Richard Tedeschi || The Science of Post-Traumatic Growth

the aftermath of traumatic life events. Their books include Trauma Transformation, post Traumatic Growth, Facilitating post Traumatic Growth, Helping Berief Parents, A Clinician's Guide, and The Handbook of Post Traumatic Growth. Richard, it's so great to chat with you today on the podcast. Thank you pleasure. So I'm wondering, how in the world did you get involved in this topic. This was not when you were at work, probably working on your dissertation.

This was not a topic that was first and foremost in the trauma literature, right. Well, I've been around for a long time, so I've been around before PTSD was even a diagnosis, right right, Well, what was your dissertation on? My dissertation was on basically trust in psychotherapy, so it was a there's a therapy, analog study of how trust develops among between therapists and clients based on some of their personal characteristics and their similarities to one another. So

that's what I was looking at then. So I was really interested coming out of graduate school and the concept of trust. Gotcha, and like, where did things transition into this line of research that you currently work on. What's the origin story of it? Yeah, I guess it. It came out of some questions I had in my own mind about my career and what I really wanted to do. By the time I got tenure at the university, I was really wondering how to combine more of my clinical

interests with my research interests. And I was talking to my colleague Lawrence Calhoun about this and talking about what, you know, what I got started in psychology for in the first place, And now that I had tenure, I felt free. I could do whatever I pleased and not get fired. So I told him I was most interested in how people learn to live well and how people become wise about living. And so we started with the idea of wisdom and we wanted to know more about that.

And in the literature of the time, this is a mid nineteen eighties, there wasn't a whole lot of good psychological study of wisdom. So we thought we'd tackled that, and we tackle it first by doing interviews with people we thought might have some wisdom and learned some things about living well in life. And so we talked to older people. These were especially bereaved, older women, widows who had lost their husband's later in life. We talked to

people who had suffered physical disabilities and adulthood. We'd become paralyzed, blinded and such because of illnesses, accidents and whatnot, but it had done very well in their rehabilitation, and we thought maybe they knew something about how to live life well given the struggles they've been through. So we started

with interviews and we transcribed these interviews. We listened carefully what people were telling us, and some of the themes of what we later called post traumatic growth started coming through in these interviews. So it all came about by listening carefully to people who knew more than us because they had lived through the things they were explaining to us. That's wonderful. Well, how would you define post traumatic growth

or how do you define it? Post Traumatic growth is the positive changes that people report often report as a result of the struggle in the aftermath of traumatic events. So that definition, although it sounds very straightforward, has some important elements to it. A couple of things that point out is these are positive changes that are really transformative. They're not simple, they're not easy, and they represent major

changes in people's lives. They occur. These changes occur in the aftermath of traumatic events, so they're not caused by the traumatic events themselves. The changes happen in the aftermath of these events as people struggle through this aftermath. So it's a struggle. It's not an easy process for people because life has handed them in situations which have disrupted their understandings of their own lives, the world they live in, what kind of future they have what we call core

beliefs about themselves and their lives and their world. So this disruption leaves people very anxious and very much at sea in terms of how to go forward and what to do next and what sense to make out of things. It's very confusing time, so it's a struggle to get through this and reconstruct set of core beliefs that make more sense. Yeah, and in your research, what are the

main areas of growth you found that are replicable. Well, what we did was when we did our interviews, we took certain phrases that showed up among the people we interviewed, and we use those to construct a quantitative inventory, a research measure, a survey to try to measure this postmatic growth process. And when we subjected it to different kinds of analyzes as we gave it to people, I'm not sure if your audience would probably know too much about

some of the mathematical part. Surprise, It's a process called factor analysis, which okay, well, well good, We've got a very stupid audience perhaps. So we did this factor analysis which takes all these these items on this inventory and creates clusters out of them mathematically, and these clusters become essentially themes that are reflected in the measure. And it turned out that there's five themes or five domains of growth, five ways which people describe the post traumatic growth that

they encounter. And so the five areas or domains of post traumatic growth are changed relationships with others, new possibilities for their lives, greater appreciation of living, a greater sense of personal strength and spiritual or existential change. So those are the five areas of post traumatic growth that we we've uncovered, and they've been pretty consistently discovered across different cultures. So our measure has been translated into over two dozen

