things, not necessarily in a happy, positive way, but in a realistic way, they can learn realistic life lessons.
Those symptoms related to being so agitated and haunted by what has happened will naturally resolve on their own. Some people, when they don’t, and they wind up getting stuck with symptoms that start to look disordered, which means it’s starting to impair their function and changing the way that they live their life.
They’re stuck with really notable distress, um, and emotional disturbance. They know that right off the bat, right? Like it’s, it’s two or three months out and they’re like, “I’m still not right. What’s going on?” But some people don’t know for 20 years. We saw this a lot with Vietnam veterans, where people got home from Vietnam.
First of all, we didn’t have a diagnosis of PTSD in the late ’60s and early ’70s. That didn’t come out until 1980. And second of all, there was a lot of invalidating of Vietnam veterans’ experience. I mean, we could talk about that for five hours. And so people just avoided, essentially. They started working their tails off or drinking or whatever they ever– they had to do to sort of white-knuckle through.
And then 30 years later, when folks retired and all of a sudden didn’t have that sort of distraction and self-medicating, their PTSD symptoms came raging to the surface, and they were like, “What the heck? This happened 30, 40 years ago. How am I just experiencing symptoms now?” And what we know is that you can still…
Recovery and really overcoming the symptoms of PTSD is possible no matter how long it’s been at no matter what point in your life. So that is some hope I really wanna instill to your listeners for sure.
Kimberley: So, so just so I’m clear for the listener, there is recovery for the PTSD symptoms. There is treatment for that.
Mm-hmm. What does that look like compared to this idea of post-traumatic growth? Are they one and the same process, or would you consider them separate tools for separate outcomes?
Christina: Yeah, that’s, that’s a big question, so let me try to break it down a little bit. So I think conceptually, and this is my Tina idea, I don’t know how much this is really, um, synthesized in the existing literature, ’cause there’s very little research on post-traumatic growth.
There’s a ton of research on post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. At this point in 2026, we have very, very clear ideas about what will effectively give people a chance of recovering from their PTSD symptoms, and we have some ideas about what can facilitate post-traumatic growth. I see overlap in the two, but I don’t know that there’s, like, a research study that you’re gonna pull up that is gonna clearly articulate this.
So to make it really simple, I think it all boils down to appraisal, the way that we’re making sense of things. Tedeschi and Calhoun, and, you know, they’re not the only people who’ve researched post-traumatic growth, but they are sort of the originators of this concept in the literature, really talk about if you want something good to come out of something bad, it’s not actually about the event that you survived.
It’s how you’re grappling with it and struggling with it. And people can reappraise what has happened in a growth-oriented way on their own.
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Christina: But it can be very helpful to have what they call an expert companion, and it doesn’t have to be a therapist. I think what Tedeschi and Calhoun do a nice job of is they broaden the definitions.
They broaden the definition of a criterion A trauma. And they’re like, “Listen, post-traumatic growth doesn’t just come from a criterion A trauma. It comes from any kind of seismic life-altering event.” But there has to be something really seismic that changes the way that you understood yourself and the world around you.
And they change the definition of who can be a helper. So typically, we think about, and I think there’s reasons why, that to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, it is very useful to be working with a trained, licensed mental health provider, someone who really has an expertise and level of skills to implement these very targeted interventions that we know have a high level of successful outcomes in helping people resolve their PTSD symptoms.
And some of those frontline treatments include prolonged exposure for PTSD, cognitive processing therapy. In the APA clinical practice guidelines right now, trauma-focused CBT is also a frontline treatment. And so working with a licensed mental health provider a- as that sort of, like, expert companion is someone that’s going to have the training to facilitate those treatments so we know they can be as effective as they’ve been demonstrated, um, to be in the literature.
But differently in facilitating post-traumatic growth, this idea of an expert companion kind of comes with, like, anyone who can help you be in the struggle. Mm-hmm. And be in the struggle doesn’t mean suffer with your PTSD symptoms. Be in the struggle means you’re trying to sort through and grapple with and make sense of what happened and why it happened and what it now means about your understanding of who you are and, and what life is all about.
