Exploring thriving in the context of clinical trauma theory: constructivist self development theory - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 1998 by Karen W. Saakvitne, Howard Tennen, Glenn Affleck

In response to an acute adult trauma, changes are more likely to be short-term and modified over time by the sturdiness of lifelong beliefs. Recurrent traumas in childhood, on the other hand, lead to more stable disruptions of frame of reference and schemas that change only slowly. Beliefs developed in childhood are reinforced when they help the child make sense of his or her experience and protect him or her from unbearable troths. (For example, when it is unbearable to be helpless as a witness and victim of abuse, a child may come to believe, "If I were smarter, I could have protected my mother and me from my father's beatings" and deny the belief that "there was nothing I could have done because I was too small and helpless as a child.") Beliefs that protect someone from something they cannot bear to know or feel are highly resistant to modification and change.

Thus, because of individual differences in identity, worldview, and spirituality, different salience of psychological need areas, and variations in self-capacities and ego resources, as well as different interpersonal and sociocultural contexts, different people respond differently to similar events. For example, when a person with strong needs for control is mugged, she or he focuses on the loss of control and failure to prevent the attack, and may respond with a greater need to control the environment. A person with more salient trust needs focuses on loss of trust in his or her own judgment and greater mistrust of others. Both feel less safe in the world, but how generalized that fear becomes and what steps each takes for self-protection vary.

If the victim of a mugging is also a survivor of childhood violence, he or she integrates the most recent assault with beliefs about himself or herself and the world from the past. She or he may question, "What do I do that makes me the target?" and then may engage in self-recriminations and become confused about whether she or he deserved to be the target of violence. If this focus on culpability precludes a balanced evaluation of the situation (i.e., if it precludes those circumstances over which she or he had little or no control and only includes those circumstances under his or her control), then the construction denies part of the reality of the event and can prevent interpersonal connections that would support healing, appropriate anger, and constructive evaluation of the event and its circumstances, including a review of self-protective or risky choices.

We return below to discussing the applications of this theory to the study of thriving. But first we want to review the current literature on thriving and posttraumatic growth with an eye to some methodological considerations.

The Study of Thriving: Five Familiar Problems

Although the emerging scientific study of thriving is viewed by its proponents as a broadening of the vulnerability and coping paradigms, we are concerned that in fundamental ways investigators of thriving have already begun to replicate the well-entrenched biases of their colleagues who study coping and vulnerability. This unintended repetition, which is both methodological and conceptual, is ironic in that it occurs just as coping theory and research have come under attack for using the methods now mimicked in research on thriving (cf. Folkman, 1997; Somerfield, 1997). We are most concerned with five specific issues: (1) an adherence to nomothetic inquiry, with its focus on variables rather than psychological processes; (2) bypassing descriptive inquiry in favor of more limited, mundane moderator analyses; (3) relying on univariate indicators; (4) failing to distinguish effortful from automatic change; and (5) ignoring the possibility and conceptual implications of abrupt change.(1)