The Nature of Transformation
Post-traumatic growth (PTG) offers one of the most compelling frameworks for understanding how trauma can lead to positive internal change. First introduced by Tedeschi and Calhoun in 1996, PTG explores how adversity can prompt psychological development across key areas. A 2022 study by Dell’Osso extends this framework further, proposing that such events may also catalyze neuropsychological maturity.
I’ll start with my favorite section from Dell’Osso.
“Each life ‘event’—intended as anything that exceeds the normal flow of things—carries within itself something (potentially) traumatic, able to lead to a subjective metamorphosis, a modification of the self-representation. Despite remaining an inevitable risk factor, those events are needed for neuropsychological maturation, for the development of an efficient mental apparatus through the acquisition of self-awareness and reality-awareness. It should be noted that the event itself may not show a specific connotation, acquiring it only on the basis of its consequences.”
What I love most about this is the observation that anything capable of disrupting your regular life also has the potential to reshape it entirely. Even something that feels small, insignificant, or perhaps stupid, can ripple into a life-changing transformation.
Dell’Osso frames emotional turning points as necessary catalysts for cognitive and neurological development, making trauma, in this view, the friction that sharpens our potential for growth.
Their work is compelling because it takes something as intangible as transformative trauma and grounds it in something observable and repeatable.
Growth after trauma was shown to present itself in 5 key areas:
1. Appreciation of Life: A greater value placed on being alive, small moments, and everyday joys.
2. Relationships with Others: More empathy, deeper connections, and a greater sense of closeness or compassion.
3. New Possibilities: A shift in priorities or life direction, often leading to changed goals or new paths.
4. Personal Strength: A recognition of internal resilience and confidence in one’s ability to endure future challenges.
5. Spiritual Change: A deepening of spiritual beliefs or existential insight, even for those who weren’t previously spiritual.
More interesting to me, is the idea that growth doesn’t arise directly from the trauma itself, but from the struggle of adapting to a new reality shaped by it. The most notable aspect of their study was the internal process of people following a traumatic event and how the individual worked to reconstruct their understanding of self and the world around them.
I believe that transformation, in all its forms, is not only inevitable but inherently difficult by design, and we’re wired for it, despite how painful it can be.
In my piece Catharsis and the Emotional Paradox of Storytelling, I examine how we gravitate toward tools that let us safely explore transformative feelings without transforming ourselves. We crave those emotional arcs because change to us, is essential, biological, and evolutionary.
It’s what we’re built to endure, over and over again.
