Krista St-Germain is a Master Certified Life Coach, Post-Traumatic Growth and grief expert, widow, mom and host of The Widowed Mom Podcast. When her husband was killed by a drunk driver in 2016, Krista’s life was completely and unexpectedly flipped upside down. After therapy helped her uncurl from the fetal position, Krista discovered Life Coaching, Post-Traumatic Growth and learned the tools she needed to move forward and create a future she could get excited about. Now she coaches and teaches other widows so they can love life again, too. Krista has been featured online and in print in Psychology Today, Medium, Thrive Global, Bustle, Psych Central, and Parents Magazine and on select podcasts such as The SelfWork Podcast, Seek The Joy, Life Check Yourself, and You Need A Budget to name a few.
Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, “Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations,” available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.
Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can’t imagine life without.
To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com.
Producer’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.
Announcer: You’re listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.
Gabe Howard: Welcome to the show, everyone. I’m your host Gabe Howard calling into the show today we have Krista St-Germain. Krista is a master certified life coach and post-traumatic growth and grief expert. She’s also the host of The Widowed Mom Podcast and a returning guest. Krista, welcome back to the show.
Krista St-Germain: Hey, Gabe. Thanks for having me back.
Gabe Howard: Well, you did excellent the first time, and we are so glad that you could be here with us again today. Now, today we’re going to be learning about post-traumatic growth. And if I understand that correctly, that’s the idea that it’s possible to grow after a trauma, not in spite of it, but because of it. Did I get that right?
Krista St-Germain: You did. It was a little bit surprising, but you nailed it.
Gabe Howard: I nailed it, yeah, well, I want to let the audience know I got that directly from your website, Krista.
Krista St-Germain: Okay, so you cheated, is what you’re saying, Gabe?
Gabe Howard: I have some questions about it.
Krista St-Germain: Sure, sure.
Gabe Howard: I just, I understand the words right. The idea that it’s possible to grow after a trauma, not in spite of it, but because of it. But it sort of sounds to me a little bit like whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is one of
Gabe Howard: Those cliches that that I personally just roll my eyes at every time. But I know that there’s science behind this, and I know that there’s more to it than that. You’re not saying something bad happens and suddenly you’re better. You’re saying that a trauma happens. And if you do the following things, perhaps things can be better. It’s not as simple as the definition would have you suspect.
Krista St-Germain: Yeah. It’s, it’s just saying that, how I look at it is that there’s nothing that can happen to us that we don’t don’t get to decide what we want to think about and who we want to be in the face of. Right? So it’s not morally superior to create post-traumatic growth. It’s not a should. It’s just a possibility if we want it.
Gabe Howard: You brought up the fact that that that almost everybody, if you live long enough, will experience a tragic loss. And yet we’re not talking about growth after suffering the loss of a loved one. We’re not talking about overcoming that trauma. We’re not even really talking about grief all that much. And you point out that that really impedes the healing process.
Krista St-Germain: Yeah for sure. I think it’s interesting just to notice how even the way that we define trauma has changed over time. So it wasn’t that long ago where we thought of trauma as objective, right? It was there were certain events that kind of people agreed upon and thought about as traumatic. But what we now know is that that’s not really what trauma is, right? Trauma is highly subjective. What might be traumatic for you might not be traumatic for me. And so it’s much more useful to think about trauma in terms of an individual experience. Right. Something that happens to you that shakes you to your core. Right. Challenges what you believe about the world and yourself. And you know, something like, for instance, childbirth might for one person be experienced as really traumatic for another? Not at all. So it’s not so much about thinking this event is traumatic and that event isn’t. It’s, trauma, is subjective. It’s independent. And, you know, largely individual. And so for that reason, when we can use a more generous definition, I think we open ourselves up to, to the possibility of better supporting ourselves, better supporting each other, and then considering, okay, if most of us are going to encounter something that we experience as traumatic in our lives, whether that’s related to losing someone we care about or not, then we can start talking about, all right, what’s helpful? When those things happen, how do we how do we want to be thinking about them instead of just making our goal to be to get back to a new normal, right.
Krista St-Germain: Which I’m never really a big fan of that phrase because I find so often people use it against themselves, right? They kind of use it as a way to say, well, I’ll just resign to this lower quality of life that I really don’t want because this thing has happened and that’s what you do, as opposed to wait a minute, okay. Yes. It happened. I don’t have to be grateful for it. I don’t really like that it happened. And also, what do I want to do with it? What do I want to think about it? How do I want to use it? To check how I’m living and see if if it’s in alignment with what I value and then if it’s not to make changes accordingly. Right. So that I am always creating what I want.
