How You and Your Clients can Benefit from Post Traumatic Growth (PTG)

For more than 25 years, I have been helping my clients benefit from PTG, Post-Traumatic Growth.

As human beings, all of us deal with traumas, both big and small. A broken heart, lost love, being fired from a job or being downsized, taking a big loss on an investment, being in an auto accident or other serious accident, a major health problem or helping a parent, child or loved one deal with a major health challenge, a home foreclosure, a business failure, bankruptcy, a dealing with drugs or alcohol, sexual or emotional trauma, dealing with along an traumatic lawsuit, the death of a loved one—the list goes on and on.

Few of us are exempt from trauma and the exemption usually has an expiration date.

Even the rich and famous experience trauma.

As a Coach, many of your clients are dealing with some form of trauma in their lives or are trying to overcome past traumas. That’s one of the reasons they come to you or are referred to you.

And it is why having a range of approaches for dealing with trauma is so important.

PTG vs. PTSD.

PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is very real and deserves the extensive attention and study it has received over the years.

In earning my Ph.D. in Psychology, I was trained in how to treat PTSD. If you have been trained in psychology, counseling or coaching, you have also been trained to identify and work with PTSD.

I've had a number of clients over the years who have had to deal with very serious PTSD caused by psychological trauma, physical trauma, financial trauma, legal trauma and other forms of trauma and/or a combination of different types of trauma.

But what about Post-Traumatic Growth?

How is it that some people are able to go through what would seem to be devastating trauma and come out stronger for it?

Delving into Post-Traumatic Growth can be truly mind-expanding and liberating.

A very simple example of PTG is weight lifting. By subjecting our muscles to the trauma of lifting heavy weights, our muscles and bodies grow stronger. They grow stronger post-trauma.

If you sat on a sofa all day watching TV or scrolling your cell phone so that your body would not experience trauma, youwould quickly become weaker.

People who care about their health physically traumatize their bodies on a regular basis through walking, running, swimming, lifting weights, hiking in the out-back, climbing mountains and more to make their bodies stronger.

We can seek out many other forms of trauma to make ourselves stronger in every area of our lives. Think about that. The implications are mind-boggling.Let me provide you with a few examples.

Loneliness is a major problem in many countries of the world. One of the primary reasons many people are so lonely is that they fear the trauma of rejection and they may be dealing with PTSD from previous social or romantic rejection.

And so they end up staying in their house or apartment and the loneliness and the feeling of not being needed or wanted gets worse.They may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs to deal with their feelings of loneliness and boredom.

As a baby step tapping into the power of PTG, they may join a social media platform to deal with their feelings of loneliness.A bigger step would be to join a dating site. Another big step would be to join community groups, local groups or to volunteer at a local charity.

One of my clients had gone through a long and traumatic divorce.“I never want to go through that again,” he told me.So he took it easy on himself for years by spending a lot of time at home and ended by being desperately lonely.

His sales job brought him into daily contact with many people. I explained the concept of Post Traumatic Growth to him and we talked about the benefits of making his sales calls about more than the products and of really getting to know the human side of the person he was calling on.

Of course, this will not always be successful. Some people want to keep everything “strictly business.”But most people were very receptive to his new approach.He found common interests with a number of people he was calling on.As he got more comfortable with reaching out on a human level, he started getting a few invitations to dinners, parties, one guy invited him on a fishing trip, he went on hikes with a couple of people (a shared interest).And he started getting a few dates.That was not his goal, but that is what happened.Loneliness became a thing of the past.

He had a few experiences that were not that fulfilling it was no big deal. He gained from Post Traumatic Growth.

An additional benefit of his reaching out to more and more people on a human level, not just as a sales professional, is that he formed deeper bonds with people, developed more trust, and his sales increased.

Suddenly he was not seen as just a salesman or a product pusher but as a knowledgeable and caring human being.

Prior to meeting me, a different client had endured business failure, bankruptcy and the loss of his home through foreclosure. His previous psychologist had been focusing on PTSD to help him deal with the trauma of what he had been through.While beneficial, it did not produce the results he wanted.

I changed the focus to Post Traumatic Growth and helped him with a series of marketing projects that have enabled him to grow his new business to more than $1 million in annual revenue.Not every marketing initiative has been successful (that is the trauma part) but enough have been that he is now able to bring home nearly $500,000 a year in net income.

We have a choice as to how we can look at and deal with trauma in our lives and in the lives of our clients. The approach we take determines the outcomes we get.

Some forms of trauma can actually be good for us and make us much stronger physically, mentally and psychologically. Especially if we have the right mindset.

What forms of trauma have you sought out to become even stronger as a person and as a coach?