different languages. Now I'm losing track how many because they get across all the time for translation, but at least two dozen different languages and across all kinds of cultures, this measure seems to show these domains of post medic growth that I mentioned. Yeah, I would even perhaps add a candidate addition to that, Marie mccallague. Marie four Yard has shown that creative growth might be another one, So

consider that. Okay, so you're saying, you're not sure how that works, right, because we've done analysis of our measure of post nic growth. So maybe she was using some different scale or items or something, So that may be. I was just talking about our measure and the ways we've seen it operate in several hundred different studies. Now, so gotcha. So if she's talking about, you know, people being more creative as the result of going through some traumatic event, you know that may show up in our

measure in a different domain. So it could show up, for example, in the domain of new possibilities. So that's where people find new priorities in their lives. They emphasize different things, they may do different kinds of work. They so maybe they engage in some more creative endeavor as a result of some of the trauma that they've gone through,

and maybe that's what she is finding. Yeah, yeah, she wasn't using your scale, but she was just looking at the role of post traumatic growth on self perceptions of creative change, and she's found significant effect, which actually makes me think of a question I wanted to ask you, which is, how do you distinguish properly between self perceptions of change? You know, because these are self report questionnaires you're using versus actual change, they're not always the same thing,

Is that right? No, that's not right. When people report change on our inventory and we interview, then they're usually representing themselves very accurately. And if you follow people across time, you generally find that these trajectories stay quite stable with the majority of people. Now there is a small minority for whom the growth seems to decline over some period of time. Now, why that happens, you'd have to get

into the stories of people's lives. And this is where it's a real challenge for researchers, because you really have to know people intimately in order to understand some of these things. So we could say, for example, in some of these people that some things happened that have created some sort of a disruption of further disruption in their lives.

Perhaps we could say, if we follow them, that they're For some of them, maybe their original ideas of growth didn't stand the test of time for them for one reason or another. But for the vast majority of people, we find that these experiences of growth are quite robust and represent real change. Now, when some people say it's not real or it's not actual, they say, the only real growth is that which can be observed from the outside,

that people can see, and it's behavioral change. And that's what some people have said about post traumatic growth, that some of it may represent behavioral change, that's what they call actual growth, and then the rest of it is illusory and people are fooling themselves. But the thing about postramatical growth it's so important is perspective change means a lot to people, and that may be an internal experience that may not be so clear to the outside observer,

but it is very meaningful to the individual. So we don't just dismiss people's reports of growth just because it means that they haven't embarked on a new career or done something, started a foundation or something like that. There are more subtle changes that are very important. So for example, I had a client one time, and I'm a clinician. You know, I do psychotherapy all the time, so I

hear stories in depth, and that makes me think. That makes me think in some ways I'm different from a lot of researchers who don't do this kind of clinical work. But for example, I remember a client I had who had two strokes. After his second stroke, the doctors told him that he had an aneurysm that could kill him at any time, and what he had to do was

remove all stress from his life. He had to stop physical activity, as a guy in his fifties, stop physical activity, quit his stressful job, and basically stay at home and just relax and be out of any kind of stress. So he did this, and he became depressed, as you might expect that could happen. But you know, when I started seeing him, we started talking about how he could live this life if he thought that this is how

he had to live in order to survive. And what he started doing was taking a walk every day around his yard and practicing a mindful meditation around his yard,

and he would notice things he never noticed before. He would look very carefully at things and experience everything in a very very careful, slow paced, deliberate fashion, and he said he started to feel much better, and he realized that he was missing out so much on life in his fast paced old life, and he really appreciated this way of seeing the world that he hadn't seen before. So his whole perspective on how to view the world out there shifted into something that he said was much

more profound than they ever experienced before. To the outside observer, it might look like he wasn't doing anything, but for him, it was profound. So who's to say what's actual growth and what's not. That's a judgment from the outside. But you have to get inside people's lives, understand things from their point of view, or to know the real story.

