As a trained and active physicist, I cannot help but consider psychology a pseudo-science, or at best a work in progress.
One of the main reasons is that psychologists are not rigorous. They are not into the scientific method in the full sense.
And so this detracts from the viability and applicability of discoveries in psychology and has created the famous replication crisis. More than 80% of the results of scientific studies and experimentscannot be replicated.
And here is an example, the topic of today's video. Trauma. Trauma and growth. Post-traumatic growth, to more precise or PTG
I claim in this video that post-traumatic growth is an oxymoron and it is an oxymoron because of the laxity with which the researchers and scholars or so-called scholars have treated the word trauma. They did not bother to define it appropriately.
Okay let's go back one stage what is trauma
When reality clashes brutally, relentlessly, cruelly, with our beliefs and our values, our narratives and our perceptions. When there is this conflict or war between reality and us, this yields or generates trauma. When reality contradicts the values, the beliefs, the observations, the narratives, the data that go into the models within our minds.
Our minds can be perceived as libraries or described as libraries. Libraries of models. Each model pertains to a specific aspect of reality.
So for example, we have a theory of mind, a model or a theory about what makes other people tick, the psychology of other people, and the minds of other people. We have the internal working model, or IWM. That is a model that deals with attachment and with relationships, especially intimate relationships, but not only, all interpersonal relationships. So there's a model for that.
You've all heard of self-image or self-perception. That's a model. It's a model that incorporates proprioception, your experience of your bodies. This model, self-image and self-perception, incorporates information about yourself, emanating from the inside or from the outside.
And so there's a model that represents you and your place in the world.
Today in modern robotics, we are trying to teach robots to become more human-like, more android or humanoid, by presenting into their coding, into their programs, all kinds of models. A model of the world. A model of the robot within the world. A model of the robot only. A model of the minds of other people, etc.
We are trying to recreate in robots the process that happens naturally in the human mind between the ages of one and more or less six, the formative years.
These models are crucial. These models give us a sense of safety, stability, predictability, determinacy, certainty.
We are able to function in the big wide world and to do so without undue levels of anxiety, without getting paralyzed, because we rely on these models. We trust them.
And it is when the world pushes back, when reality undermines these models, exposes them as fallacious or partial or inefficacious or dysfunctional.
At that point, we have a trauma.
Trauma is not the same as crisis or life crisis. Trauma is not the same as change and transformation.
They're not the same and we'll come to it in a minute.
There is no trauma when the conflict between reality and our models of reality is partial. There is no trauma where there is no conflict between our reality and our models of reality.
Even if we were to witness a catastrophic event, a horrendous, incomprehensible chain of circumstances, even then we are unlikely to be traumatized if we had expected this to happen.
Anything that happens in reality and is predicted by the models in our mind, anything that happens in reality and is an integral part of the narratives that together comprise our identity, who we are, anything that happens in reality, anything, never mind how brutal, or sadistic, or cruel, how dangerous, or terrifying, or anything that happens in reality, and sits well with the way we have perceived reality and the way we have anticipated reality.
And at that point, there's no trauma.
Trauma is the unexpected. Trauma is the sudden. Trauma is the surreal.
Trauma is when everything breaks down, when you can no longer make sense of your environment, of who you are, of your relationships, of other people.
This incomprehensibility, this lack of meaning, structure, order, direction, purpose, this is what generates trauma, as Victor Frankl had observed long ago.
Trauma is not an objective thing. Trauma is a subjective thing.
The same event can traumatize two people and leave eight people utterly untouched or mildly discomforted.
Why the disparate reactions? Why do some people get traumatized while others do not?
Because they have different models, different models of other people, different models of other people's minds, different theories of mind, different internal working models, different expectations from relationships, a different perception of the universe and how it works, a different apprehension of their place in the world, etc.
These disparities, these discrepancies between models and between narratives among people, predispose people to survive events that otherwise would be traumatic or to get traumatized.
Trauma is a predisposition only in the sense that it is embedded, the potential for trauma is embedded in your values, your beliefs, the narratives you tell yourself and you're embedded in, and the way you perceive other people, yourself in relation to other people, yourself in the world, your place in the world, and the world at large.
