When Hardship Doesn't Make Us Wiser: Post-Traumatic Growth

Without examining it, we often believe that suffering teaches; that if it does not break us, hardship will deepen us; and that those who have endured the most will have the most wisdom to show for it in the end. It is a comforting story, and there may be truth in it. But it is far from the whole truth, and the gap between the story and reality is something I have watched unfold within my own family.

My mother spent her life feeling cheated, and the wound had a source. When I was still an infant, her brother, ten years her senior, died by suicide. I never knew him, and I cannot pretend to know what that loss did to her in those first raw years. Looking back across her whole life, I see that she never found a way through it. The grief did not soften into something she could carry; it hardened into a sense that she had been singled out for unfair treatment, that more had been owed to her than life had paid. That orientation ran beneath nearly everything for as long as I knew her. My mother was in a serious car accident just after I turned eighteen, and she suffered brain damage from it for the rest of her life. For more than thirty years afterward, nearly every conversation we had took a particular shape, typically focused on what I owed her, how I had fallen short, and what I should do differently because of the effect it had on her. I cannot fully separate the woman from the injury, and I have stopped trying to; perhaps the accident sharpened what was already there, or perhaps it simply gave a long-standing disposition a new place to live. What I can say plainly is that neither the early loss nor the later injury softened or opened her. Each seemed instead to confirm a story she had been telling for a very long time.

Years later, I faced my own confrontation with a body that would no longer cooperate. In November 2019, severe spinal nerve damage left me unable to do the most basic things for myself, dependent on others, consumed by pain, and forced to ask what my life and worth amounted to if I could no longer produce, achieve, or even move. I would not wish that experience on anyone, nor would I trade it back. It became the hinge on which a more honest and meaningful life turned.

Same family. Two injuries to the body and the nervous system. Two kinds of hard, and two utterly different outcomes. The difference was not in the severity of what happened. It was in something harder to name, and it is what the research on growth after adversity has spent thirty years trying to understand.

What the Research on Post-Traumatic Growth Actually Says

In the mid-1990s, the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun named a phenomenon clinicians had long observed but rarely studied: that some people, after profound difficulty, report genuine positive change. They called it post-traumatic growth and developed an instrument to measure it across five domains, including a renewed appreciation for life, deeper relationships, a sense of personal strength, openness to new possibilities, and spiritual or existential change (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996).

The finding that made the work matter was simply that growth after hardship is real and reasonably common, not a consolation prize people invent to feel better. But two things in the research are easy to miss, and both are directly relevant to my mother and me.

The first point is that growth is neither universal nor obligatory. It is one possible response to adversity, not the expected one, and certainly not a measure of character. Many people endure terrible things and do not emerge transformed, and there is nothing wrong with them for that. Research also shows that growth and ongoing distress can coexist; the presence of one does not cancel the other. Anyone who has been told that their pain should have made them stronger by now knows how cruel the growth story becomes when it curdles into an expectation.

The second is subtler, and it is where my training as an anthropologist makes me cautious about the very framework I am describing.

Whose Growth Are We Measuring?

The idea that suffering can be followed by growth is not a Western invention. It runs through Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and countless other traditions that have held for millennia that hardship and flourishing are bound together. But the way modern psychology measures growth is another matter. As a careful review by Splevins and colleagues put it, the concept may be cross-culturally valid at an abstract level, while its operationalization quietly imposes the assumptions of a Western, individualist society (Splevins et al., 2010).

Consider what the standard measures reward. Personal strength. Self-reliance. The individual who reframes adversity and moves forward. These are real goods, but they are also culturally specific, the virtues of a society that prizes autonomy and the self-authored life. In other cultural worlds, the deepest response to suffering might be a quieter integration into family or community, an acceptance rather than a triumph, a deepening of obligation rather than a discovery of independent strength. Measured by the standard instrument, those responses can look like an absence of growth, even though they are nothing of the kind.

I raise this not to dismiss the research, which I find genuinely valuable, but because it changes how I hold my mother’s story. She came of age in a particular time and place, shaped by expectations about what a life should look like and what she was owed. To say she did not grow, by the standard the literature uses, is to measure her against a template built in a world that was not entirely hers. The grievance she carried, that sense of having been shortchanged, left little room for the kind of reappraisal that growth requires. The injury did not create that orientation. It met it and never had cause to leave.

What Made the Difference

If the severity of hardship does not determine whether we grow from it, what does? The research points, again and again, not to the event itself but to what happens in its aftermath: whether a person can engage with what occurred rather than merely defend against it, whether they can revise the story they tell about their life, and, crucially, whether they can find a way to turn toward others and purpose rather than inward toward grievance. In this account, growth is less about the wound than about the stance we take toward it.

That is the difference I saw in my own family. My mother’s suffering arrived in a life already organized around what she had not received, and it confirmed rather than disrupted that story. Mine arrived in a life I had been building around achievement and doing, and it shattered that story so completely that I had no choice but to build a truer one. I do not say this to claim credit. I had advantages she did not, including the simple luck of meeting my hardship at a point when I was ready to be undone by it. She died in early 2022, and I find I can hold both things at once now: clear sight of the grievance that shaped her, real tenderness for the loss beneath it, and an understanding of how hard it must have been to live a whole life inside that grief. But the contrast taught me something I carry into my work: the event is rarely the thing. The stance is the thing.

If You Are in the Middle of Something Hard

If you are reading this during a difficult season, I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying you should be growing. I am not saying that if you are still in pain, you have somehow failed in your suffering. The research would not say that, and neither would I. Growth, when it comes, arrives on its own schedule, often only in hindsight, and it never erases the cost.

What I will offer is the one question that, based on research and my own family, seems to matter most. It is not about the hardship itself. It is about the stance:

As you carry what you are carrying, are you turning it over in a way that keeps the story open, or in a way that quietly closes it down?

There is no right answer to hold this morning. It is simply a question worth living with, because the direction we lean toward over months and years often becomes the path we follow.

A gentle note

If you are in an acute crisis, a coach is not the first call; please reach out to a therapist, a doctor, or a crisis line in your country. If you are unsure where to turn, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential helplines in more than 130 countries. Coaching is for the longer work of meaning and direction, not for emergencies. If you are past the acute stage and beginning to ask what this chapter of your life is asking of you, I am glad to sit with that question.

→ Book a free 30-minute conversation at stepsalongtheway.global.

Sources: Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305

Splevins, K., Cohen, K., Bowley, J., & Joseph, S. (2010). Theories of posttraumatic growth: Cross-cultural perspectives. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 15(3), 259–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/15325020903382111