“While there is nothing good in trauma, good can come out of trauma,” Viktor Frankl wrote in “Man's Search for Meaning.”

As a personal injury attorney for more than 30 years, I have often represented clients whose lives were devastated by terrible injuries: brain and spinal injury, severe burns, amputations and paralysis. Even worse, many of my clients' loved ones have been killed. Those cases always proved challenging for me to grasp the enormity of my client's damages, so that I could properly convey their loss to adjusters, risk managers, defense counsel, judges and jurors. But, no challenge was greater for me than representing parents who had lost a child. During these cases, I would sometimes try to imagine what it would be like for one of my two children to die. But I couldn't spend much time thinking about that because it was too painful to comprehend. We know, of course, that tragedies do happen. That children do die. But we just never expect it to be our children. I never imagined that my daughter, Casey, would be taken from me. She was struck and killed by a distracted driver in 2009.

Since Casey's death, I have learned that trauma, including grief and loss, can present the opportunity for growth. Psychologists refer to positive psychological change following trauma as post-traumatic growth (PTG). Perhaps the two leading authorities on PTG are researchers from the University of North Carolina, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun. Tedeschi and Calhoun define PTG as “the experience of significant positive psychological change arising from the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.” Thus, PTG describes an experience in which an individual, following trauma, and even suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), not only returns to baseline functioning, but exceeds prior levels of functioning in some areas. It is not the trauma itself that causes PTG, but rather the individualized reaction: our personal struggle with trying to adapt to the loss that causes growth. Additionally, it is not that the symptoms of PTSD have disappeared, but that personality changes indicative of growth co-exist with PTSD.