If you, for example, perceive the world as a hostile, dangerous Darwinian place, then you're very unlikely to be traumatized.
If the way you perceive other people is as envious, malevolent, malicious, conspiring, if you expect the worst from other people you're very unlikely to be traumatized.
If you perceive yourself in a certain way you're likely to be traumatized and if you perceive yourself in a different way with the same event in the same set of circumstances you are unlikely to be traumatized.
Trauma comes from the inside, not from the outside.
And the same person can be traumatized at age 20 and go through the same events at age 50 and be indifferent to them.
So the potential for trauma evolves, evolves with time and is reflective of personal growth, maturation, the phases of the lifespan, knowledge accumulated, experience, and so on, so forth.
It's not a constant. It's not like you have the same potential to be traumatized at any age in your life. That's not true.
So, to summarize, trauma is a reaction to an irreconcilable, irresolvable conflict between reality and how you have perceived reality.
Your perception of reality, your narratives, your theories, your models break down, disintegrate in the face of the harshness and the relentlessness and the factuality of the world.
The world is there and there's nothing you can do about it.
I said that trauma is not the same as a life crisis or a personal failure.
Traumas are unexpected, surreal, inexplicable, while life crises are totally anticipated. They are known facts of human life.
Failures are built into motivation. Failures are within the range of expected outcomes.
So failures and life crises are integral parts of the fabric of the lifespan. We go through life fully expecting losses, crises, failures, defeats, humiliation, abandonment, and rejection. All these things are expected.
Trauma is never.
The force of the trauma is its suddenness, its abruptness. It is a concentration of force in a point-like area.
And that's why traumas break you apart.
Everything you believed in, everything you thought impossible and possibletraumas break you apart.
Everything you believed in, everything you thought impossible and possible, everything you thought you knew about other people and about the world at large, and about yourself, and about your place in the world, and your relationships with people, everything that has kept you going, everything that is imbued your life with a modicum of certainty and predictability, everything is gone in an instant.
Trauma is instantaneous.
Now, of course, we do have situations like complex trauma.
But complex trauma, first of all, is clinically distinguished from trauma. They're not the same.
And even complex trauma is merely all the elements of trauma extended over a long period of time.
Complex trauma is no more understandable than trauma. It's no less surreal than trauma, is no more real than trauma, and is no less challenging to who you think you are to your identity than trauma.
All forms of trauma negate you, vitiate you, ruin you, your world and your understanding of other people.
It's as if you find yourself afloat, adrift, untethered, and you have to reinvent, reinvent everything from scratch.
You have to recreate a theory of mind.
You have discovered things about people. And now you need to modify your theory of mind, your other models about relationships and about who you are, and so on so forth.
This is the force and power of trauma.
Now of course, trauma, life crisis, failure, defeat, rejection, abandonment, humiliation. They all generate and gender, foster and yield change. They all change agents.
All these result in a transformation to a lesser degree or to a total degree.
But transformation usually is inevitable in the wake of these events, life events.
But there's a big difference, and this is where post-traumatic growth fails because it doesn't make this difference.
Its lexicology, its terminology is flawed, fundamentally.
Crisis, failure, defeat, they lead to adaptive change, they lead to growth, they lead to maturation, they lead to development.
Crisis, failure, defeat, abandonment, rejection, humiliation, all these.
They force you to reconsider yourself, your options, your place in the world, other people, reality, and rewrite your narrative.
That is adaptive change. It's a positive adaptation. It leads to personal growth, development, an increase in personal autonomy and independence, agency, and self-efficacy.
Trauma does exactly the opposite.
Trauma results in maladaptive change, regression, dysfunction.
Trauma never leads to growth, never leads to development. Trauma is bad for you, period. It regresses you, it infantilizes you, it renders you helpless and hopeless and broken and damaged and hurt and paralyzed and ossified.
Trauma stunts growth, retards growth.
Trauma has an adverse impact on growth, personal growth and personal development.
It is inversely correlated, negatively correlated with growth and personal development, it is inversely correlated, negatively correlated, with growth and development.
And the work of these scholars and their idea of post-traumatic growth has to do with a confusion.
They confuse, repeatedly.
