Ep #297: Creating Post-Traumatic Growth with These Powerful Sentences

Welcome to The Widowed Mom podcast, episode 297, Creating Post-Traumatic Growth with These Powerful Sentences.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects today.

Little update in my world, feeling definitely, as I record this, because it’s a little bit ahead of time, of course, grief about what’s happening with the fires in California. I imagine you might be feeling that collective sense of grief too. And also, if you are so busy with your own grief that it’s really hard to even notice the grief of others, that’s okay too, right? I just wanna normalize that. But it’s been feeling rather heavy to me and hard to watch. And I also know that post-traumatic growth is also possible for all of the people who have experienced those fires. Not that that means they will have wished for them. Not that that means they will ever have wanted them. But simply to say that they always get to be the ones as do we who get to choose how we play the cards that life deals us and what we do next.

So that’s what I want to talk to you about today. Also, my daughter is leaving again. This time she’s going to be in Colorado for the next few months and probably part of the summer. Excited for her, sad for me, trying to spend a lot of time with her and enjoying the few precious days that we have left before she goes. So that’s what’s happening in my world.

Okay. Let’s talk about creating post-traumatic growth with these powerful sentences. So post-traumatic growth, you know I am obsessed with it. You may have never heard me talk about it before if this is your first episode of the podcast, but by the end of this episode, you will know what it is. You will know what thoughts can hold you back from post-traumatic growth, what sentences can hold you back. I will give you some powerful sentences that will help you create post-traumatic growth, not because you should, but only if you want to, right? And then I’ll give you some questions that you can think about that will help.

So, before we dive in, I would love for you to follow the podcast if you haven’t already. It helps you never miss an episode. And if you find that the podcast is helpful, please take a moment to rate and review.

It makes a huge difference in helping reach more widows with this free support and I really, really want that. I asked ChatGPT the other day how many widows are in the US now and the number jumped up to 13 million. I thought it was only 11. Apparently now we’re at 13 according to ChatGPT. And if I could just reach a fraction of those women, then the widowed mom experience would be easier, and that’s what I want. So, thank you for sharing, for rating, reviewing. I very much appreciate it.

All right. First, what is post-traumatic growth? If that term is new to you, you can go to coachingwithkrista.com and click on the podcast tab and you can search post-traumatic growth and several other podcast episodes will show up in case you are interested in that. But let me just give you what you need to know.

So here’s what you need to know. Post-traumatic growth is a term that was coined in the mid 90s by a couple of researchers. Their last names were Tedeschi and Calhoun, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun. And they were studying individuals who had significant trauma and they noticed this recurring phenomenon. They noticed that some people didn’t just recover and go back to kind of their initial baseline of wellness or life satisfaction. Some people actually reported profound positive change as a result of what they had been through. Not in spite of what they had been through, but actually because of what they had decided to do with what they had been through, all right?

So this really revolutionized the way that we thought about trauma. Now at that time, we also thought about trauma as rather objective, meaning we thought that certain events were traumatic and other events weren’t. And what we now know is that that’s really not true. What’s traumatic to me might not be what’s traumatic to you, right? It actually is a very subjective experience.

But regardless, what we thought before Tedeschi and Calhoun’s work was that the best we could possibly hope for after someone experienced something traumatic was to get them back to the baseline, get them back to the level of wellness or life satisfaction that they were experiencing before the traumatic event happened. In other words, the goal was bounce back, all right?

Post-traumatic growth came along and said, no, no, we don’t have to settle for bouncing back. We can bounce forward. We can actually go on to improve our quality of life and our satisfaction with life. And the trauma doesn’t do that by itself, right? It’s not the trauma that creates the growth, it’s who we decide to be after the trauma. It’s how we decide to make sense of it. It’s what we use that event for, how we assess what’s going on in our lives and how we’re living our lives, and the changes that we then make. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

And know also that post-traumatic growth as defined by Tedeschi and Calhoun has five areas. Personal strength, meaning that we notice that we are so much more resilient and capable than perhaps we thought we were before. New possibilities, right? That something like this happens and then it opens us up to new opportunities, new paths that we maybe haven’t considered before or are now opening to consider. For me, that was a different career. That’s why I became a coach.

Post-traumatic growth might, for you, be improved relationships, right? Think about how you have already experienced changes in your relationships. Some people you thought were going to be there ghosted you. Some people that used to be important now you struggle to relate with and yet maybe you have some deeper connections with other people that you never imagined that you would. You think about your relationships differently in such a way that gives you more of what you want in the relationship department.

The fourth dimension of post-traumatic growth is appreciation for life. I know for me after Hugo died, after I came out of the intense part of that experience, I just started appreciating what before had gone unnoticed in a way that felt new and amazing to me.

And then for others, that fifth dimension is spiritual growth. So some of us develop a deeper spiritual connection. Maybe it’s a stronger faith. Maybe it’s a reevaluation of our faith and beliefs. Maybe we start noticing, oh, I didn’t actually choose these beliefs for myself and they aren’t working for me anymore. And we create something new as it relates to our spirituality. Or maybe we come out of it with an even stronger faith that we had before. Right? So these are the dimensions of post-traumatic growth. That’s how the concept came to be.

And what I want you to hear is that it is available to all of us and it is not a should. It is not morally superior. It’s just an option. And again, if you wanna learn more about post-traumatic growth, remember you can search by keyword on my website under the podcast tab and any podcast episode I’ve done about that should pop up for you so that you can listen to it. Okay?

So what I know about you, if you’re still listening, is that you either want to create post-traumatic growth, or you’re at least open to the idea that someday you will, right? And you’re probably wanting more from life than what you’re currently experiencing. So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about post-traumatic growth sentences that can help and sentences that can hold you back.

