Post Traumatic Growth
We've all heard of Post Traumatic Stress. Some of us are likely living with it, or are at least experiencing some symptoms of it. Concurrent pandemics of drug addiction, suicide and COVID-19 have left many of us with excessive worries, intrusive thoughts, changes in mood and deliberate avoidance of people, places and things that remind us of an event that felt life-threatening. There have been so many life-altering experiences for all of us in the past few years, and many of us were living with other traumas and loss prior to the pandemic.
But did you know that, for some people, they may experience something called Post Traumatic Growth, or PTG? Robert Tedeschi, a psychology professor emeritus at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, helped to originate this term highlighting the positive changes that can occur after someone experiences a stressful event. That is not to say that bad things happen for a reason, or that trauma happened because someone needed to learn a lesson. However, it does mean that we as humans may learn from terrible things. We may learn about our own resilience, or about a passion to help others, or perhaps about who our true friends are. We may learn that we can do really difficult things or that we want to spend our time differently. I think most of would wish we never learned these things if we could have our person back, but we don't get to pick one or the other.
How does Post Traumatic Growth happen? For some, it comes naturally. But for others, there are strategies to encourage this growth.There are five tasks to master in our quest for PTG. They include education, emotional regulation, constructive self-disclosure, narrative development and service. Although there is a lot of intention in these tasks, teachers and staff involved with students can encourage this growth in and out of the classroom. Modeling emotional regulation by taking deep breaths when overstimulated, explaining or educating students about how you cope with stress, doing weekly check-ins to allow people to share their stories and offering opportunities to be of service are just some ways to encourage resilience and growth after trauma.