Life crises with trauma.
Failure with trauma.
Narcissistic injury with narcissistic modification, which is a form of trauma.
They confuse all these concepts.
They're not rigorous. they're not scientists. it's shocking. it's first year stuff in physics.
The term post-traumatic growth was coined by the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
Tedeschi suggested that upwards of 80%, maybe 90% of survivors of what he called trauma, reported at least one aspect of growth, for example, a renewed appreciation of life, and so on so forth.
And I will deal today with his work, and I'll mention his predecessors, because basically, Tedeschi and Calhoun didn't come up with anything new.
They just came up with a catchy title, actually.
As you can see, I hold a very dim view about their work.
And to trace the intellectual antecedents and roots of post-traumatic growth, and of course it's an oxymoron, it's a misnomer. It's not post-traumatic growth.
But to trace the intellectual path that led them to this discovery, we need to go a bit further into another continent, Europe, and to a concept, the concept of positive disintegration.
Positive disintegration.
Positive disintegration was proposed by a brilliant intellectuals, philosophers, psychologists and so on so forth, who is much ignored and much abandoned and utterly unknown in the United States, among other places.
And it is a huge pity because he has been definitely a genius.
And that is Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychologist.
His theory of positive disintegration postulated that symptoms such as psychological tension and anxiety are signs of what he called positive disintegration.
Now again, it's very important to distinguish stress, anxiety, tension, all these are not the same as trauma. They are indicators, symptoms of crisis, impending on looming threat, defeat, failure, humiliation, rejection, abandonment, shame, you name it.
But they're not trauma. They're absolutely not trauma.
So in this sense, Kazimir Dabrowski's work is far more scientific, far more well-founded, and far more rigorous and unambiguous than the work of Tedeschi and Calhoun.
Dabrowski suggested that stress, anxiety, tension could lead to adaptations, not maladaptations, not negative adaptations, but positive adaptations, the kind of adaptations that allow us to mature, to grow, to cope better with the environment, to survive, to become fit, so, survival of the fittest, and so on so forth.
But they do this, stress, anxiety, and tension, accomplish this personal growth and personal development.
They accomplish this via disintegration.
Whereas Tedeschi and Calhoun's work is an integral part of what is known as positive psychology, Dabrowski is far more realistic, being European and Polish, I must say. He is much less of an optimist when it comes to human nature, and he definitely would not have countenanced positive psychology, I want to believe.
Positive disintegration. Sounds like an oxymoron or contradiction in terms, but it's not.
Disintegration is a precondition for reintegration. Deconstruction is the first phase of construction.
You need to move the furniture around in your mind and at first it looks like chaos, but then you rearrange them and in your living room has a new look. Your mind feels fresh, ready for new challenges.
The theory of positive integration suggests that when an individual rejects previously adopted values related to physical survival, their place in society, you name it, when previous values are rejected, owing to stressful, anxiety-inducing new information, this forces the individual to adopt new values.
And these new values are improved by definition because they reflect additional information.
So the sequence is this.
You're happy go lucky. You go through your routine, your daily routine you think you know the world you trust other people because you have a theory of mind you know your place you have aspirations and ambitions which rely on your self-image and perception in a sense of self-worth and let's assume that you're mentally healthy you regulate internally you don't depend on other people for the regulation of your moods and your emotions, all is well, and suddenly there's a crisis.
You're fired. Your wife files for a divorce or cheats on you. I mean, something horrible happens. There's a life crisis. You lost all your money in the stock exchange. There's a life crisis.
At that point, most people draw back and soul search. They review their lives. They ask themselves, where did I go wrong? What did I misperceive or misapprehend? How should I have acted based on which values?
And because there's new information, the information pertaining to the crisis, the information pertaining to the mishap or the disaster, because there's new information, the answers to the soul searching questions are likely to be of higher value than the previous answers.
The more information you accumulate, the more experience you have, the better your answers are. The more appropriate, the more adaptive, the more factual, they correspond to reality much better.
So when an individual is forced by dint of external circumstances to reject previously adopted values and adopt new values, these new values are based on the higher possible version of who the individual can be.