And that can be a wise elder, it can be a, a loved one, it can be a friendship. But to facilitate post-traumatic growth, really we’re trying to help people sort of wrestle with this within themselves- How this seismic event has changed the way they understood the world around them, and how instead of these platitudes of like, “You should just be grateful,” or like, “Aren’t you grateful that you survived?”
We might be considering these sort of post-traumatic growth domains. Like, how has this given you a greater appreciation for life or changed your priorities? That’s, I think, one of the positive slants without talking about positivity equaling- Mm … psychological comfort or happiness that, um, we can really think about how have people been able to have a greater appreciation for why they’re here.
Sometimes people experience these sort of changes in existential development or spiritual growth. Sometimes people understand themselves better- Mm-hmm … which can deepen their relationships or deepen the intimacy, the sort of emotional intimacy in their relationships, or have a greater sense of personal strength.
Like, I survived, and so I might feel really vulnerable and dysregulated in a way. But I, I also feel like I’ve been tested in a way that proves my courage and strength in a way that I didn’t know before. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question?
Kimberley: And, and for the listeners, I’ll give an example, but Christina, you might even wanna jump in and correct me if this is not a great example, is I know for me, I took from the traumatic event bad things could happen at any moment.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And there was like a vigilance that went along with that, right? Like, you have to be always on guard for this terrible thing that could happen because it did, right? Like, it’s almost like you’ve got evidence. Compared to like OCD and other things where you’re like, it’s a thought or whatever, if there’s been a real event, I was like, “No, it actually happened, so it’s likely to happen again, and I have to be on guard to protect myself from that bad thing happening,” which I think a lot of people with PTSD sort of take away as stuck points.
But then going through treatment, it helped me to understand it’s not my responsibility to prevent bad things from happening. Like, I got… The growth for me was, I think the disordered part was, it’s now your job, Kimberly, to prevent any bad things from happening to the people you love. Mm-hmm. And then the re- growth and the recovery was, it’s not your responsibility.
You get to just live your life. And even if bad things happen, you will be able to get through it. You would be able to survive. So would that classification feel true to you, or where would you maybe put in some nuance or caveat?
Christina: No, I think that’s right on. And I also think that the outcomes of recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder does not mean you go from bad things can happen at any time.
You know, the, the foundational stuck points or sort of core beliefs of PTSD are the world is unsafe, other people can’t be trusted-
Kimberley: Mm-hmm …
Christina: and I can’t cope. I can’t handle things. I can’t cope. I can’t handle my feelings. And there are sort of a multitude, an unlimited multitude of stuck points or post-traumatic cognitions that can kinda stem from some of those beliefs, right?
A lot of those unhelpful ways of thinking are things about inappropriate self-blame or taking responsibility, like you said. The goal of both PTSD treatments, or at least the frontline PTSD treatments And the evidence of post-traumatic growth, because they’re not the same thing, but I think they can both happen at the same time, is that your new understanding is much more balanced and healthy.
And as you said, it doesn’t go from the world is unsafe and other people can- can’t be trusted to the world is totally safe- Yeah … and I’m sure no bad things are gonna happen again. That’s unreasonable. Yeah. That’s actually not helpful learning.
Kimberley: It’s like denial.
Christina: It’s like deny- it’s delusional, and actually, like, we need to learn from traumatic experiences so that we do have- Mm-hmm
some kind of understanding about what can happen, you know? So I think that the reappraisal of it’s not my responsibility. Mm-hmm. I think there’s another appraisal that can happen, which I really think of as, like, the inconvenient truth of trauma. Remember Al Gore’s old, like, the inconvenient truth- Yeah … of climate change?
Yeah. The inconvenient truth of life after trauma is that you now have had this lived experience, like, yeah, really awful things can happen in life. Yeah. I think the Buddhists have known this, you know? Yeah. We’ve known this for millennia, um, the kind of Buddhist idea that, like, life is going to be uncomfortable.
Discomfort and even pain is inevitable, but the suffering is optional, and I think that’s sort of a very reductionistic but drilled-down idea of, like, of this idea that when you experience traumatic events, you now know firsthand terrible things happen in life. And of course, you wanna protect yourself from those things happening again, and so that’s where some of that hypervigilance and, um, really guardedness can come.