It seems analogous to me like life satisfaction questionnaires. I mean those come those are self report and no one would say that someone's self reported to life satisfaction questionnaire is not as valid as their actual I don't even know what actual life satisfaction is compared to someone's subjective

view of their life satisfaction, but it just seems somehow analogous. Well, that's an interesting comment because I've often thought that when people say, post my growth questionnaire, the inventory is just self reports, I can trust it. But we trust all kinds of measures of things like depression anxiety PTSD, self report of all sorts of negative horrible things. We don't question whether those are valid. You know, we've psychology is

built on self report pictures. I mean, I mean, you know, ninety percent of our research is on self report measures, and we sort of accept those. But some people have had trouble accepting these reports. They just don't believe that people can make these kinds of transformations. For some reason or other, it's it's some kind of cynicism, perhaps, I'm not sure. Well, what what are some things that some of the critics do get right? I've been following the

work of Ronda Jack or Ra Krim. I don't know if you've you've been reading his most recent papers on trying to tighten up the field scientifically. Yeah, some familiar he says, Yeah, are there are some points here from what he is that well, I think, and maybe I misrepresent I'm not sure. I haven't read everything he's written, but I remember that he said that unless there's personality change, that we should be looking at personality change as a

as a indicator of growth. And you know, personality, you know, it depends on how you define personality, you know. I mean, I taught personality for forty years at the university, so I'm well familiar with all the different kinds of approaches to personality that are out there. And and you know, there are there are some things about personality that seem to be pretty much baked in and aren't and don't

change very much. So it's hard to get some essential things changing about personality, but around the edges of it to some degree, when people are confronted with something that is what we call the core belief system or the assumptive world, like Ronnie job Bowman talked about in the past in the nineties, the assumptions that we make about our lives and how they're going to go, or if we take a narrative approach you know, the idea that

people are essentially internally writing their own autobiographies and looking into their futures, or the idea of the possible cells and the future cells that we have in mind. All those are personality constructs, and we can use those constructs to understand pretty well in some of these transformative experiences.

I wouldn't say, for example, that we'd see a great deal of change in the Big five personality factors or something like that, but we have found things like openness to experience or extraversion tend to be related to post traumatic growth in a small way that you know, these aren't huge correlations, but there's a little bit of indication of that, and there's a good reason why that may

be the case. So you know, if you're open to experience, open to novelty, and you have that kind of creative sense of yourself, you're more likely to be able to create a different kind of future for yourself. So post mental growth is a creative process if you have if you're extroverted, if you look at the dimensions on extraversion in the Big five, you find things like positive emotions

as well as a connection with other people. So people experience positive emotions may be more likely to see into a future that's essentially positive for them. And if you're willing to connect with other people, you're going to find some people who help guide you in some ways into a future that's better for yourself. And we've talked a lot in our work about these kinds of guides, these

expert companions. So so so that's you know, I mean, there's there's a role for understanding how personality fits with all this, But I wouldn't define post and my growth very narrowly. Is personality change fair enough? And that's the question of personality change is also a different question that you just raised, which was are there certain individual differences that make it more likely for someone to go through post traumatic growth?

And that's a very interesting question too scientifically, and the openness to experience one makes a lot of sense to me because that's a topic that's a personality trade. I've studied my career and it is so strongly correlated with with a search for meaning, which is so core to what to the kind of growth you're talking about, right, Well, I wanted to I want to say something about current work that I'm doing. You know, in your introduction, you

mentioned professor at University of North Carolina, Charlotte. I'm actually

Professor Emeritis. I retired from unc Charlotte, and I've been working for the past during the latter parts of my career there and since my retirement at Bouldercrest Institute, which is Bouldercrest Institute for post Traumatic Growth is a is founded for veterans and first responders who have trauma histories, and we have developed programs to help facilitate post traumatic growth in these folks, and well over a thousand people have come through our programs at this point, and we've

just recently in the past year, published a program evaluation of what we do and we get really remarkable results in terms of post traumatic growth in this in these populations. And we've designed a program that's based on our research and post traumatic growth process where we've come to understand how postraumatic growth develops and our program focuses on these important parts of the process, and in doing so, we've come up with a peer based program to facilitate postraumatic growth.

So all the people who are the facilitators in these programs are veterans themselves or first responders, and we train them to deliver the program, and they have all been through the program themselves, so they have a lot of cultural competence, they can speak the language, they understand what these people have been through. And this peer based model, I think is something that has a lot of has a lot of importance for how we deliver mental health services.

