Post Traumatic Growth Quotes

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

There is a moment in our healing journey when our denial crumbles; we realize our experience and it's continued effects on us won't "just go away". That's our breakthrough moment. It's the sun coming out to warm the seeds of hope so they can grow our personal garden of empowerment.

post-traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit." If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

The wounded mind must be reset like a fractured bone. It cannot heal itself without spiritual realignment.

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is not a cliché but fact.

Shotton had an insatiable appetite for feedback—a quality I have seen in all the top business performers I have worked with. They have a particularly strong need for instant, in the moment feedback.

The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.

But when things go awry, business and sports superstars dust themselves off and move on.

Trauma and pain have a way of forcing you to zoom in on the heart of your life.

When an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someone who is sharing a positive experience, love and friendship increase.

We adapt to adversity by orienting to our strengths, attending to our pain, and taking charge of the narrative that defines our lives. I believe that we all have the capacity to overcome adversity. However, this requires that we have compassionate support and intelligent guidance. Our injuries do not occur in a vacuum, so our healing cannot occur in one either. Our hurts and losses need to be repaired interpersonally. We cannot heal alone.

The Reactive mode tears us down, while the Responsive mode builds us up. Adversity is certainly an opportunity to develop resilience, stress-hardiness, and even post-traumatic growth. But for a person to grow through adversity, there must also be Responsive resources present such as determination and sense of purpose. Plus most opportunities in daily life to experience and develop mental resources do not involve adversity: there is simply a moment of relaxation, gratitude, enthusiasm, self-worth, or kindness.

Sometimes, PTSD sufferers will shut out memories of painful periods in their lives and experience amnesia. Thus, a traumatized individual might not remember when his spouse died in a car accident. Another person who was abused might have gaps in her memory of childhood.

Of Post-Traumatic Growth: Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term in 1995, when they noticed that some people did not recover from their traumatic experiences in a typically resilient fashion. Rather than return to their set point, everything about them radically changed: their worldviews, their goals in life, their friendships. "It's not just bouncing back," Tedeschi explains. "Most people talk about that as resilience. We distinguish from resilience because this is transformative. " "The one thing that overwhelmingly predicts it is the extent to which you say, "My core beliefs were shaken,'" Calhoun adds. What kind of core beliefs? "The degree to which the world is just," Tedeschi says, "or that people are benevolent or that the future is something that you can control. Beliefs about, basically, how life works.

A man approached me and asked if he could sit next to me on the dock. I shrugged my shoulders. Apparently, he had been at the bar the night before and was concerned by what he had witnessed. More importantly, this complete stranger took the time to say something. He remarked that I seemed lost. I simply nodded as the tears began to pour down my checks. It was the first time I had cried in many years. He spoke about how our lives are like the boats we could see on the water. That we all need to orient toward a point on the horizon or we will hopelessly drift. He suggested that it was time for me to realize that I was here for a purpose. I listened and felt a tender release of my pain. He continued to speak about finding a balance between risk and safety. Too much risk sets us back. Too much safety and we can’t progress forward. It is remarkable how one courageous conversation can save a life. I never found out who this man by the ocean was and never saw him again. However, he helped me to discover an inner compass that would eventually help me come back to my true north. With time, therapy helped me gain traction and create more stability. Although my path forward wasn’t completely straight and narrow, I slowly began to emerge with greater confidence and hope.

Not surprisingly, people with PTSD commonly feel detached or estranged from others. People who have endured combat, rape, disaster work, and other forms of trauma often assume that they are now different and that no one could possibly relate to their experiences. They might feel that they can’t tell others about what happened or what they did for fear of judgment, and the secrets and fear of being shunned lead to their feeling disconnected from others. Because they no longer feel comfortable in social situations, they might avoid gatherings—or they might go but find no pleasure in them. Of course, to connect with others, people need to be emotionally open. This is difficult when one is still struggling to contain memories of the past.

Your past can either cripple you or empower you. You choose. You can let your feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and shame keep you working jobs that suck your soul. Or you can go out and, with a little luck and guidance, write a new story of your life. It can be post-traumatic stress or it can be post-traumatic growth that defines you. You know as well as I do that in reality you don’t have a choice. You know as well as I do that in reality you don’t have a choice. Your skeletons chase you no matter where you hide. It’s about time to find your inner strength to pull through and make something of yourself.

As with post-traumatic growth, it’s not the scare itself but the subsequent perspective shift that enhances gratitude.

Dr. Martin Seligman in his excellent book, Flourish, calls the practice of instantly finding the benefit in adversity “post-traumatic growth,” and he backs it up with rather thrilling and extensive research studies. Our society and media are fixated on post-traumatic stress because of the strong bias toward (and financial interest in) tragedy.

the main obstacle to achieving “the impossible” may be a self-limiting mind-set.

Top sports performers don’t allow themselves to be distracted by the victories or failures of others. They concentrate on what they can control and forget the rest.