People are just trying to not, not experience that again. The reconciliation is not, “I’m sure nothing– I’ve done my bad thing. Nothing else painful, nothing else life-threatening will happen to me again.” It’s, it’s this really inconvenient truth and harsh reality of there could be more trauma in my future.
Mm-hmm. Or there might have been nothing I could have done to prevent this thing from happening. You know, like, helplessness really underscores traumatic experiences. If we could have prevented this from happening, we would have.
Kimberley: Yeah.
Christina: I, there might have been nothing I could have done to avoid this. There might have been nothing I could have done to prevent this, and it could happen again at some point in my future.
That’s really scary for people to come to a level of acceptance with. But having that appraisal of that doesn’t mean that me then trying to be responsible, especially inappropriate responsible for preventing all things from happening, protecting all people that I love, is reasonable or healthy or a realistic way for me to navigate my life.
My point, I guess, is that the outcomes of treatment aren’t necessarily jolly.
Kimberley: Yeah.
Christina: Yeah But they’re realistic and they can help people move forward.
Kimberley: Yeah, and I will… It’s funny, as you were saying that, you were saying, like, terrible things will happen in our lives. I think that what was different for me, and I don’t know if this will be helpful as a, like, an actual, like, something to, the way that you can hear it if you’re listening to the podcast or if you’re watching, is for me it was instead of it, that tone being like, “Really bad things are going to happen”- Mm-hmm
that tone came from such a place of anxiety and panic and holding my breath to this slower, like, having gone through prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy, then the tone is more like, “Yes, bad things will happen.” The tone of how I hear that sentence has changed, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. So it’s the same words, like, “Bad things will happen,” was first, like, in this anxious place to, and then it would follow with, like, “It’s your job to, to solve it.”
And now it’s like, “Bad things will happen and you can live until that then,” meaning you can just relax un- until… Not relax, but you can rest until then. You don’t have to be hypervigilant. So it’s sort of like this subtle shift of recognizing the reality and accepting it and not feeling terrified by it.
It’s still scary- Yeah … but not feeling terrified by it. Now, my question for you is, I did not know about the term post-traumatic growth until after I had done all that work.
Christina: Mm-hmm.
Kimberley: And so w- I wonder if you can identify, like, I know that the researchers that you’ve mentioned have these sort of five areas that post-traumatic growth can show up.
Can you help people identify those areas?
Christina: Yeah, for sure. And just to validate what you’re… Like, I, I am a prolonged exposure supervisor. I, I’m certified in cognitive processing therapy. Like, I don’t know that there’s anything in the way that providers are trained or in the literature where we’re, like, specifically saying, “Emphasize post-traumatic growth.”
Yeah. Like, the point of those therapies is PTSD symptom reduction. Yeah. And I don’t think that’s because something is missing. I think that’s really important because PTSD is keeping people from living the life that they wanna be living. I also think, though, it’s an interesting concept to consider post-traumatic growth that I think probably really skillful providers are already doing these things, are already facilitating it without knowing what, what they’re doing or without using that jargon.
So I don’t wanna say that, like, “Oh, you know, our frontline treatments are reductionistic.” Absolutely not. I think that when I go through the sort of domains that Tedeschi and Calhoun have in, in their post-traumatic growth model, you can… might even say, like, “Oh yeah, like, I talked about this with my therapist.
We didn’t call it post-traumatic growth, but, like, this is something that we talked about in our processing conversations,” or, “This is something that, like, spontaneously occurred to me as I was returning to things that I had been avoiding.” And so one of the domains, um… And they, m- you know, Tedeschi and Calhoun developed a measure of post-traumatic growth so that they could do research on the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth, and it has five domains.
And they have a lot of face validity. So the first one is really having this, like, greater appreciation for life and changed priorities. Mm-hmm. And I think that many people in recovery from PTSD, it’s not that we’re, as providers, gaslighting trauma survivors and saying, like, “You should just be grateful that you lived.
You survived 100% of your bad days, and therefore, just be, you know, just appreciate what you’ve got.” Like, that is not what this is trying to talk about. But I do think naturalistically there’s a perspective change.