If we can think about how to involve more peers in mental health service delivery, I think we can do a lot more to help people in this country have trauma histories. So we've had a lot of success in applying our research on post meatic growth in this process.

And I would encourage people to look up Bouldercrest dot org on the website and you'll see we have two facilities, one in Virginia and one in Arizona beautiful rural ranches essentially where we give first rate accommodations to the people come to the program and it's all for free because it's funded by some generous donors, so no one has

to pay for our programs. And we have people come for a week, but then we have them we give them up to eighteen months follow through with contact with us in various ways so that they can consolidate their learning that they've done during this week long program. And

it's not a clinical program, it's not psychotherapy. It has a lot of recreational, outdoor activities involved in it for a good reason, because all those activities demonstrate some things that they're going to have to be able to do in order to live well and experience post traumatic growth.

And then, ultimately, as you just mentioned, the meaning that they derive from this experience comes when they plan out a life of service going forward, so they have a purpose, or they benefit other people and do things for their greater community, or their families, or their country, whatever it might be, so that they re establish a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, and that helps consolidate

this post traumatic growth process. So this is a way that we're applying all this research to helping people in some ways that are really remarkable. And we've got also now eight different partners across the country, other veteran service organizations that we've trained up their staff to deliver these programs, so they're available not only in Virginia and Arizona, but Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Maine, Washington State, Arkansas, different places in the country,

all delivering these programs. So I'm really proud to see how this concept of post traumatic growth has been utilized for good for so many people, and we're going to do more than that. That is wonderful. Well, you know, I'm just trying to think of you know, well, let me phrase this a different way. I think that it's important to emphasize with this kind of research that it's not the event itself which automatically leads to post traumatic growth.

It's that, though there are a lot of various things that could go under the brill of trauma, and trauma in a certain degree is kind of the eye in the eye of the beholder, but it's the meaning making that and the sort of cognitivey structuring that happens as a result of the situation. So am I fair to say that you've a pretty broad umbrella of what you include under the idea of trauma. I think you've said it very well that it's in the eye of the beholder.

So we do not define trauma according to certain kinds of events like you find a DSM and whatnot. Instead, trauma is a disruption of the core belief system the assumptive world. That's what qualifies things as trauma to an individual if they thought of themselves, their lives, and their world a certain way, and then they experience this psychological earthquake which disrupts that whole infrastructure, so they can't make

sense of how to live anymore. That's traumatic, no matter what the event is that set it off, And you're right that it's not the event that creates the growth, it's what happens afterwards. What do they do with that disruption? How do they recreate a system of understanding how to live in a particular kind of world which makes sense to them and allows them to go forward in a

meaningful way. So we find trauma not according to events, but according to impact, and we see things from the point of view of the person that we're working with. I remember, I tell this story. I remember a long time ago I was working with a fellow who had cancer, terminal cancer, and I made the mistake of saying to him, this must have been this must be the toughest thing you've had to deal with. And he said, no, actually not. My divorce was a lot tougher than this. And he

explained to me why. He said, I always figured I was going to die. Everyone dies, and this is the way I'm going to die. So this is not surprising to me. Yeah, everybody's got to die. This just happens to be the way I'm going to go. I'm not surprised. However, my divorce was a shock. I never thought that I'd lose my wife and my kids and my family. That just disrupted my whole life and my sense of myself as a married man with a family. I never thought

that that would happen. So he talked about a disruption of his core belief system essentially with the divorce, but not with the cancer. So who's to say what's traumatic? You know from the outsider again, you know, outsiders making judgments about people is a problem, and we have to

understand people's experience. So yeah, as a researcher, I know that I'm sometimes doing kind of research which just gets me, you know, scratching the surface and I don't know the story of As a clinician, I get to know the story, and that's what's informed me a lot, just listening to stories and understanding this process. I love that you bring

those multiple perspectives to the table. It's not just about checklists and quantitative like scales, but you also care about the experience and listening to the experience of the person in a lot of ways. That's a very humanistic psychology perspective of you. Are you well, It's interesting you mentioned that, because I think that's where I started. I mean, when I was in graduate school. My first clinical supervisor was a student of Carl Rogers, Who's some listeners might like

