When the World Shakes: The Psychology of Post-Traumatic Growth

There is a common assumption that crisis breaks people. And it can. But trauma psychology tells a more nuanced — and ultimately more hopeful — story.

When major disruptions occur, whether a global pandemic, an economic collapse, a personal loss, or a collective upheaval, something profound happens beneath the surface: our foundational beliefs about how the world works are temporarily suspended. And in that suspension, there is an extraordinary opportunity — if we know how to use it.

In an April 2020 interview on MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, I spoke about how crises don't just stress us. They can transform us. That insight is rooted not in optimism, but in decades of psychological research — research that is more relevant now than ever.

How People Actually Respond to Traumatic Events

When confronted with a crisis, most people think of two responses: fight or flight. But the science tells us the picture is considerably richer.

Walter Cannon's classic fight-or-flight model describes the sympathetic nervous system's emergency activation — the surge of adrenaline that prepares us to confront or escape a threat. This is real, and many people do experience it during crisis: heightened reactivity, urgency, a drive to do something or get away.

But research by Shelley Taylor and colleagues (2000) identified a third major stress response pattern, particularly prominent in social contexts: tend-and-befriend. Rather than fighting or fleeing, some people respond to threat by moving toward — nurturing those around them, strengthening social bonds, and finding safety in connection. This isn't weakness or avoidance. It is, in evolutionary terms, one of the most sophisticated stress responses we have.

Understanding your own stress signature — which mode you gravitate toward — is itself a form of self-awareness that creates choice. And choice is the beginning of regulation.

The Shaking of Foundations

What makes major crises uniquely powerful from a psychological standpoint is what researcher Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992) called the shattering of assumptive worlds. Most of us move through daily life on autopilot, guided by largely unconscious beliefs: that the world is predictable, that we are safe, that tomorrow will resemble today. A major crisis cracks these assumptions open.

This cracking feels destabilising — because it is. But it is also the precise mechanism through which growth becomes possible.

When foundational beliefs are disrupted, we enter a state of what I describe as momentary suspension — a pause in automatic thinking, a loosening of certainty, a brief but genuine increase in open-mindedness and curiosity. The question that emerges is: what do I actually believe now?

This is the window. The research literature calls what happens next post-traumatic growth.

What Is Post-Traumatic Growth?

Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is not the absence of suffering. It is growth that occurs because of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). People who experience PTG typically report changes across five domains: a greater sense of personal strength, new possibilities, relating to others more deeply, greater appreciation for life, and spiritual or existential change.

PTG is not automatic. It requires active engagement with the experience — processing it, making meaning from it, and deliberately orienting toward what the disruption has revealed. This is where self-awareness becomes not just useful but essential.

In my clinical work, I encourage people to ask: What has this period shown me about what I was prioritising? What have I been forced to slow down and notice? What do I want to carry forward — and what am I relieved to leave behind?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the raw material of growth.

Cognitive Flexibility as a Survival Skill

One of the most important capacities crisis can build — if we let it — is cognitive flexibility: the ability to update our thinking, hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, and adapt to changing circumstances without being destabilised.

Rigid belief systems and inflexible worldviews are fragile in the face of disruption. But people who approach uncertainty with curiosity rather than fear — who use the upheaval to seek new knowledge and explore new ways of being — tend to emerge from crises with a significantly broader and more resilient psychological foundation.

This is why I always encourage people, during periods of disruption, to capitalise on the natural openness that crisis creates. Read differently. Question assumptions you have held for years. Explore ideas you previously dismissed. The brain, when its usual grooves are disrupted, is genuinely more plastic — more available for change.

Prosocial Behavior: Why Helping Others Heals You

One of the most consistent findings in stress research is also one of the most counterintuitive: helping other people is one of the most effective things you can do for your own nervous system.

Evolutionary psychology confirms that prosocial behaviour — acts of care, generosity, and service — activates the parasympathetic nervous system, produces oxytocin, and generates significant positive physiological and emotional responses (Brown et al., 2003). In other words, giving — even when we ourselves are stressed — is biologically restorative.

This is why crises so often produce what appears to be a paradox: communities under enormous pressure become more generous, more cooperative, more attuned to one another. We see this in disasters, pandemics, and collective hardships across history. Crisis motivates people to seek meaning — and service to others is one of the most reliable paths to it.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or purposeless during a difficult period, the research suggests that moving toward others — even in small ways — is not a distraction from your own needs. It is a direct response to them.

You Are a Center of Transmission

Here is something I genuinely believe, and that the science of emotional contagion supports: you are always transmitting something to the people around you.

Research by Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1993) on emotional contagion demonstrates that emotions spread between people automatically and unconsciously — through facial expressions, vocal tone, posture, and proximity. Christakis and Fowler (2009) extended this insight to show that emotional states ripple through social networks, influencing people up to three degrees removed from the original source.

This means that the work you do on yourself — regulating your own nervous system, cultivating self-awareness, choosing calm over reactivity — is never only for you. It radiates outward. You become, as I often tell my clients, either a transmitter of hope and order, or a transmitter of fear and chaos. The choice begins with your own self-care.

This is not a burden. It is an empowering reframe. In times when we feel powerless to change large external events, the territory we can always influence is our own inner environment — and that influence, it turns out, extends much further than we think.

Where to Begin

If you are moving through a period of disruption — personal, professional, or collective — here is the framework I share with my clients:

Start with self-awareness. Monitor your stress levels. Identify which stress response you default to: fight, flight, or tend-and-befriend. Notice when you are dysregulated. This is not self-indulgence. It is the foundation of everything else.

Maintain your routines. Stability within uncertainty is not about denial — it is about giving your nervous system the predictability it needs to function. Keep your sleep, movement, mealtimes, and social rhythms as consistent as possible.

Direct your fear productively. Fear is energy. The question is where you point it. Channel it into learning, into service, into building something — rather than letting it cycle through rumination and helplessness.

Seek meaning actively. Ask what this period is teaching you. What assumptions has it disrupted? What has become clearer? Viktor Frankl (1959), who survived the Nazi concentration camps, observed that those who found meaning even in extreme suffering were the ones who endured. Meaning-making is not a luxury — it is a survival mechanism.

Be prosocial. Even small acts of connection and generosity have measurable effects on your own wellbeing. Start close. Start with whoever is in the room with you. The ripple moves outward from there.

References

Brown, S.L., Nesse, R.M., Vinokur, A.D., & Smith, D.M. (2003). Providing social support may be more beneficial than receiving it: Results from a prospective study of mortality. Psychological Science, 14(4), 320–327.

Christakis, N.A., & Fowler, J.H. (2009). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. Little, Brown.

Frankl, V.E. (1959). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J.T., & Rapson, R.L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–99.

Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. Free Press.

Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R., & Updegraff, J.A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429.

Tedeschi, R.G., & Calhoun, L.G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.

About the Author

Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist based in Dubai and the UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She specialises in anxiety, stress, trauma, emotional wellbeing, and integrative approaches to mental health. She has been featured on MBC1, BBC Arabic, Sky News Arabia, and Kalam Nawa3em.

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