I am not a psychologist. I am a former athlete who lived through a version of it. But I think the concept deserves a clear explanation, because it gets misunderstood constantly, and understanding it correctly matters if you are trying to lead a team, coach an athlete, or just make sense of your own worst day.
Post Traumatic Growth Definition
Post traumatic growth, often shortened to PTG, is a term coined by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in the 1990s. It describes positive psychological change that some people experience as a result of struggling with highly challenging, traumatic events. It is not the absence of pain. It is not “everything happens for a reason.” It is the specific, researched observation that some people who go through severe adversity come out the other side with a genuinely different, often stronger, relationship to their own life.
Researchers generally describe PTG across a few domains: a greater appreciation for life, deeper relationships with other people, a stronger sense of personal strength, new possibilities for what your life or career could look like, and in some cases a shift in spiritual or existential perspective. Growth after trauma is not one feeling. It shows up as a change in how a person actually operates.
PTG vs PTSD
This is the part that gets confused the most, so I want to be direct about it. PTG and PTSD are not opposites, and they are not mutually exclusive. A person can experience post traumatic stress disorder and post traumatic growth at the same time, or in sequence, or PTG can emerge specifically because of the struggle that PTSD symptoms create.
PTSD is a diagnosable condition involving intrusive symptoms, avoidance, and changes in mood and reactivity following a traumatic event. It is real, it is common, and it deserves proper clinical treatment when it shows up. PTG is not a replacement for that treatment, and it is not something a person can simply choose instead of struggling. The research is consistent on this point: growth tends to come out of the struggle itself, not around it. You do not skip the hard part to get to the growth. The hard part is usually where the growth comes from.
Can Trauma Make You Stronger
This is the question underneath all of it, and the honest answer is: sometimes, for some people, under some conditions. Trauma does not automatically make anyone stronger. Plenty of people go through terrible events and do not come out with growth attached to it, and that is not a personal failure. It is just not automatic.
What the research points to is that growth tends to follow when a person is able to process what happened rather than suppress it, when they have some kind of support system around them, and when they eventually find a way to make meaning out of what occurred, even partial meaning. That last part is where my own experience lines up most closely with what the research describes.
My Own “Now What”
In 2021, I crashed at 40 miles per hour at the Tokyo Olympics. The crash caused a traumatic brain injury and left me unconscious for 5 days. It ended my career as a BMX racer, a career where I had held a top 5 world ranking for over 10 years and represented the United States more than 50 times across over 25 countries, three years after winning Olympic gold in Rio.
I did not process that crash quickly, and I did not find meaning in it right away. For a while there was only the question, now what. That question is uncomfortable to sit with. It is also, I think, the actual starting point of growth after trauma, because it forces you to stop looking backward at what you lost and start looking at what is still in front of you.
What I eventually built out of that crash were three things I now think about constantly: gratitude, resilience, and perspective. Gratitude for a career and a life I almost did not get to keep. Resilience that I did not know I had access to until I had no other option. Perspective on what actually matters when the plan you built your whole identity around disappears in a single moment.
That experience is also where my thinking on leading through sudden, forced change comes from. A crash is one version of forced change. A layoff, a diagnosis, a market collapse, a sudden leadership transition, these are all different versions of the same core event: the plan stops working and you have to build a new one in real time.
Applying This to Teams, Not Just Individuals
Leaders often ask me how to help a team recover after a hard year, a failed launch, or a sudden disruption. The instinct is usually to move past it quickly and get back to normal. I would push back on that instinct. Teams that are given room to actually process a hard event, name what it cost them, and then deliberately look for what they can build from it tend to come out stronger than teams that are told to just move on. That is the work I do with organizations as a resilience speaker.
That is the difference between performing under pressure when the stakes feel irreversible and actually being equipped for it. Growth is not automatic, for a person or a team. It is a process, and it starts with a willingness to sit with the question instead of rushing past it.
If you are looking for a keynote speaker who can bring this idea to your team, built around a real story of performing under pressure and leading through sudden, forced change, you can learn more about my talks at connorfields.com.
– Connor Fields