fans the early humanistic psychologists. All right, so I was. I was taught by Carl Rogers student a guy who did some of the original psycho therapy process research with Dodger in Ohio State. That was William Snyder's name was William Snyder, and he you know, I remember, I'll just go off on this tangent if you don't mind. I remember when he was teaching a psychotherapy we had to record all our sessions. We had to listen through every session,

transcribe every session, and everything that we did. We had to say something about how we came up with that comment and how why we're responding to the client this way. He made us really think hard about how we're responding to people and really think in ways to kind of justify anything that we would say, because he thought listening was important. If we're going to say something, it better be important, you know, because we got to pay attention

to that person. So that's where I came from originally. Yeah, well, I really love that perspective. I've been trying to resurrect humanistic psychology for what it's worth. You know. Another point that seems to be very worth a lot. Oh great, great, Sorry, there's a little bit of a delay, so if I could talk over you. It's not intentional, Please know that. Another another point that I think is really important to make here is that you're not making the case that

growth requires suffering. There are certainly multiple paths to growth. And it also seems like you're not making the case that the person necessarily is grateful and and and would prefer the trauma over not having the trauma. It seems like you're not making that case either. Is that correct? Well, let's take the first thing the other two things. There are various roots to growth, of course, so this isn't the only way people become wise or learn things, or

live better or discover meaning or amount. I'm certainly not saying that there are various roots to growth, and this is this is one way that this happens in human life. And I want to emphasize just because Lawrence and I coined this term post traumatic growth, doesn't mean that it's a recent development. I mean this goes back in human history of you if you study the Great Religions literature.

I mean, it's just it's all over the place. As long as there have been trauma, there's been growth, actually growth and change. And we you know, in our first book we wrote in nineteen ninety five, we tried to cover a lot of that point out how you know this is this part of human experience. So that's that's that's one thing. And then you know, post traumatic growth is certainly something that people value, but if they look at the event, which is the catalyst for it, you

get different kinds of responses. Now, I like to quote Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote a book in the nineteen eighties When Bad Things Happen to Good People. His son Aaron died as a teenager, and there's a quote by him where he says, I have become, as a result of Aaron's life and death, a better pastor, a better rabbi, just a better person because of going through all of that. But I'd trade it for a second if I could have my son back and be just an average rabbi, right,

But I cannot choose. So I worked for twenty five years for a nonprofit that served brief parents. Sat for twenty five years and brief parents support groups, and no parent would say, oh, my child died was a good thing. It produced this growth in mean parent would ever say that, but they would talk about change and growth, but they realized it's because what happened in the aftermath. Right now.

I also in our first book, on the first page of our first book, quote one of our first research participants who was paralyzed, and he was a young man in his twenties, and he said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He says he doesn't regret it. He says, I know that's hard to swallow, but it's the truth. And if you understand my story, you know why. He says, I was living a life

that was really self destructive and not meaningful. He was a musician, spoken a lot of pot in a rock and roll band and got in a motor vehicle accident one night with his band and got paralyzed, ended up back home in rehab, and I had to quit smoking pot. And in the rehab, one of his physicians asked him to talk to some of the other young men in

the rehab we're also paralyzed and whatnot. Does he seem to have a pretty good attitude about it, and he found meaning in helping out these other young men, and he decided to go to college. He ended up getting a master's degree in rehabilitation Kylesling. When I interviewed him, he was directing an agency for disabled people. He said, this never would have happened to me if I hadn't become paralyzed in that accident. I don't regret it at all. This life is much better than where I was headed.