Control and power can be asserted most effectively by slowing down the pace of the negotiation, actively leading counterparts into a constructive dialogue, and demonstrating genuine openness to others’ perspectives.

The only way to influence the outcome is by focusing on the things you have the power to control:

It’s imperative to recognize that you’ve done what you’ve done since your trauma simply to survive.

I even read a whole book on the psychology of post-traumatic growth, and how, in the wake of the terrible, traumatic, unfair, cruel, gaping wounds that life inflicts on us, we can become wiser and stronger than we were before.

Having a positive past depends very little on what events actually occurred. What happened to you doesn’t matter as much as what story you decide to tell yourself about what happened. What happened to you doesn’t matter as much as what emotions you feel about what happened. We get to choose what story we attach. Grief expert and psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, M.D., said, “The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision. Psychologically, the past, present, and future exist together here and now. Our present state is largely what determines those critical past narratives. With deliberate practice, you can develop the skill of positively reframing any past experience into a gain. With practice, you can get better and quicker at converting pain into growth and purpose. This is what psychologists call post-traumatic growth. Can you feel genuinely glad you went through your hardest moments? Without those, you wouldn’t know what you now know or be who you are.

After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn't until the Paris riots that she realized how much he'd changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she'd changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn't shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn't disintegrating beneath them.

They drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win, We drew a circle that took them in!

The plight of the children was particularly painful to see. They scavenged in packs and were so filthy that it was said that the only clean part of them was the whites of their eyes. Both their physical and emotional growth was stunted and they were showing symptoms of poor diet, lack of sleep and the first signs of psychological disorders which would manifest in the months and years to come. They were also suffering from what had been known as shell shock or what would later be classified as post-traumatic stress disorder. Bad teeth could be fixed and sores, tuberculosis and rickets were treatable, but emotional disorders such as depression, chronic anxiety and nervous ailments would require years of therapy and they did not belong to a generation that would have considered seeking help.

flagellation.

Experience post-traumatic growth – Incredibly, male Holocaust survivors lived longer than men of the same age who escaped Nazi rule. Despite all odds, these survivors experienced post-traumatic growth which enhanced their later years of life.

General Cornum invited a leading positive psychologist to head up the development of each course: Barbara Fredrickson for emotional fitness, John Cacioppo for social fitness, John and Julie Gottman for family fitness, Ken Pargament and Pat Sweeney for spiritual fitness, and Rick Tedeschi and Rich McNally for post-traumatic growth.

Here's the truth of the matter: growth is not the goal of grieving. Nor is it a mark that someone has grieved well. Grieving is the process of survival, resilience, rebuilding, connecting with the past, redefining your identity, recalibrating your values, and so on. Some people will experience growth as a by-product of this process, but certainly not all. And, those who do feel they've experienced growth often don't see it this way for some time after their loss. Another little-known truth is that one may feel they have experience growth in their grief yet still feel intense pain over the loss. It's important to talk about the true nature of post-traumatic growth so people understand that it's not an easy path out of or around pain. On the contrary, only through confronting and struggling with pain can such growth and transformation occur.

«THE GOOD THING ABOUT something awful happening is that you come out the other end having experienced growth. You become a better person. You become stronger. You become more accomplished. Unless you don’t. The narrative of grief and loss is that surely there has to be an upside. Resilience! Superpowers! Eternal gratefulness! Extreme compassion! An appreciation of what really matters. But what if there’s not? What if something shit just happens and then you keep being the person you always were. Just sadder. Maybe even a less-good version of yourself. Not only do people want you to experience grief and loss unscathed (move it along now, it’s getting old) you must learn from it as well.» «The world wants to see post-traumatic growth. It wants to see happy endings. A crescendo of grief and loss and pain and joy that leads to … something. Somewhere. But what if it doesn’t? What if awful things just happen because awful things just happen and we bear them? We endure.»

The Reactive mode tears us down, while the Responsive mode builds us up. Adversity is certainly an opportunity to develop resilience, stress-hardiness, and even post-traumatic growth. But for a person to grow through adversity, there must also be Responsive resources present such as determination and sense of purpose.

Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun (2004). “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,” Psychological Inquiry 15: 1–18. The researchers have a test of post-traumatic growth, called the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), that you can find online. We also recommend the excellent Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg. Also see:

Many people have heard about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but a less well-known phenomenon is post-traumatic growth. This refers to the positive changes that may occur, or that people may choose, after experiencing a crisis or trauma. Although these people have certainly suffered, they are able to grow from crisis rather than get crushed by it.5 Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived the holocaust and the loss of his family, wrote many books, including Man’s Search for Meaning. In this seminal reflection on spiritual survival, Frankl described his experiences in concentration camps and how they ultimately led him to develop further meaning in his life. “What is to give light, must also endure burning,” he wrote.