If I Had to Reverse-Engineer the Process of Post-Traumatic Growth, Here’s How I Would Break It Down

I discovered that real recovery isn’t linear, gentle, or pretty

The school system failed me. The courts failed me. My family failed me.

I survived horrific childhood abuse and exploitation and in spite of everything, I have recovered into an adult I love and respect.

And yet, I am one of many millions of children around the world who have had to live in a world parallel to the one most people live in. In our world evil really does exist, the heroes don’t always win, and otherwise “good and decent” people choose to protect themselves at the cost of innocent children.

If I were to share my own process, I would begin by giving you permission to admit that it happened. You’re allowed to be angry, hurt, and messy. You don’t have to follow social norms to grow into a person who can do hard things, love well, and intentionally cultivate a life that far overshadows anything that ever happened to you.

If you’ve been through it, you already know this is for you.

If you love someone who’s been through it, this is for you.

If you want to understand and support others who have been through it, this is for you.

If there is one thing I think is most deserved, it is your own love for your one and only beautiful life.

This is how we repair.

1. Discernment

One thing that kept me trapped and prevented me from reaching out for help or choosing other paths, was a lack of discernment.

Because my frame of reference was built inside a life of abuse across so many different situations, I was living in a reality where danger was constant and normal. My concept of the world was shaped by survival. When you’re in survival mind, you don’t plan; you react. You can’t think outside of the moment because there’s no capacity for foresight; only endurance.

It wasn’t until I began having disconfirming experiences, glimpses of a gentler world, that I realized not every environment was predatory.

For me, one of those experiences was Virginia Tech’s Upward Bound program. For the first time, I was surrounded by peers who weren’t living in various degrees of neglect or abuse. I got to learn. Make friends. Have fun.

And that simple exposure to safety, to opportunity, to normalcy, rewired something fundamental.

Discernment begins there: the first time you see that another reality exists. That first spark of something different is when you get to choose to explore other realities.

Once you realize you have choices, your exciting responsibility is to start choosing intentionally. It is now your job to make every decision a chance to shape your reality instead of repeating past patterns.

2. Boundaries

Once I learned to discern what made my life feel lighter, the next step was setting boundaries to protect those discoveries. To me, boundaries are rules you choose to live by to cultivate your own self respect and to protect your personal power.

For me, this looked like creating small, practical boundaries that opened space for joy. I swapped my daily uniform of a white ribbed tank top and basketball shorts for dresses, heels, and facials. I set boundaries around how I spent my time and protected my health, taking free community finance courses, learning about nutrition, and shopping at the farmer’s market instead of the grocery store.

Eventually, it looked like a bigger boundary: moving out of state, away from everyone I’d grown to love, to start over on an island 2400 miles into the Pacific Ocean, outrunning my drug abuse and redefining what stability could mean.

Each choice was a small reclamation: proof that I was living by my own rules.

Discernment opens up your options, and boundaries protect your choices. Don’t break your own rules. If you do, forgive yourself fast and start again. The best gift you can give yourself in recovery is time. As much of your own time back as you can possibly reclaim.

3. Reflection & Dissection

This is the part when things can often regress and get ugly. And this may be the most important step of all: directly examining your memories, the roles your close ones played, the patterns you developed. Not shying away from being very honest about the realities you lived.

When we start facing the reality of what was actually taken. What the true costs have been. How much better, easier, and safer life could have been. This is when rage can enter the scene, if it hasn’t already.

People around you may pull away from your intensity. You might find yourself in places you thought you’d already outgrown. You may ruminate, repeat, or make mistakes when the waves of grief and confusion hit. When your eyes finally become clear.

All of it is okay. You’re not failing. This is the root of wisdom.

4. Zoom Out

When you zoom out, you start to see that your story never started with you. Long before you were born, the world had already decided what kind of life would be waiting. What food was affordable. What jobs were available. What schools were underfunded. What people were valued.

The setup was in place long before you arrived. Entire generations were shaped by laws, labels, and power structures that decided who mattered and who didn’t. You inherit that reality before you ever have a say in it.