So remember, the brain is always looking for evidence of what we believe. The brain is always looking for evidence of what we think. And it’s ignoring evidence about what we don’t believe, right? That contrasts with what we believe. So it’s really important if we want to maximize the use of our brain and if we want to love life again and create post-traumatic growth, that we are thinking on purpose because our brain will always be finding things that line up and prove our own thinking true. And this really, really matters.

So here’s some examples of some sentences that could hold us back from post-traumatic growth. Life will never be as good again, so what’s the point? Ever thought that one? My best days are behind me, y’all, if I had a nickel for every time I thought that thought. I thought that thought so many times. Didn’t feel like a thought, felt like a fact. Thought it was just true. It was a thought.

But right, think about that. If my best days are behind me and that’s what I’m believing, what’s my brain showing me? Is my brain showing me anything that is to the contrary? No. It’s only showing me how good it used to be and how good it was and how happy I used to be and how it’s hard. And it’s only showing me examples of widows who had completely lackluster lives after their person died. It’s not showing me the examples of those who actually went on to create joy and fulfillment and a strong sense of purpose and self-confidence, right?

Because it will be looking for my best days are behind me. If I truly love my life, that means I’m betraying my partner. Have you had that thought? Or that means I’m doing something wrong or what will other people think? Right? Something basically it’s wrong to love my life after my person died. Some cousin thought of that.

Or maybe it’s I’ll survive, but I can’t imagine how I’d enjoy it. Like the best I can hope for is to get back to neutral. Right, the best I can hope for is to not hurt so much. But I’m probably not ever really gonna feel truly great again. These are all examples of sentences that will block us and hold us back and literally ask our brain to go find evidence of how they are true, which perpetuates them. Make sense?

Okay, so now we know what post-traumatic growth is, we know some thoughts that will hold us back from post-traumatic growth, and we know how important it is that we pick thoughts on purpose, right? Because our brain is always gonna find evidence that lines up with our thinking.

So here would be some examples of post-traumatic growth sentences. Even though I didn’t choose this, I can choose what I make of it. Grief and joy can coexist. I don’t have to choose one or the other, right? It’s not one or the other, it’s and. Grief and joy can coexist.

It’s true I won’t be the same, but it can still be a different flavor of good. It’s possible my best days are in front of me. What if that’s possible? What if you choose to believe that it’s possible that your best days are in front of you? What do you think your brain is gonna start looking for?

If other people can love life again then maybe it’s possible for me too, right? I’ve done it. Do I have something magical you don’t have? No. How many clients have I worked with who have done it? Lots. Do they have magical powers that you don’t have? No. So what if you chose to think the sentence if other people can love life again, then maybe it’s possible for me, too? What do you think your brain would start to find?

I’m the boss of the choices I make going forward no matter what has happened to me in the past. Right.

A lot of us are thinking all of these thoughts about the past or limiting our ability to believe what we might wanna believe because of what we think and have thought in the past. We’re kind of bringing that, I call it past forward thinking, right? We’re bringing our thoughts about the past or from the past into our present, which then helps us not create what we want in the future.

So what if what’s happened in the past has nothing to do with the choices that you make in the future? What doors does that open for you? I’m more resilient than I thought. Look at me, I’m still going. How does that feel when you think it? Are you giving yourself credit for your resilience with your thinking? I want you to imagine if you believed all of those thoughts. What would your brain be looking for? What would that create in your life? What doors might open?

Now growth doesn’t always happen automatically. For some people it does and that’s amazing. Sometimes it takes intention. That’s okay. Sometimes it takes effort. That’s why I do what I do, right?

So here’s some questions for you to consider. What’s one small thing that I’ve learned about myself through this experience? Because I know there are things that you have learned if you ask yourself, what values has this loss brought into focus for me? Right?

I know for me, it became very clear that I didn’t want to do my old job anymore. I valued contribution and I didn’t feel like I was making the kind of contribution that I wanted to make in that job. I didn’t care about it. It paid the bills. The people were nice, but it wasn’t the contribution that I wanted to make. And Hugo’s death brought very sharply to my attention that life is precious and short, and if contribution matters to me, then I better figure out a way to make one. And that’s why I quit my job and that’s why I do what I do now.

Now that doesn’t have to be post-traumatic growth for you. Maybe it’s a different value that you are noticing is important to you and you want to live into and be the expression of. And then the last question I want you to ask, what’s the next tiniest step that I could take to explore who I’m choosing to become now? What’s the next tiniest step I could take?

Please do not put any pressure on yourself to need all the answers right now, you do not. If one of these questions really strikes a chord, I would love for you to share it with me, send me an email, let me know what you thought, krista@coachingwithkrista.com.

But we really can use our brain to think in ways that create what we want. Post-traumatic growth is not about being grateful for your loss. It is not about thinking insincere happy thoughts. It is not about minimizing your pain. It’s about creating meaning, creating purpose, creating more of what matters to you in the life that you’re living now. And it starts with looking at the way that you think.

Of course, if you are ready to take this work further, this is what I do when Mom Goes On. This is an entire program all about helping widows love life again. And you can find the details on my website at https://www.coachingwithkrista.com. Click on the “Work With Me” tab. It’s all there for you.

If this episode helped you, it would mean so much if you would take a moment to follow the podcast, to leave a quick rating, a quick review. I read all of them. Share it with someone who might need it. That’s how we can make sure more widows find this kind of support, and I very much appreciate it.

So that’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care, and I’ll see you next week, bye-bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. 

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.