From post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth
· · 8 min read
Neal Tricarico describes how his family moved from post-traumatic stress toward post-traumatic growth after his son Anthony died by suicide, why stress and growth run side by side rather than in sequence, and how that shift became the Endurant Movement.
Post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth are not two ends of a road where you leave one to reach the other. After our son Anthony died by suicide, the stress did not end so that the growth could begin. They ran together, for a long time, and they still do. What changed is that we stopped waiting for the pain to finish and started building something with it. That building became the Endurant Movement. This is how the shift actually happened, without pretending the loss was a gift.
TL;DR
Moving from post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth is not recovery in the sense of getting back to who you were. It is a slow turn, made of small choices, in which the same event that broke you starts producing new strength, new relationships, and new purpose alongside the grief. For our family that turn became a movement built around mental health, autism awareness, and suicide prevention, because the private work of surviving Anthony's death kept pointing outward.
Key Takeaways
- Post-traumatic growth was named by researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in the 1990s, and it describes positive change that follows the struggle with trauma, not the trauma itself.
- Growth and distress coexist; the research does not describe a point where one replaces the other, and neither does my life.
- The first movement toward growth is usually one concrete action taken before you feel ready, not a feeling that arrives on its own.
- Building publicly instead of healing privately gave our pain a job, and that job is what kept us moving on the days nothing else could.
- If you are carrying suicidal pain right now, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day.
What is the difference between post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth?
Post-traumatic stress is what the event does to you. Post-traumatic growth is what you eventually do with the event. The National Institute of Mental Health describes the stress side plainly: after a traumatic event, people may continue to feel stressed or frightened even when they are no longer in danger, with trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating, and a mind that keeps returning to what happened NIMH on post-traumatic stress disorder. I recognized every line of that in the first year. The body stays braced for a phone call that already came.
Post-traumatic growth is a different measurement. The researchers who named it, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, found that some people who struggle with devastating events report real positive change afterward: a deeper appreciation of life, closer relationships, a sense of new possibilities, greater personal strength, and spiritual change the Post-Traumatic Growth Research Group on what PTG is. The key word in their work is struggle. Growth comes from wrestling with what happened, not from the event itself and not from being spared the pain.
I have written before that post-traumatic growth is not closure. Stress and growth are not stages either. They are two things the same loss is doing to you at once.
How do you start moving from one to the other?
You start smaller than you think you should, and earlier than you feel ready. For me the first movement toward growth was not a breakthrough. It was getting out of bed to do one thing that mattered to someone else. Then doing it again the next day.
The stress does not ask permission before it shows up, and the growth will not either, but growth needs a doorway. Ours was talking. Saying out loud what had happened, using the real word, refusing to soften it into something more comfortable for the listener. I learned that using the word suicide was itself a step, because every honest sentence made the next one possible.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention describes the path for loss survivors as one that moves at its own pace, with support from people who have walked it, and no fixed timeline for when the weight lifts AFSP: I've lost someone. That matched what we found. Nobody handed us a schedule. We found other parents, we found a therapist who could sit with the unspeakable, and we found that action taken in the middle of the stress, not after it, is what moved us.
Why build a movement instead of healing privately?
Because private healing kept pointing outward, and because our pain needed somewhere to go. Anthony was autistic, and we learned only after his death how much higher the suicide risk is for kids like him, and how few of the people around him had been told. That knowledge could have stayed a private wound. Instead it became the reason we started speaking. Our family had learned something at an unbearable cost, and keeping it to ourselves felt like a second loss.
The Endurant Movement grew out of that. It began as a way of honoring Anthony's life and giving other people who were fighting similar battles a place to be seen, heard, and supported the Endurant Movement. What surprised me is how much the building did for us. Having a job to do with the grief gave the worst days a shape. On the mornings I could not carry my own pain, I could still show up to carry someone else's.
That is not a strategy I would prescribe to everyone. Some people need to heal quietly, and there is nothing lesser about that. But for us, purpose came back before peace did, and the movement was how it came.
How do mental health, autism, and suicide prevention fit together?
They fit together because they were all present in one boy, and separating them is part of what failed him. Anthony had support for his autism. He had people who loved him. What he did not have was a system that understood his mental health through the lens of how his brain worked, or that recognized the gap between autism support and mental health care as a danger in its own right.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is clear that suicide has no single cause and that risk builds from a mix of health, environmental, and historical factors AFSP on risk factors and warning signs. For an autistic teenager, those factors stack differently, and the warning signs can look like ordinary stress or ordinary quiet. So the movement could not be about just one of these things. Mental health, autism awareness, and suicide prevention are one conversation, and we try to have it in every room we are invited into.
Where do teens and youth come in?
They come in first, because that is who Anthony was, and because young people do not want to be lectured. They want to be met. Some of the most honest conversations we have had about mental health were with teenagers who were relieved that an adult would say the word suicide without flinching and then stay in the room afterward.
Youth work is where the growth side of this story is most visible to me. When a young person tells us they feel less alone, or a parent says they finally asked the direct question at home, that is post-traumatic growth doing its work in public. It does not erase what happened to Anthony. It means his life is still changing other lives, which is the closest thing to a way forward I have found.
If you are a young person reading this and the pain has gotten heavier than you can hold, you do not have to carry it by yourself. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour, any day, and tell one person the truth about how you are doing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is post-traumatic growth the same as getting over it?
No. Getting over it implies the loss recedes. Post-traumatic growth means something new is built alongside the loss. The grief does not shrink; your life grows larger around it, and the research describes growth and distress existing at the same time.
What does the Endurant Movement do?
It creates spaces, conversations, and programs around mental health, autism awareness, and suicide prevention, with a particular focus on young people and the families around them. It began as a way to honor Anthony and give others fighting similar battles a place to be seen and supported.
Can stress and growth happen at the same time?
Yes, and in my experience they usually do. The researchers who named post-traumatic growth found it comes from the struggle with trauma rather than from its absence, so the stress is often still present while the growth is underway.
What is the first step from stress toward growth?
One small, concrete action taken before you feel ready, often something done for someone else. Motivation tends to follow action rather than lead it, and support from people who have lived through a similar loss makes the next action easier.