Accentuating the Positive: Self-Actualising Post-Traumatic Growth Processes

Abstract

It is not altogether uncommon, in the aftermath of stressful life events, for individuals and groups to report that they have had experiences that have led them to significant personal change and psychological growth. In the last half century psychology has begun to broadly recognise and understand the psychological benefits to individuals who are able to manage the balance between the intense effects of trauma on the one hand and the emerging effects of flourishing and personal growth on the other. These life-enhancing outcomes can include: improved psychological well-being and health; personal and spiritual development; increased coping skills and deepening relationships; enhanced personal resources; and, changes in religious and spiritual assumptions, beliefs. As a consequence, main stream psychology has broadened its position on trauma, moving beyond its interest in the effects of impairment and pathology on functioning, to a curiosity about the incidence, meaning, and positive potential these growth outcomes may have post-trauma. As these outcomes are to some degree measurable, this paper questions whether the view of trauma provided by mainstream psychology and cautiously limited by what may only be quantitatively proven, is somewhat restricted. As psychology positions itself in the new millennium this paper offers a number of contributions to theory of post-traumatic growth which may admit a fuller consideration of the role of psycho-spiritual transformation in the processes, outcomes, and management of trauma: Abraham Maslow’s theory of peak experience and self-actualisation and Carl Rogers’ organismic valuing process; Stanislav Grof’s holotropic paradigm and formulation of psycho-spiritual transformation; Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi’s research on posttraumatic growth; and, Martin Seligman and Stephen Joseph’s conceptualisations of positive psychology. Together, these interdisciplinary strands capture something of a prevailing optimism and shared understanding that the struggle of posttraumatic experience may, for some at least, offer the potential for personal growth.