It's a positive adaptation in the sense that individual is forced to grow, to develop in order to accommodate the new information, the new circumstances, to adapt to the new environment with new people maybe.
Rather than regard disintegration as a negative state, the theory of Dabrowski proposes that it is a transient state which allows an individual to grow towards some kind of personality ideal, comparable vaguely to the ego ideal.
But this is not the pursuit of the ego ideal compulsively, narcissistically.
This is brought about by life itself. It's an integrative process. It's a good process.
It's not that you sit back in your armchair and you say, okay, I'm going to be the president of the United States or multi-billionaire or lead armies in battle. It's not this kind of grandiose daydreaming that results in a conflict between you and your ego ideal.
In the case of positive disintegration, you become a better version of yourself with each crisis, with each life crisis.
Whenever you experience stress, anxiety, and tension, these modify who you are and what you are capable of. They rewrite your narrative. They teach you new values. They create new emphasis and your beliefs accommodate all these novelty. And you become a better version.
Now when I say better, this is not moralistic. It's not better in the sense that you are more ethical. It's better in the sense that you're more self-efficacious. You're more agentic. You're more independent. You're more autonomous. You're more powerful, it empowers you.
The theory of Dabrowski stipulates that individuals have a development potential. Some of them have low development potential and some of them have high development potential.
Dabrowski calls it over-excitability have high development potential.
Dabrowski calls it over excitability, high development potential. And these people have a higher chance of reintegrating at a higher level of development after they disintegrate.
So Dabrowski regards all this integration is positive. He says that what drives us to evolve, to become better versions of ourselves, to become more self-efficacious, to accomplish things, to go places, what drives the adventure of life is disintegration owing to stress, anxiety, and tension.
But some people are more capable than others to reintegrate, to reinvent themselves, to recreate their beliefs and values, and some people are less capable. Some people are over-excitable and some people are under-excitable to use Dabrowski's language.
These integrative processes need not be traumatic. And it's a big difference between Dabrowski and Tadeusiewicz. They need not be traumatic.
Even in what Dabrowski calls level four and level five, trauma is not a precondition.
Now, Dabrowski was one of a family, a group of scholars, who came up with the idea of deconstruction or disintegration as a precondition for reintegration, reinvention, recreation and reconstruction. It's a good take.
So for example, there's Crystal Park. Crystal Park proposed what she called the stress-related growth model.
And Crystal Park highlighted the sense of meaning in the context of adjusting to challenging and stressful situations.
She said that stress and challenges, anxiety that is attendant upon stress, the tension of all this, they actually push you to derive a sense of meaning.
Meaning is an epiphenomenal. It's an emergent phenomenon. It is when you combine stress, anxiety and so on, suddenly your life acquires meaning.
Another model was Joseph and Linley's model of adversarial growth. Adversarial growth.
They studied psychological well-being and according to their model, whenever an individual is experiencing a challenging situation, individuals can integrate the experience into their current belief systems, the current worldviews, their current models.
So they modify the external information to fit into their internal models, or they modify their internal models to fit the unmodified external information.
Of course, when you positively accommodate information, when you assimilate it in a way that modifies prior beliefs, this is psychological growth.
Adversity leads to psychological growth via the modification of internal models.
This is the power of input from the outside, of feedback, of data.
If you reject it, if you reframe it if you falsify if you ignore it just in order to preserve your storyline, your narrative, your beliefs, your values, if there is a confirmation is a confirmation bias in an echo chamber and you don't want ever to modify your rigid, that's the way it is, that's the way who you are, and it must be, therefore, true, this is a great definition of narcissism.
Healthy people change all the time in response to cues and stimuli from the environment.
Back to post-traumatic growth.
Post-traumatic growth is also about change, and it assumes that change is positive in the wake of trauma.
But as I said, in Tedeschi's and Calhoun's original work, there is a god-awful confusion, almighty confusion between trauma and life crisis.
Traumatic events are not the same as life crisis, as I've explained earlier.
So there's a lot of hybrid thinking in their work.
For example, they say that at the same time, you could endure and experience post-traumatic stress disorder and grow and evolve and develop personally.
Anyone who has ever worked with patients with post-traumatic stress disorder can tell you how counterfactual this is, how nonsensical this is.
