What is it about?
This research explores the profound, real-life experiences of individuals living in a war-affected society. Traditionally, trauma is viewed primarily as a source of psychological damage. However, our qualitative study reveals that processing war trauma is a 'dialectical process'—meaning that deep emotional suffering and remarkable personal growth can, and often do, exist side by side. Through in-depth interviews, we examined how people make sense of their traumatic experiences. We discovered that individuals do not simply 'move on' or forget the scars of war. Instead, they develop complex coping strategies that allow them to rebuild their lives, find new meaning, and experience significant posttraumatic growth (PTG) even while acknowledging their pain. Ultimately, this study highlights the incredible resilience of the human mind and offers a more nuanced, realistic picture of healing in conflict zones.
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Why is it important?
Traditional trauma models tend to pathologize survivors, focusing on psychological deficits and symptoms of PTSD. This work extends that vision This study offers a more balanced and realistic framework for understanding individuals in war-affected societies by highlighting the dialectical nature of trauma, where psychological distress and personal growth coexist. Clinical psychologists, mental health professionals and humanitarian organizations will be interested in the findings. They suggest that therapeutic interventions should focus on reducing trauma symptoms and, at the same time, recognize and support the survivor’s capacity for meaning-making and resilience. In the end, this work offers a culturally informed view of human adaptability, moving the story from passive victimhood to active posttraumatic growth despite hardship.
Perspectives
As a clinical psychologist and researcher, my interest in this study arose from my observations of how people cope with the long-term effects of conflict in their lives. In clinical practice, the focus is often on the psychological symptoms and the damage caused by trauma. But what I saw was a lot of active and ongoing meaning-making and adaptation going on in many people in this distress on a regular basis. This clinical reality inspired me to investigate this duality —the co-existence of pain and growth — using a descriptive phenomenological approach. I was trying to document the real process of coping, beyond the usual diagnostic frameworks, by capturing the participants’ direct, lived experiences. I hope this research encourages mental health professionals to adopt a more comprehensive strategy that recognises and supports the natural dialectic of suffering and resilience.
Marzie Hashemi
Khatam University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Trauma as a dialectical process: A phenomenological study of war exposure, coping, and posttraumatic growth within a war-affected society., Psychological Trauma Theory Research Practice and Policy, September 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/tra0002279.
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