Post-Traumatic Growth and the Hero’s Journey

A companion to Dark Night of Our Souls for anyone considering what growth after trauma can mean.

A note before you read: This article discusses trauma and suicidal crisis. Read at your own pace. If you may hurt yourself or someone else, call emergency services. In the United States or Canada, call or text 988 at any hour. Elsewhere, contact the crisis service where you live.

After a film about trauma ends, the room can feel strangely ordinary. The dishes still need doing, and your phone may light up with a name that changes your breathing. You may recognize yourself in a story and still be unsure how to understand that recognition.

Dark Night of Our Souls brings first-person accounts of combat, abuse, grief, chronic pain, addiction, and loss into conversation with clinical research and spiritual inquiry. Guided by Richard Rudd, the film includes perspectives from Danielle Alexander, Trung Ngo, Anderson Todd, John Vervaeke, Nadine Purdy, and other contributors. They examine how a person can live after an experience changes their sense of safety and identity.

The film moves between research, personal testimony, spiritual traditions, and the mythic pattern Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. That range needs context. When someone in the film describes a practice that helped them, the account belongs to that person. It does not become a recovery protocol for every viewer.

This article stays with the film’s central ideas and the questions they raise. It does not prescribe a trauma practice. The material is educational and cannot diagnose or treat trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or any other health condition.

What Is Post-Traumatic Growth?

Post-traumatic growth is a research term for positive psychological change that some people report through the struggle with trauma or severe adversity. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun described changes in five broad areas: appreciation of life, relationships with other people, personal strength, new possibilities, and spiritual or existential understanding. The American Psychological Association’s overview explains the concept and its development.

Researchers locate the growth in the struggle that follows, rather than in the traumatic event itself. No survivor is required to produce growth from harm. Some people do not identify with the idea at all. The event can remain unnecessary, undeserved, harmful, and costly even when a person later finds a different way to live.

A report of growth tells us little about whether trauma symptoms remain. Research has found that perceived growth and post-traumatic stress symptoms can exist at the same time. Their relationship varies with the person, the kind of trauma, age, and time since the event, according to a meta-analysis indexed by the National Library of Medicine.

In ordinary life, growth may be less visible than the word suggests. A relationship may begin to feel trustworthy again. A boundary may become clearer while an old priority falls away. An ordinary routine may carry new importance. None of these changes erases grief, symptoms, disability, or the cost of what happened.

Why the Film Uses the Hero’s Journey

The hero’s journey is a story pattern associated with mythologist Joseph Campbell. In its familiar form, a person leaves known ground, crosses a threshold, undergoes an ordeal, and returns to ordinary life changed. The Joseph Campbell Foundation describes it as a movement from the familiar world into an unfamiliar one and back again.

Dark Night of Our Souls uses that pattern as a language for meaning-making. The film describes crisis as a call, trauma as a kind of descent, and integration as a return to life with a changed understanding of oneself. For some viewers, that story can give shape to an experience that has felt shapeless.

The metaphor has limits. Trauma is not an adventure someone must welcome, and survival does not require a heroic identity. A story pattern also cannot establish how long recovery should take or which form it should assume.

The film places this mythic lens beside a disaster-response curve. The curve moves through pre-trauma, impact, a temporary heroic phase, disillusionment, and reconstruction or recovery. Its most useful feature may be the uneven line. An early surge of action can give way to exhaustion. Later growth can coexist with periods of distress. The film emphasizes that the route and timetable differ from person to person.

Where the Two Ideas Meet

Post-traumatic growth gives researchers language for changes that some people report after severe adversity. The hero’s journey gives storytellers language for departure, ordeal, transformation, and return. They describe different kinds of knowledge, yet both are attempts to understand how a life continues after its earlier assumptions have been disrupted.

For viewers who find the framework useful, it may open questions that have no forced answer:

• Did this experience divide my life into a before and an after?
• Which beliefs about myself or the world no longer hold?
• Has the way I relate to other people changed?
• Which parts of the experience remain difficult even alongside change?

Some people will recognize their lives in those questions. Others will not. Post-traumatic growth is a possibility described in research, not an assignment.

Common Questions About Post-Traumatic Growth

Can I Experience Growth and Still Feel Terrible?

Growth and distress can exist at the same time. A stronger boundary does not erase nightmares. A renewed relationship does not cancel grief. Post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic stress can develop alongside each other, and improvement rarely moves in a straight line.

Does Trauma Always Involve Another Person?

Trauma does not always involve another person. It can follow a serious accident, disaster, illness, sudden loss, combat, or interpersonal violence. The National Center for PTSD describes a wide range of reactions that may follow traumatic events. Questions about forgiveness or contact apply only when another person was involved.

How Long Does Post-Traumatic Growth Take?

There is no reliable timetable. The National Center for PTSD describes recovery as an ongoing process that happens little by little. Acute safety, housing, money, physical health, social support, and access to care can all affect what is possible at a given time.

Do I Have to Forgive Someone If Another Person Was Involved?

Forgiveness is not a condition of post-traumatic growth. The film includes personal testimony in which forgiveness matters to the speaker. That account reflects one person’s process. Another person may choose distance or no contact while still wanting accountability. Forgiveness and renewed contact are separate decisions.

Can Meditation, Breathwork, Ritual, or Plant Medicine Help?

The film suggests that meditation, breathwork, ritual, and plant medicine may help some people in some circumstances. It presents these approaches through testimony and discussion rather than as a universal protocol. Each person’s case is unique, and these practices differ in their evidence base, legal status, risks, and required support. Questions about whether any of them fit a person’s health history belong with a qualified professional.

Does Post-Traumatic Growth Mean the Trauma Happened for a Reason?

The concept does not require that conclusion. Growth after harm does not retroactively justify the harm. A person can find meaning in what followed while still regarding the event itself as senseless, preventable, or wrong.

Is Post-Traumatic Growth the Same as Recovering From PTSD?

They are different concepts. PTSD is a mental health diagnosis. Post-traumatic growth describes positive changes a person may perceive after struggling with adversity. Someone may report growth while still having PTSD symptoms, and someone can recover from PTSD without describing the experience as growth.

When the Questions Need Clinical Context

The National Center for PTSD explains trauma symptoms and treatments with strong research support. In the United States, SAMHSA’s Find Help page provides treatment locators and referral services. A licensed clinician can consider symptoms, current safety, physical health, medication, cost, and personal preferences in a way that a documentary or article cannot.

Continue the Conversation

In Dark Night of Our Souls, survivors describe experiences that resist a clean before-and-after story. Contributors from clinical research and contemplative traditions approach post-traumatic growth from different directions. Their accounts sometimes use different language for the passage from disruption toward return.

The film’s value lies in hearing how particular people understood what changed for them. Viewers can consider those accounts without adopting every conclusion or practice.

Watch or continue Dark Night of Our Souls on Gaia.

Editorial Sources

• Dark Night of Our Souls: Gaia
• Growth After Trauma: American Psychological Association
• A Meta-Analytic Clarification of the Relationship Between Posttraumatic Growth and Symptoms of Posttraumatic Distress Disorder: PubMed
• Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell Foundation
• Common Reactions After Trauma: National Center for PTSD
• Coping With Traumatic Stress Reactions: National Center for PTSD
• Understanding PTSD Treatment: National Center for PTSD
• Trauma-Informed Approaches and Programs: SAMHSA
• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: United States
• 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline: Canada