Post-traumatic stress disorder precludes personal growth and development. We need to get rid of it first before we can even imagine a positive adaptation.
And yet in their work, the two things go in hand in hand. The distress that is an integral part of PTSD actually drives personal growth and development.
And this, I'm sorry to say is nonsense, completely untrue.
Adversity can of course yield change. Change can be unintentional, unconscious or intentional. The change can be in oneself, the change can be in one's social circle. One can even attempt to change the world by relocating or, I don't know, changing one's lifestyle. Change is a reaction to change. Life crisis is a change. Trauma is a change. All these are changes.
But we react to trauma either by freezing or by fleeing or by developing dysfunctional maladaptations in a variety of ways.
For example, denying reality. For example, flashbacks, revividness, where we confuse reality with memory. For example, fantasy defense in the case of narcissism, which is a post-traumatic condition.
Trauma never leads to good places. It never ever leads to growth and development. Whoever says this knows nothing about trauma and, I'm sorry to say, human beings and psychology.
Adversity has multiple forms. When adversity is totally unexpected and surreal, it's trauma.
But adversity could be a life crisis, could be a transformation, which is not a life crisis, but still challenges the narrative and the values and the beliefs of the individual.
There are many forms of adversity and yes it is true that adversity frequently leads to growth and development when it's not traumatic.
So Calhoun and Tedeschi say that post-traumatic growth can in fact coexist with PTSD.
Now, Calhoun and Tedeschi described five categories of growth. And here, their contribution is substantial.
They misidentify the etiology. These five categories of growth and personal development, they are reactive, but they are not reactive to trauma. They are reactive to adversity, other types of adversity, not trauma.
And still, they were the ones who in the 1990s and most notably in 2006 identified five categories of growth that occur in reaction to most types of adversity.
So people recognize and embrace new opportunities. Survivors find stronger relationships with loved ones as well as with others who have suffered the same way. People cultivate inner strength through the knowledge that they have overcome tremendous hardship. And people gain a deeper appreciation for life. And finally, people's relationship to religion and spirituality changes and evolves.
Now, this is all true with life crisis and in this sense Tedeschi and Calhoun made a contribution by mapping out the growth, personal growth and development after having experienced this kind of adversity and challenges and so.
When we are shaken by life crisis, everything falls apart. Our beliefs crumble. Our values are in doubt. We no longer trust our capacity to gauge reality properly, impaired reality testing.
And above all, we find it difficult to self-regulate our moods, our emotions, our sense of self-worth. When we are forced to think in completely new ways about ourselves, about our interpersonal relationships, about the world, about society, about our culture, everything we have held dear.
And this, of course, generates a lot of emotionality, it could lead to emotional dysregulation.
When you confront adversity, you try to make sense of everything that has happened, your resources are taxed to the maximum and you may find yourself coming up short, unable to make the transition.
Now, the good news is that should you succeed with the positive adaptation, it's usually lifelong. It's the gift that keeps giving.
Your experience crystallized and transformed into new insight is something that will benefit you throughout the lifespan. It's a cumulative thing.
These layers of experience, layers of pain, layers of hurt, layers of rejection and abandonment and humiliation, layers of crises and threats, these layers accumulate and each layer generates new knowledge, new wisdom.
And these are your endowments, these are your assets bestowed upon you by the abrasiveness and harshness of life. It is a friction with life and with peers that pushes us to grow in during our childhood and adolescence.
And actually this process continues well into adulthood and in lucky people, blessed people until the day they die.
Between half and two thirds of people who come across adversity experience a spurt of growth. And that is an impressive number.
But it takes a special kind of personality to truly benefit from a life crisis, to leverage adversity, to convert a crisis into opportunity.
You know the famous Chinese ideogram, opportunity and crisis? It's the same. It's wrong. There's no such thing. It's apocryphal. It's a nonsense story. But they should have come up with such an ideogram because every crisis is an opportunity.
Now, people who benefit the most from adversity are women. I've always claimed that women are much wiser than men. They had to be in order to survive men.
Adults, people who have experienced life crisis and adversity as adults.