Kimberley: To- There was- It happens organically.
Christina: Yes. And there’s no way-
Kimberley: Through the conversation of processing the trauma, what did you learn?
What have you come away? How do you see the world differently now? Like, you… There are some scary things and scary ways you see the world, but if you process it, you can come to, like, like I did, like, I had to work through it to come to a place where I’m like, “I have learned because of this event that I am not responsible for all the things.”
That, if that helps.
Christina: Yes. Well, I’m also wondering too if there might’ve been some learning, and I’m totally making a guess here, so tell me if I’m wrong, that, like, I’ve learned that I’m not responsible for this and I’m not responsible for, for things that might happen in the future. Love that. But also, no matter how much I try to control and prevent- that thing from happening, there’s no amount of perfect control.
Kimberley: 1,000,000%. And I think that as events, and this is sort of like, you know, we, we were gonna have a guest who has lived experience come on the show, but for reasons- Mm-hmm … we, that wasn’t able to happen, is I think what also happens is if the traumatic event happens a second time, you do learn that all of those behaviors were for nothing.
Meaning, like, you didn’t prevent anything, that you can… The attempts to do safety behaviors and control is not helping.
Christina: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely helps people feel better. Like, it helps people feel less anxious and feel like they’re doing something, or they can compensate and really overcompensate for, like I said, the inconvenient truth that, like, we can’t control everything that happens to us in life, and probably more bad things are gonna happen.
Not that we wish that on people, no way. Not that we think that’s a great learning opportunity, no way. But it’s just the reality of existing in this human human life. Yeah. So that sort of, I think this can both come from PTSD treatment, but it can also happen either naturalistically or with that sort of, like, just expert companionship that Tedeschi and Calhoun talk about, where this, like, reappraisal for app- the appreciation of life.
I think that some people can survive trauma and think, like, “The world is a dark and scary place. The world is unsafe. I can’t trust the people around me,” and then they just hunker down and they escape. But I think in PTSD recovery and both post-traumatic growth, this idea of like, yeah, the world… Like, bad things happen over the course of a person’s life.
Some of those things are life-threatening. Some of those things change you forever. They’re seismic earthquake kinds of experiences. And that can make me appreciate the valuable parts of my life even more, or change my priorities, right? Change, change what I wanna spend my time on, change what I wanna focus on, change my priorities.
There, there can be this sort of reappraisal of why I’m here and what I wanna make, how I wanna make the most out of my time. Uh, you’re nodding your head, and I’m curious if that’s something that resonates with you.
Kimberley: Yeah. I’m thinking of so many clients right now who have had that same experience of like…
You know, I think about even just medical trauma, right? Like, you’ve, they’ve gone through a very, very serious cancer, and they come out and they’re like, “Whoa, life is so fragile.” Like, instead of going, “Wow, I could die any moment,” they’re, they’re- Yeah … more like Holy moly. N- like I’ve actually have a co- a colleague who we’ve had this conversation.
She’s like, “Nothing matters after cancer.” Like, like, and, and I don’t mean that. That’s not actually, but that was her experience of like, it’s just, like the proport- the way we care disproportionate now compared to how it was. It’s just like-
Christina: Yes …
Kimberley: what matters to me is so different. I used to worry about being late for five minutes to a luncheon, and cancer made me not worry about that anymore.
Or, you know, being in a fatal accident that, you know, I almost died made me realize what’s important.
Christina: Yes, and that’s post-traumatic growth. That is something good can s- come out of something terrible. And that sort of, so that’s one of the domains, this kind of shift in perspective about what really matters to you or, or appreciation for what really matters to you.
You know, another domain is, like we said, there’s this both end that tends to happen in post-traumatic growth, which is a deepening of relationships. People feel more vulnerable, but also can develop more emotional intimacy. Mm-hmm. I wanna be careful about the way I use intimacy, ’cause sometimes we say intimacy and people think sex.
Kimberley: Yeah.
