The Quiet Power of Post-Traumatic Growth Factor (PTGF)
An Unexpected and Often Unexplored Part of Healing from a Toxic Relationship
Emerging from a season of deep emotional upheaval and betrayal — the kind that leaves you gasping and being rearranged from the inside out — is disorienting. Especially when the trauma has come from someone you once trusted, loved, or built a life and future around.
The dismantling of reality may have already been in motion from the gas-lighting, subtle and insidious put-downs and a deeply unsettling sense of confusion that are a hallmark of a toxic relationship. These are no foundation for a healthy relationship. They cause a deeply traumatic aftermath as the trauma bonds break apart post-relationship. For anyone who has ever experienced this type of break-up, it is so very different to a normal break-up. It is fire and brimstone like no other. Akin to turning all of your hopes and dreams to ashes. There are no words to adequately describe the pain when someone you thought you knew, becomes a stranger overnight.
If you are brave enough to sit in the quietude of this season, listening to the deeper sounds of life rearranging itself oh-so-delicately around your new and unasked for normal.
Slowly, something starts to shift.
And it is unexpectedly beautiful, nourishing and glorious.
Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness - Isaiah 61:3
It doesn’t happen all at once. Or dramatically. Small flickers of insight, clarity, and inner knowing start to take root and grow. There is a small, reassuring sense of deep peace in the heart. A stillness that craves to be savoured. A sense of liberation from bondage. Wings that move across the heavens to elevate your awareness above the white-noise of the world at large.
This healing is what psychologists call Post-Traumatic Growth Factor (PTGF).
It’s the idea that, after trauma, we don’t just return to “normal.”
We rise.
We rebuild something stronger, deeper, and often far more aligned with who we truly are.
So what is Post-Traumatic Growth?
PTGF is a research-based phenomenon where individuals experience positive psychological change after enduring adversity. It doesn’t mean the trauma was “worth it” — but it does mean that something profound can still emerge because of it.
People report:
A deeper appreciation for life
Stronger relationships and boundaries
Greater spiritual connection
Renewed life purpose
Inner strength they never knew they had
If this sounds like a contradiction and paradox, it is. But it’s also very real.
Growth doesn’t erase grief — it grows beside it.
How this looks in real life:
For me, it meant acknowledging I had tolerated emotional discontent and compromise for far too long — not because I was weak, but because I was loyal, loving, and hopeful.
My template for love had been wired for a healthy side plate of emotional turmoil since childhood.
Growth and healing meant understanding that my body, my intuition, and my nervous system had always known the truth — even when my mind wasn’t ready to admit it.
Even now, I find myself in the cognitive dissonance of what I thought was real and what reality turned out to be.
Healing meant beginning the work of putting myself back together, not as I was in the old life of naively trusting, but as who I was meant to be all along - discerning, wise, protected.
It’s still happening. But I never would have imagined that so much pain and heartbreak could come with the side effects of greater trust, faith and deeper connection to my own divinity.
If you’re in the ashes of your own pain right now…
You don’t have to have all the answers.
You don’t have to explain anything to anyone.
You only have to listen to the small quiet reassurance that whispers from me to you now:
“There is life on the other side of this and it is honestly, a better one”
You are not broken. You are becoming.
Even now, growth is unfolding beneath the surface.
True faith relies upon us NOT seeing what is on the other side.
There are riches beyond measure for those who exercise faith and trust when the material, external world is suggesting otherwise and life plunges you into a darkness that you didn’t see coming.
After-all, faith and trust cannot exist where there is complete certainty.
And I am all for a world where faith and trust is no longer so under-rated.
My gentle invitation:
What might be quietly growing in you…
after heartbreak?
after loss?
after this shattering betrayal?
What if it’s something sacred?
What if your healing is a gift that delivers you to a life that is far greater, better, more than you could previously have imagined?
What if this entire experience was pre-destined to awaken you to your greater life purpose?
With fierce loving-kindness,
Lisa
Your sister in post-traumatic rising