So it depends. You know, you got Harold Kushner and the rest of the break parents. You've got this guy, And that wasn't the only story we've heard. You know, there's this so anyway, anyway, it depends. You got to listen to You got to listen to individuals and understand their stories and their perspective. But I tend to believe people's perspective. You know, you listen to people and you sit with them, and they're earnest and they tell you

stories like that, I believe what they're saying. So some people do say, hey, this this terrible event. I don't regret it. Other people say I would undo it in a minute. I hear you, and I appreciate that that you acknowledge that some people's experiences that they they are grateful for the event itself. So I appreciate that. Something that interests me very much is the role of culture

and context in facilitating growth, falling adversity. So I am wondering what degree you do culture shape the narration of people's stories about challenge, adversity and failure. Well, I'm not sure if this gets to your question, but I'll answer it this way that we'll go from there. As I've mentioned to you, there's you know, a lot of cultures

where post traumatic growth research has been done. And almost every day I get an email from someone somewhere in the world who is asking for permission to use the inventory or want some advice or whatnot. Often, not always, but often they are students doing their dissertations and whatnot. And they they may be in Pakistan, Indonesia, Nepal. Who knows just all kinds of places you know, it's amazing

to me. And and they're picking up on this because they see these kinds of things in their own cultures, right, and they want to learn more about it. So it seems to be quite universe now how it shows up, what domains of growth tend to happen very So for example, I have a good friend colleague, Kanataku, is Japanese, and when she does research in Japan, she finds that one particular domain of post traumatic growth does not show up much in Japan, and that's the one on personal strength.

And she tells me it's because in Japan you don't claim personal strength very much. It's a much more collectivistic culture, and you don't proclaim yourself above others, and so seeing yourself as kind of achieved more personal strength is a hard thing for a Japanese person to do. So there you start to see a cultural difference compared to Americans, who are all about you know, our rugged individualism and our egoism and all of that kind of stuff that's

that's throughout our culture. So there are some variations like this across cultures and contexts, and so growth happens in maybe slightly different ways, in different situations you know, around the world, and of course certain kinds of events might might be more stronger catalysts for certain kinds of growth

perhaps as well. So, for example, if if you have a kind of event where people come to your assistance and your aid more maybe in a natural disaster, for example, you might start to change perception of your relationships with others because you've been responded to in such positive and helpful ways. Perhaps so, the kind of trauma, the kind of culture you can create some variations on this, but generally the experience itself is very common across cultures. Thank you.

I was wondering about that. Another thing I was wondering about is the link between post traumatic growth and PTSD. Can you have both at the same time? As what I'm trying to ask, Yes, absolutely, yes, yes, and so because the same kind of experiences that produce symptoms of PTSD are also the catalyst for post traumatic growth. I mean, something bad, right, something really bad, So you can get symptoms of PTSD along with post traumatic growth. And post

ramatic growth does not wipe out symptoms of PTSD. They may co occur. Right, However, when we have done our studies at Bouldercrest with people who have typically quite a few PTSD symptoms. By the time they're through our program, those symptoms have alley have alleviate, alleviated to a great degree.

They've dropped by more than half. So that's because our process of facilitating growth involves some things that at the same time address symptoms, especially a lot of emotion regulation strategies, and when people disclose to each other and support each other, that tends to alleviate a lot of the symptoms of

PTSD as well. But what's really most interesting is that the enduring symp of PTSD carry less weight for people when they also experience growth, because they say to themselves, basically, Okay, I still have some nightmares, but you know what, I'm living a life of service and meaning and purpose. So if I have to have some nightmares, I don't care as much about it. I guess it's a price I pay, and it just doesn't concern me as much because I'm doing something important with my life, so I'll put up

with some of this stuff. So PTSD and POSTMADA growth co occur. They're related, they're correlated about point two point two five, and a lot of studies because there has to be some kind of distress to create the fertile ground for post traumatic growth, So you get distress as part of the part of the picture. Thanks. Yeah, I

was wondering about that. How is your research on posta static growth or growth after positive experiences informed how you think about PTG if it's informed it at all, Well, it's I can't say I know a lot about it. I mean, I've read some of that network, but you know, I'm focused on how people change their narrative and their core belief system as a result of the experiences in the aftermath of difficulty events. So you know, when I think of this ecstatic thing, it's it's like positive events,

wonderful positive events. So to the degree that that changes your perspective in terms of core belief system or your life narrative, I can imagine how that might be. But there's something else I want to say about what post traumatic growth experience is like for people, and that is it's not an intellectual experience. It's an emotional experience. So people can I've heard this many times, people say I knew before these events in my life that I was

supposed to live life in a certain way. Or live life meaningfully, would main this or that or the other thing. But I know it differently now, I know it in a visceral way. I get it in a way that I can't go back to the old picture, the old perspective, because I've been essentially changed. And so if that can if a positive experience can do that, well fine. You

know there's that root to growth too. So there's a there's an article that Charles Carter wrote back in nineteen ninety eight about catastrophe theory in relation to this, and I think it's pretty interesting because catastrophe theory is built on the concepts that were applied to structures and materials, and materials can bend and then they have a point that they break, and once they break in this theory, they can't be reassembled in the same way. You know.

