Posttraumatic Growth and Psychotherapy

Abstract

Posttraumatic or personal growth has supposedly always been taking place within psy­ chotherapy, at least in some patients, but this issue has not been explicitly talked about within scientific discourse or therapeutic reflections on the psychotherapy process. Before talking about growth in psychotherapy, it seems reasonable to give a definition of what might be meant by growth in this context although we might exhaust the reader by re­ iterations. The term posttraumatic growth (PTG) as Tedeschi and Calhoun (1995, 1998) have termed it wants to capture the positive outcomes of people having experienced and coped with an extremely stressful life event (traumatic event). The growth term expresses that in people’s lives there is something positively new that signifies a kind of surplus compared to precrisis level. Those positive surplus outcomes might include individual development, personal benefits, new life priorities, a deepened sense of meaning, or a deepened sense of connection with others or with a higher power. The expression growth stresses that persons have developed beyond their previous level of functioning as a result of coping with the stressful event; they do not only recover from the crisis. The terms PTG or stress-related growth further underscore that these positive psychological changes do not happen as part of a developmental process, but as the result of the coping process with a severe outer stressor. In this chapter, we will, by and large, follow Tedeschi and Calhoun’s (2004) conceptualization and apply the term PTG to growth processes resulting from coping with crises or other stressful life circumstances, as not all patients seekingtherapy have experienced a traumatic event in the narrow sense of the word as used in some diagnostic discussions, such as that found in the current DSM-IV(American Psychiatric Association, 2000). However, one can assume that almost all patients seeking therapy have experienced some kind of crisis or severe stress that have exceed their coping resources. Because we want to avoid making inflated use of the term trauma, we will prefer to use the term stress-related growth in this discussion of growth and psychotherapy instead of PTG.