That's very surprising because we used to think of children as more malleable, more amenable to change, easier to transform and influence, but not adults actually, which just goes to show you that the more you experience the slings and arrows of time and life, the more conditioned you are, the more skilled and the more ready you are to affect change in your life to grow, to evolve, and to become more self-efficacious.
When your personality includes the traits of openness to experience and extraversion, two of the five, you are much more likely to benefit and to react positively to life crisis.
Now, don't confuse post-traumatic growth with thriving, with resilience, and they're not the same.
They're not the same.
Resilience is just another name for persistence and perseverance.
And there's a video coming in the next, I think tomorrow maybe, where I discuss the differences between perseverance, persistence, stamina and so on so forth.
Resilience is all these, the ability to overcome obstacles and challenges, to respond to challenges in a constructive way, capacity to kind of survive.
I would say that resilience is survivability.
While post-traumatic growth, and again I don't like the phrase post-crisis growth, includes many other facets and many other traits and skills and capacities for example the capacity to reflect, self-reflect, grow, capacity to grow.
Some people are incapable of growth.
Shift perspectives, empathize, and so many, many additional capacities.
Resilience doesn't require these capacities.
If you survive a life crisis, I don't know, a disease, cancer or something, it may lead you to quit your job and devote your life to the fight against cancer.
This is an example. It's a new appreciation for life. It's a commitment to new values a connection to other people so this is much bigger than resilience it's not the same and thriving is yet again another concept which we're not going to right now it's not the same.
So there's a big debate in psychology about post-traumatic growth, because most of the data that was used or observed to substantiate the claim of post-traumatic growth relied on self-reporting.
People said in the wake of this trauma or this crisis or whatever, I grew up, I matured, I became a better version of myself.
But this is self-reporting. We have multiple studies, many studies that show that perceived growth and actual growth are not aligned.
We often misperceive something, some process, some internal process. We often misperceive it as growth or development when actually it's exactly the opposite.
So when scholars, experimenters, researchers rely on self-reporting, they are on quicksand, they're on very shaky ground.
People are not qualified to judge if something constitute growth or not and the subjective experience of growth has nothing to do with the objective fact of growth.
Some studies bothered to talk to family members in order to validate the self-reporting claims, but even this is dubious.
Post-traumatic growth may be just another name for coping.
Coping. People cope. They try to reconstruct shattered lives. They try to reconstruct undermined worldviews, a newfound sense of vulnerability.
It's an adoptive tool. You need to revise the narrative of your own life, your beliefs, your values, your purpose, your goals. You need to revise all these in order to return to a new equilibrium which reflects the new information from the environment, which may be adverse.
But it doesn't mean that it's an improvement or that it's a positive adaptation necessarily.
In the wake of trauma, for example, there's a lot of this going on, a lot of soul searching, readjustment of values and beliefs and so, but actually the outcome is negative. It's a negative adaptation.
There's regression, stunted growth, dysfunction.
In trauma, regression stunted growth dysfunction in trauma is the most important thing is to somehow process the experience, process it and put distance between oneself and the traumatic experience, mental distance.
And usually it takes time, so it's also temporal distance and physical distance, because there's an element of triggering involved.
It's nearly impossible to evolve, personally develop and grow when you're in the wake of trauma, let alone when you're in the throes of trauma.
Much, much later, having recovered from the trauma or somehow incorporated it, you as a survivor can ask yourself questions about life, appreciated maybe in a new way, about yourself, see yourself in a new way, about others and their role in the trauma, and so on and so forth, deepen some relationships, cancel others, maybe even develop a new sense of religiosity or spirituality if you're so inclined, although this is a form of a sign of weakness, of course.
But all this happens not because of the trauma. It happens despite the trauma. All this happens not during the trauma, as Tedeschi and Calhoun claimed.
Never. It's not true.
All these changes may happen, and very often don't, but may happen, positive changes.
Years the trauma and the trauma like the demon that it is keeps haunting you, keeps haunting the survivor, keeps pulling the survivor back, keeps regressing the survivor, keeps stunting the survivor's growth, keeps forcing the survivor to doubt his or her own sanity, perception of reality, the world, others, paranoia, you know, trauma is a bad thing.
To associate it with growth and development, maybe a bad thing as well.