Expecting people to grow after trauma can foster a “toxic cultural narrative,” some psychologists say.
presented in May in Chicago at the Association for Psychological Science conference, some researchers called findings of posttraumatic growth “largely illusory.” Growth studies suffer from serious methodological flaws, these researchers say. That includes a reliance on surveys that require people to assess their personal growth over time, a task that most people struggle with.
That yearning for positive outcomes can create “toxic cultural narratives,” says personality psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Referring to parents who lost a child in the Uvalde mass shooting, he says: “There is something grotesque about this expectation that people could come back from something like this.”A half-century ago, psychologists largely treated a person’s difficulty in rebounding from traumatic events as a personal failing.
“Posttraumatic growth is you go down to the depths and then at some later point, rise above that baseline into some other realm,” says Tedeschi, now the chair of Boulder Crest Institute for Posttraumatic Growth, an organization in Bluemont, Va., that uses research on posttraumatic growth to help combat veterans, first responders and their families.But some researchers soon began to question people’s ability to accurately respond to the growth survey..
That mismatch occurs because people are terrible at remembering how they felt in the past, says study coauthor Crystal Park, a clinical health psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. “I want to throw out the concept of people being able to accurately report that they have grown.” Meanwhile, in unpublished work, trauma researcher Adriel Boals of the University of North Texas in Denton sought to overcome what he sees as the original survey’s growth bias in a different way. He asked people whether they changed“Half the people are picking, ‘I changed despite this event,’” Boals says. That suggests that people who may report growth on the original inventory do not actually attribute that growth to the trauma but to other life experiences.
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