Psychology Today: 6 Ways Growth From Trauma Can Happen

"When people are going through trauma, they don't always want to hear about silver linings. Psychology writers often use the term "post-traumatic growth." I'm not using that term here because it implies that growth can only happen after the trauma has passed. People can experience psychological growth while those experiences are happening, not merely after they've been resolved.

Let's unpack how that can happen.

1. Better empathy and sensitivity.

Especially if your life has been relatively smooth sailing, experiencing troubles yourself can give you better empathy and sensitivity for what others may be experiencing that you're not aware of.

2. What's meaningful to you feels clearer and becomes a priority.

Trauma can make what's most meaningful to us feel more apparent and more urgent. Our threshold for irritation can go down, but this can lead to opting out of whatever seems petty and insignificant.

3. New support options.

When you're going through trauma, you'll likely reach out to new supports. This could be a therapist, friends of friends who have experienced the problem you're having, or support groups. When we're vulnerable, we often connect with people on deeper levels. Another benefit: Becoming involved in support groups can help you improve at supporting others.

4. Specific close relationships.

Trauma can be bonding. Through a shared trauma experience, people sometimes develop lifelong friends.

5. You develop your resourcefulness and creative problem-solving.

New challenges require new skills and new approaches. A trauma can help you discover your resourcefulness in practical terms, and also in mental/emotional terms. The techniques you use for getting through your current challenge will likely be useful in the future.

6. You gain the understanding that you can cope when a feared outcome occurs.

Old-fashioned psychology approaches to anxiety used to focus on reducing people's perception of risk. When you go through a significant trauma, you gain a real-life experience of coping with extreme distress you can draw on later. When you worry about a catastrophe, you'll have the memory that when something traumatic happened, you coped with it. This can be liberating.

Growing from trauma isn't a requirement. It shouldn't feel like extra pressure. But if you are growing from the trauma you're experiencing, then it's worth noticing how that is happening. Making those learnings explicit can help you retain them for future use and remind you of your resilience."

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