Someone survives a serious illness. Later, they say they don't regret it, not because the illness was good, but because of who they became afterward. A person leaves an abusive relationship, and years later, describes a level of self-trust they never had before. Neither of them is pretending that the hard part didn't happen.

Both are describing something real that a lot of therapists see after trauma. It has a name: post-traumatic growth which is positive psychological change that can develop after someone struggles with a highly stressful or traumatic event. It's a real, researched concept, first described by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in the mid-1990s. In this post, we'll look at what post-traumatic growth actually is, the stages people tend to move through, how it differs from resilience, and why it's not the same as pretending trauma was a good thing.