Christina: And I mean, you know, close and connected relationships. But there can also be a thinning of relationships, so less breadth and more depth. I think sometimes, depending on the nature of people’s traumatic experiences, it can really show you who your friends are- Yeah … or teach you about, you know, the people who show up, the people who really are really there when you need them.
And so your relationships can get more meaningful, but they can also get thinner.
Kimberley: Yeah. If you have trauma and you’re willing to actually talk about it and not isolate-
Christina: Mm-hmm …
Kimberley: and actually sit with someone while you feel those feelings, I feel like that was probably the most important intervention, even though it wasn’t like, it’s not like we were sitting there correcting my thinking.
The most helpful intervention was telling the story and someone just sitting there and nodding and going, “Wow, like that was really a hard time you went through. Like, wow.” That was life-changing.
Christina: Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of the reason that PTSD persists when people develop PTSD is because people are so scared- Mm-hmm
to tell their story, or they feel so much shame, or, you know, avoidance is such a self-reinforcing powerful coping mechanism. Mm-hmm. It’s like I can feel temporarily better if I don’t talk about it- Yeah … or I don’t think about it. But the other side of the story is Really talking about it. And this is not just, this part’s not just my opinion.
Like, we have great neuroscience about this. Sheila Rauch, who’s one of the, you know, authors on the Prolonged Exposure Ma- Manual, and Carmen McLean, who’s a big PE researcher, um, have this great book called Retraining the Brain, and it talks about the neuroscience of developing PTSD and recovery from PTSD.
And this idea of, like, being able to share your story with a supportive, non-judgmental other person, having support around feeling those really painful feelings is life-changing, but it also is not a new idea. You know, it’s, like, not that, like, when PE was developed, even though it’s a brilliant intervention, that was the first time we ever thought, you know, like leaning on our community or leaning on our village might be helpful.
Right? There’s some folk wisdom in that. I also think, you know, one of the domains of post-traumatic growth, which also I see as, you know, a, a trauma-focused psychologist, is this greater sense of personal strength. And again, we have to be careful that that’s not delivered, providers have to be careful that that’s not delivered in these, like, throwaway platitudes.
Like, “You’re such a survivor- Yeah … and you’re so strong” Because really there’s, there’s a lot to grapple with in, in the aftermath of a traumatic event, especially when people get stuck in the struggle, and the way that they’re trying to make sense of things is actually holding them back. But I do think both in PTSD recovery and in post-traumatic growth, where this is an overlap is this, like, greater appreciation of my personal strength- Yeah
and ability to survive. And just an example, you know, I’ve worked for years and years and years with, um, people who have survived sexual assault, um, traumas, and a lot of times there’s these unhelpful stuck ways of thinking, like, “I should have said no, I should have fought harder, I should have done X, Y, and Z” And there’s this total, um, dismissal or ignoring all the things that they did do- Yeah
that actually allowed them to survive. And I think coming out of the fog of PTSD symptoms, but also this can be a part of post-traumatic growth, is just recognizing, um, “I actually am more capable or stronger in ways that I wasn’t able to recognize or didn’t realize.”
Kimberley: Yeah. I wanna sort of round us out, because I think the beauty…
Like, for me, the beautiful part of this post-traumatic growth concept is if you’re struggling with PTSD or you have been through a traumatic event, it’s really highlighting that it doesn’t mean your life is gonna suck. Like-
Christina: Yeah …
Kimberley: that, that g- growth is possible, that good can come. This is not like you’re stamped forever with this terrible event and you’ll never be the same.
Like, I wanna- Mm-hmm … really help people feel hopeful, and I h- I think that’s what people will take away from this. Like, there’s so many opportunities for growth even moving forward. Like, you could start the growth process here, and moving forward from here with this research and what you’re talking about.
What would be the one main thing you would want the listeners to know if they’re on this journey?
Christina: Yeah. So I think to have hope is, like, one of the one of the main takeaways, actually. And this is really well documented in the PTSD recovery literature, that we already know that hope either mediates, which means hope comes first and then PTSD symptom reduction comes second, or at the very least is correlated, right?
Like, hope sisters with recovery from PTSD. So hope is incredibly important. But in terms of thinking about post-traumatic- growth. The idea is that it’s not about the event itself. The event happened, the event was horrible. Thank God you survived, but, you know, if we could have prevented this from happening, we would have and we should have, right?
