Women’s Journeys to Posttraumatic Growth

Book excerpt: This accessible book draws on research around women’s experiences to illustrate and explore the concept of posttraumatic growth, emphasizing practice implications for healthcare professionals and strategies for fostering posttraumatic growth. Including the voices of women, in their own words, Women’s Journeys to Posttraumatic Growth explains the differences between post-traumatic stress disorder and posttraumatic growth and presents the theoretical framework of posttraumatic growth. It synthesizes relevant international research and introduces data from four new qualitative research studies on posttraumatic growth in women who have experienced the death of a spouse or longtime partner, death of a child, a close brush with death, and intimate partner abuse. The book develops clinical and nursing practice implications for healthcare professionals and explores current self-help and professional therapeutic strategies to foster posttraumatic growth. Women’s Journeys to Posttraumatic Growth is an invaluable guide for health and social care practitioners, as well as students and researchers with an interest in trauma, abuse, bereavement and loss, and women’s healthcare.