Tedeschi and Calhoun [from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte] wanted to know why some people grow after trauma while others do not. The nature and severity of the trauma, they discovered, was less important than one might think. According to another researcher who has studied post-traumatic growth, "It is not the actual trauma that is causing the damage. It is how people interpret what happens, how what they believe about themselves and life and the world gets shaken up, not the trauma itself, that forces people to experience growth." When Tedeschi and Calhoun probed more deeply into their data, they found that the difference between the two groups lay in what they call "deliberate rumination," or introspection. The participants whom Tedeschi and Calhoun studied spent a lot of time trying to make sense of their painful experience, reflecting on how the event changed them. Doing so helped them make the life changes associated with post-traumatic growth.
Emily Esfahani Smith, ‘The Power of Meaning’