Like, trauma is not a helpful way for people to learn, but we can’t stop it from happening. The importance is about how you wrestle with it in the aftermath, how it’s changing the way that you appraise yourself and the world around you. And the hope-related part of that is that it doesn’t have to mean you lived through something horrible and therefore you will have a horrible life.
It can be you lived through something horrible and you survived something horrible, and you can still feel pain You can still wish that didn’t happen. That’s reasonable. “I just wish this hadn’t happened in my life.” You can still accept that sometimes, you know, the reality of our human existence is that bad things will happen.
But also, through sort of the grieving process, the wrestling with it, the post-traumatic growth piece of it is it can really help you reconsider, uh, either from a spiritual and existential perspective or just even a values-driven perspective, like what is important to you, what matters, and how you can, you can really essentially, like, thrive in the purpose of your life after trauma.
That can be very hopeful. It doesn’t mean you have to skip over the grieving process or that you should be glad that this happened. No way. But you can both wish this never happened and both be impacted by it, and also have this idea that you might be vulnerable, yet stronger, or you might have a better sense of who really matters to you in your life or what really matters to you in your life.
There’s also these tremendous examples of post-traumatic growth in action. Um, just to give a really simple example, I spent a long time in my career working in VA healthcare. Um, I don’t anymore, but I, you know, I learned a lot from my experience as a psychologist within the VA, and I worked in my internship year with Vietnam veterans, um, Vietnam veterans who both were working to overcome their PTSD symptoms, and so they had PTSD, and they were working on recovery.
But also were experiencing this, like, real post-traumatic growth behavior of they were going– They did this tremendous fundraising throughout the year where they would then go into high schools and provide education about the Vietnam War. This is, like, predating the Ken Burns documentary, where they really wanted people to understand, like, this is what happened, and educating people.
And even more ins-importantly, they would make a trip back to Vietnam every year and do volunteerism. So they helped build schools. They brought wheelchairs for children who were affected by Agent Orange. They helped fund ambulances. They just did this traumatic sort of giving back that in my mind was then, was just one of the most concrete examples of post-traumatic growth.
That, like, one of the things that they took away from this terrible thing that they had survived was that they could Feel good about the good that they were doing in the world- Yeah … to try to make some sense out of it.
Kimberley: Yep. Yeah.
Christina: Make meaning out of it. And, and also, and also that didn’t mean that they were sugarcoating that terrible things were still happening, you know?
They weren’t avoiding the kids who were affected by Agent Orange. They were saying, “Well, I can be a helper. You know, I can be someone who can feel good about what I’m contributing, focus on what really matters to me now in the aftermath of this trauma.”
Kimberley: Yeah. This has been such a cool conversation. Thank you so much.
My heart feels very happy right now, so thank you very much for doing this.
Christina: Oh, you’re so welcome. That, that really, that warms my heart honestly.
Kimberley: Yeah. So good.
Christina: Yes.
Kimberley: Yeah. Tell us how people can hear about you and where they can get in touch with you.
Christina: Yeah, so I, like you said in the intro, I’m the director of education at a very specialty treatment center in the Greater Philadelphia area called the Center for Anxiety and Behavior Therapy.
And, um, you can find more information about me on our center website, which is just centerabt.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and those kinds of social things. And, you know, you can feel free to share my, share my contact, my email address with people if they have specific questions. Um, I always feel a little bit of pressure, like there’s so much to understand about these topics and so much that I wanna say.
Reducing it down to, like a hour-long or half-an-hour conversation is, is tough. And so-
Kimberley: It’s impossible. It’s impossible.
Christina: Uh, yes.
Kimberley: Yeah.
Christina: Yes. And- I, I really welcome follow-up questions if people
Kimberley: have them. Yes. And, and I felt the same way. Like, I could, I could easily have this conversation for at least another 45 minutes, ’cause there’s, there’s so much nuance and so much depth and different explanations for it.
You did a beautiful job. Thank you for sharing all your information, so thank you so much for coming on.
Christina: Oh, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Kimberley: Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbtschool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.
