There’s a phrase clients bring into my office often: “I just want to leave this behind me.” It’s an understandable wish. It’s also, clinically speaking, a bit of a misnomer.
The goal of trauma work isn’t erasure. Nothing in the research supports the idea that a difficult history simply disappears with enough therapy, enough time, or enough willpower.
What changes—what can change—is the relationship a person has to that history, and what it’s allowed to run in their present-day life.
Why “Moving On” Isn’t the Right Goal
Psychiatrist and researcher Judith Herman’s influential three-stage model of trauma recovery remains one of the clearest maps we have for this process:
- Establishing safety first
- Then, moving into remembrance and mourning of what was lost
- And only then reconnecting with ordinary life
The stages resist shortcuts. Skipping ahead to “moving on” before safety and mourning have been genuinely established tends to produce something that looks like healing but isn’t load-bearing.
Part of why insight alone often isn’t enough comes down to physiology. Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory offers a useful explanation: the autonomic nervous system can remain locked in a state of threat response—fight, flight, or shutdown—long after the actual danger has passed (Porges, 2011).
A person can know, cognitively, that they’re safe now, and still not feel safe in their body. This is also the throughline of Bessel van der Kolk’s widely read work on trauma and the body, which argues that traumatic memory is stored somatically and procedurally, not only as narrative—one reason talk therapy alone sometimes falls short without a body-based or experiential component (van der Kolk, 2014).
Psychiatrist Dan Siegel’s concept of the “window of tolerance” gives this a practical shape: it’s the zone of nervous system arousal in which a person can engage with difficult material without becoming flooded or shutting down.
Much of trauma-informed clinical work is, in effect, the slow project of widening that window—building capacity, not chasing a single breakthrough insight (Siegel, 1999).
Growth Is Possible, But It’s Not Automatic, and It’s Not the Whole Story
The idea that people can grow through adversity isn’t just an inspirational sentiment. It has a name in the research literature—post-traumatic growth—and a validated way of measuring it.
Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun developed the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory in the mid-1990s, identifying five domains in which survivors commonly report meaningful positive change: personal strength, deeper relationships, new possibilities, greater appreciation for life, and spiritual or existential change (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996).
A few nuances from this research matter more than the headline finding:
Growth is not the same as resilience
Resilience describes a return to baseline functioning. Growth describes ending up somewhere psychologically different—often more solid—than where a person started.
Growth tends to emerge through deliberate, not intrusive, reflection
Tedeschi and Calhoun’s later work describes a shift from unbidden, intrusive replaying of a traumatic event toward more intentional, chosen reflection on what it means. That shift—from rumination happening to someone, to reflection a person chooses to engage in—appears to be one of the actual mechanisms of growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).
Growth and distress can coexist
This is the finding I most want people to hear, because the alternative—the idea that growth means the pain is over—sets people up to feel like failures when grief resurfaces months or years later. It’s well documented that survivors often report meaningful growth and ongoing grief or anxiety at the same time. One does not cancel out the other.
Social support is one of the strongest predictors of whether growth occurs
Having people who can tolerate hearing the story—and help a survivor build a coherent narrative out of it—consistently shows up in the literature as central to the growth process (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). This is, not incidentally, a large part of what the therapeutic relationship itself is for.
I’d add a clinical caution here that the research doesn’t always make explicit: post-traumatic growth language can be misused. “Everything happens for a reason” said too early, before the grief work has happened, isn’t growth—it’s a bypass. Growth that skips the mourning stage tends not to hold.
Purpose as a Stabilizing Structure
The third piece—healing through finding purpose—has its most famous articulation in psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s account of meaning-making, developed from his experience in concentration camps.
Frankl’s actual claim is more precise than it’s often given credit for: he never argued that suffering itself is meaningful. He argued that the human capacity to choose one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering is where meaning gets constructed (Frankl, 1959).
Psychologist Crystal Park’s meaning-making model offers a more contemporary clinical framework, distinguishing between global meaning—a person’s overarching beliefs and life goals—and situational meaning, the sense made of a specific event.
In this model, healing involves reconciling a disruptive event with one’s larger belief system, sometimes by revising the event’s meaning, and sometimes by revising the belief system itself (Park, 2010).
There’s also a physical health dimension worth naming. A widely cited longitudinal study by Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano, using data from the long-running Midlife in the United States study, found that people with a stronger sense of purpose lived longer over a fourteen-year follow-up period, independent of age, retirement status, and other measures of well-being (Hill & Turiano, 2014).
Purpose, in other words, isn’t just a psychological nicety—it appears to function as a genuine protective factor.
Why does purpose stabilize people this effectively?
Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, offers one mechanism: purpose-driven activity tends to satisfy three core psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—and it’s the satisfaction of those needs, more than the specific content of the purpose itself, that seems to do the stabilizing work (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
Clinically, this changes what “finding your purpose” should actually look like. It’s rarely a matter of searching outward for a mission. More often, it’s noticing what a person has already been quietly called toward—advocacy, caregiving, creative work, mentorship—and building from there, rather than assigning meaning from the outside in.
What This Adds Up To
None of this—the trauma work, the growth, the purpose—happens in a straight line, and none of it happens without adequate safety first.
But taken together, the research offers something more useful than the platitude that time heals all wounds. It suggests a more specific and more hopeful claim: that the nervous system can be taught safety again, that growth is a documented and real (if not guaranteed) possibility, and that purpose, once genuinely found rather than manufactured, does measurable protective work—psychologically and physically both.
The wound doesn’t have to be the whole story. But getting past that requires actually going through it, in the right order, with the right support. That’s the work.
If you’re ready to work on this, I’d love to connect. You can send me a message or schedule a free consultation here.
About the Author:
Susan Podbielski
Licensed Mental Health Counselor
With over 10 years of experience as a licensed therapist, Susan Podbielski specializes in helping people overcome anxiety, depression, and the debilitating effects of past trauma through a practical, collaborative approach.
She combines evidence-based tools, including CBT, DBT, mindfulness, and self-compassion techniques, to meet each client’s specific needs and goals.