It reminds me of a lesson from the PADI Divemaster course. One of the textbooks show a graphic of divers at different experience levels, each surrounded by a bubble representing their awareness. New divers have small bubbles because they’re just learning how to breathe, manage their panic, and handle their gear. Their awareness ends at their own hands. They can’t yet see beyond themselves, so they kick other divers, stir up the sand, or miss the beauty around them.

As you dive more, you relax. You build habits that keep you safe and calm. Your awareness expands, you start noticing currents, marine life, other divers, and the rhythm of the ocean itself. You’re no longer trapped inside your own panic.

And finally, when you become the leader, your awareness stretches even wider. You attune to the complexity of the environment around you: the people, the animals, the gear. You become preventative in your actions, able to navigate, educate, and support.

Learning to mentally zoom is how you train yourself to see your role as part of a whole ecosystem. You learn to let go of the smaller details. You give yourself the freedom and permission to just live the way you want to live. You get to see, and choose, where you want to be in this complex and horrifically beautiful world.

5. Rebuild

From my perspective, the most damaging aspects of trauma are losing your sense of personal power and dealing with the dissolution of trusted connections. Those two betrayals are all it takes to completely derail a person’s reality. What’s even tougher is realizing that power isn’t given back to you, and the way you interact with others is forever changed.

New power is built through practice. New connections must be carefully vetted, then nurtured. Healthy love and respect won’t suddenly land on you one day, like a radioactive spider, and gift you with superhuman strength and surround you with high integrity people. In the muggle world, that strength comes from uncompromising dedication to your own reparenting, regrowth, and rebuilding.

Power won’t come in a pill. It won’t come through denial. And it won’t come another day. It comes when you commit to it. You have to be generous, persistent, and unwilling to give up on yourself.

You’ve developed many skills that would get you through any natural disaster, but you probably need to do some brushing up on your relational skills, community building, and self-esteem. And if you’ve gone the direction of existing through others, you’re going to have to stand on your own two feet and get what you want on your own steam.

You’ve cleared the field. You’ve laid the foundation. Now it’s time to start laying the bricks, designing the layout, and building your dream home. Only you live in your head, and you need to make it nice in there.

6. Expansion

Expansion is the phase of integration, when all the trauma skills you’ve honed finally start working for you instead of against you. The hypervigilance that once kept you exhausted sharpens into intuition. The control issues become leadership. The people-pleasing becomes empathy with boundaries. You start realizing you’ve been training for this your whole life.

Integration is where your body and mind finally sync up. You start getting a handle on your energetic presence, how you walk into a room, how you impact others, how you stay steady no matter what anyone else is doing. You’re not hustling for safety anymore; you’re radiating it.

You hold grief and joy at once, knowing both belong. You face new challenges with confidence. You trust only with keen awareness, receive without surrender, and give without depletion. Expansion is a calm, sustained hum of power.

The kind of power that comes when you know who you are, and that you can handle whatever’s next.

If you are going through something, don’t hesitate to reach out for help within your support system. If this article resonate with you, please leave a comment.

My Recommended Reading and Audiobooks

• One Day My Soul Just Opened Up — Iyanla Vanzant

• The Art of Communicating — Thich Nhat Hanh

• The Untethered Soul — Michael A. Singer

• Living From a Place of Surrender — Michael A. Singer

• The Myth of Normal — Dr. Gabor Maté

• Relational Intelligence — Tony Sanders

• Peace Is Every Step — Thich Nhat Hanh

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents — Lindsay C. Gibson

• Boundaries: Updated & Expanded Edition — Johnny Townsend

• Spark Joy — Marie Kondo

• Essentialism — Greg McKeown

• The Tibetan Yoga of Breath — Anyen Rinpoche & Allison Choying Zangmo

• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind — Joseph Murphy

• Hold Me Tight — Dr. Sue Johnson, EdD

• Anxiety in Relationship — Theresa Miller

• Finding Me — Viola Davis

• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind — William Kamkwamba & Brian Mealer

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow — Francis Weller

• Reconciliation — Thich Nhat Hanh