It's like it's forever disrupted, right. That's the way we think about this change in the belief system. You know, the old system gets broken in some essential fashion that you just can't go back to seeing life in the same way used to. This catastrophe has happened that breaks the old perspective, and now you're at a new plane, a new level and that's why for people, post traumatic growth tends to be sustainable, sustained because of that sort of that sort of experience. Do you see the pandemic

as an opportunity to category to catalyze PTG at all? Yes, for some people, you know, it depends. It depends, as a phrase that psychologists like to use a lot, Yeah, they do, because there's so many factors involved the things, right, Yeah, So you know, it depends on whether the situations in people's lives create a challenge to the core belief system of the assumptive world, the assumptions people have made about

how life is going to go. And for a lot of us, you know, we might have assumed that that in our world, our first world, that we never suffer seven hundred thousand deaths from some damn disease. We assume that, you know, we we be able to go to the hospital and get treated and instead of being turned away because it's all filled up, we always assume that, you know, we can go out and hang out with people as

we wanted to. I mean, there have been maybe a lot of assumptions we've made that that have been challenged by this. So if that has really rocked people's worlds, so they can't go back to the way they used to function. Maybe there's post traumatic growth in that. Maybe they change the way they relate to other people, Maybe they shift their life in new directions. You know a lot of people are quitting jobs and stuff like that.

I read a little blurb in the New York Times, and I think it was just today about the great resignation. People resigning from all kinds of things, just not doing what they used to do. And maybe that's a sign of some new possibilities for people, that they create something different out of their lives. Maybe this has been a spiritual and existential change for people where they realize how vulnerable we all are. And if that's the case, maybe

you start living differently. These all kinds of things here that could be happening. We'll have to see. But for some people the pandemic hasn't changed things much. For other people it's been devastating, and for others it's been transformative. Yet it's right, you know, well, I want to end this interview today by just getting to the practical level. What are some tips or you know, how is PTG

best facilitated? What have you found in your research. Well, if we look at what we've done at Bouldercrest, here's the facilitation process that we understand it. First, people have to be educated about why they've reacted the way they have psychologically and physiologically to the events that they've encountered. So it's important understand that it's important to understand the core belief process of disruption and to see the possibility of growth, to get a sense that that could be.

In fact, when people apply or a program, that's one of the questions we ask them, can you see possibly into the future anything better for yourself than what you've been through? So there's that emotional regulation. People have to be able to regulate their emotions enough so that they can more deliberately think through reconstructing their core beliefs, figuring out what to believe, what makes sense to them, get past a lot of rumination that's very intrusive, and be

more deliberate and reflective about their thinking process. So they've got to have some good emotional regulation strategies. And then they have to be able to disclose or express themselves in some way to get what's inside outside in some fashion can start to recreate some understanding of their lives, how they got to where they are, and where their

life may be going. So they have a narrative that makes sense, and they can see a future for themselves, and that future should include some way to be of service in the world, some way to do something useful to benefit other people, not just live for themselves, because out of that work of service, people are energized. I mean those people. I mean it's commonplace for people to say that when they give and they help, they feel like they get more out of it than the people

that they help. So it's energizing, it's meaningful, is a sense of purpose. People want to continue to do these things that are that feel so good good so that that continues that growth process into people's lives, into their futures. So that's what the process should should look like for people,

and that's that's the way we kind of organize our program. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for appearing on my podcast, but even more importantly, thank you for spearheading this whole field of investigation, which has taken off in lots of exciting directions by other researchers. I've been trying to look at this topic I'm working a book about this topic actually, and you've inspired me a lot personally, and so I just I just must thank you so much for your

time today and for all the great work you've done. Well. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I appreciate your your incisive questions and uh it's a great time to have a conversation with you. Thank you. I'm glad we finally got a chance to do it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.

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