Stress-related growth and thriving through coping: the roles of personality and cognitive processes - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 1998 by Crystal L. Park

This idea that stress-related growth and thriving may be helpful to individuals coping with loss can be seen as having great social impact as well, if implemented on a large scale. Carver (this issue) discusses, for example, how people who have experienced medical crises often make changes in their lifestyles that can be considered evidence of thriving. For the individuals, this would likely produce an improved quality - as well as increased length - of life. For society as a whole, this might produce a healthier populace, higher standards of health and health behaviors, and possibly a lowered cost of health care.

How can we, as a society, encourage stress-related growth and thriving? Part of this paradigm shift involves changing cultural expectations, creating the awareness that out of trauma comes not only pain and suffering, but sometimes the possibility of transformation and growth as well. This awareness can be accomplished by developing the language and conceptual framework, developing the research base to understand this phenomenon better, and especially connecting the current concepts and empirical research to the ideas of transformation and growth that have existed in our culture for millennia in the form of various religious, mythological, and philosophical traditions (Aldwin, 1994; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995).

Agencies and helping professionals can also work toward cultivating the conditions that render stress-related growth and thriving more likely. A clearer understanding of how people's dispositions, resources, and coping efforts influence their growth and thriving following stressful experiences may lead to better provision of adequate resources as well as interventions on the part of helping professionals. For example, if research continues to bear out that individuals with more social resources and more optimistic perspectives are more likely to grow and thrive following stressful encounters, interventions to promote those conditions may be developed and implemented. Stress-related growth and thriving can also be promoted in the processes of psychotherapy and posttraumatic interventions. (See Calhoun & Tedeschi, this issue, for an overview of relevant therapeutic issues.)

It is important to keep in mind that these individual differences and coping processes are set within the context of cultural expectations and beliefs regarding appropriate responses to stressful experiences (see Abraido-Lanza, Guier, & Colon, this issue). Although not yet well researched, attention to ethnic and cultural differences in such expectations and beliefs may result in the development of more supportive social and cultural environments for growth and thriving.

Continued research on the roles of personal dispositions, resources, and coping will also pave the way for the development of more specific models of growth and thriving, such as that of Saakvitne, Tennen, and Affleck (this issue), and with them, insights into how concepts of stress-related growth and thriving can be applied to the lives of individuals and to societies.