Post Traumatic Growth

Thanks to a link on Jim Gilliam’s blog I read a Psychology Today article about Post Traumatic Growth. I’d never heard of this term before. I checked with my sister and apparently some folks in the APA started pushing for “positive psychology” in the 1990s. They want psychology to also study the growth from trauma instead of just the problems. I think the hope might be that you end up with a science where you have something to work towards, instead of just trying to get away from problems.

Isn’t positive psychology just a more palatable way to describe transpersonal psychology? Consider this definition of spiritual emergence and tell me how this is different from Post Traumatic Growth:

This has also been called transpersonal crisis, acute psychosis with a positive outcome, positive disintegration and an extreme state.

It would be an impressive feat to see the APA make transpersonal psychology mainstream by calling it positive psychology.