Gabe Howard: But that’s a little bit easier said than done, right? Especially in the face of, you know, losing a loved one or loving someone. I, I know that we’ve talked about before, you and I on the other show that we did that people feel bad for feeling better or getting
Gabe Howard: On with their lives after the death of a loved one. So I can only imagine if they feel that they are now better off, or that they are achieving more, or that their life grew in some way after the death of a loved one, that they would feel very, very badly, as you even just described getting to the new normal a lot of people have conflicted feelings about, but what you’re describing is actually making yourself better in the face of trauma and the face of of grief. And I imagine that that really conflicts people.
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, the word better is a little sticky for me. I don’t think it’s so much about being better as it is being more maybe more intentional or more aligned. Right? So there’s five domains of post-traumatic growth. So interpersonal relationships, new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change and appreciation of life. And none of that really is saying I grew to be a better person. Right. It’s saying okay, when I look at the quality of my interpersonal relationships, do I like them? Am I am I with people who I want to be with? Am I myself when I’m with the people that I care about? Right. If not, there’s some opportunity there. And sometimes when something traumatic happens, that’s what we find is that the people who we thought were our ride or dies, ghost. Right. And maybe we’ve been going through the motions in relationships because we didn’t know how to exit gracefully. We felt guilt, and we stayed in relationships with people that we really didn’t want to be in relationships with. Because we have a history. Right. Or it feels like a should to us, when in reality we can be like, wait a minute, okay. I maybe I’m not surrounding myself with people who I really want to be around. Maybe I’m not being myself with the people who I care about. So. Does that make me a better person? I don’t know that that’s the right lens. Right. It’s. Does that make me more intentional and living more aligned with what I value? That’s what it is for me. But when you think about it as better, then doesn’t it make sense that you would you would kind of feel a little icky about that, because it would be so easy to say, well, I’m only better because this traumatic thing happened to me. And that feels weird, right? It’s like a conflict of values there.
Gabe Howard: It does feel weird, but it’s also the plot of everything. I’m going to use Batman just because I love Batman. Right?
Gabe Howard: Batman witnessed the murder of his parents and then saved Gotham. Right. He. He
Krista St-Germain: Mm-hmm.
Gabe Howard: Helped everybody. He cleaned up the city. Arguably, everybody’s life is better because Batman went through this trauma and apparently practiced post-traumatic growth because he. He used it to become, well, Batman now. That’s a that’s a fanciful analogy, but.
Krista St-Germain: Mm-hmm.
Gabe Howard: It is portrayed in, in, in, in pop culture, over and over and over
Gabe Howard: Again, bad things happen. Greatness follows. But that’s not how it plays out in the real world. That’s that’s not what you’re actually talking about when you talk about post-traumatic growth. Is that is that accurate?
Krista St-Germain: I just think it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, right? It’s not like as simple as saying, well, first of all, it’s not saying Batman wished his parents died. Batman is grateful that his parents died. Right. We’re not saying that. We’re saying, okay, this thing happened, and then Batman decided who he wanted to be. Right. Of course, that opportunity is always available to us without bad things happening. But what post-traumatic growth? The researchers that discovered it, what they discovered was that there were basically, you know, before their work, the idea was pre trauma. Somebody would be experiencing a particular level of wellness or quality of life, and then post trauma, that level of wellness would dip and some people would stay there. A second group would kind of dip and come back to that level of wellness that they were experiencing before. But that was like the best we could hope for before their work. Right. The goal was like, okay, it’s it got really bad, but maybe we can get back to where it was and what they just started noticing was there was this third group of people that weren’t just bouncing down and back.
Krista St-Germain: They were bouncing down and forward. Right. They were reporting greater levels of satisfaction, greater levels of quality of life. And so it’s just a reframe of what is possible for us. And and I don’t I don’t think it has to be heroic in the sense or glamorous in the sense of a Batman and how it shows up in popular culture to be really meaningful and valuable. Like for me, in my instance, you know, a huge part of post-traumatic growth for me was realizing, like, I’m not in the job I want to be in. I mean, is that heroic? Are people going to make movies about that? No. Right. But at 40, it was a pretty important thing for me to figure out that I really wasn’t. I was the money was okay. Right? Like, am I being who I want to be in the world? Am I showing up with friends the way that I want to show up, or am I just going through the motions and adulting in the way that I think you’re supposed to adult? And for me, that’s largely what I was doing.
Gabe Howard: It reminds me a lot of that whole fake it till you make it that that seems to be the advice that people get after a trauma. Well, fake it till you make it. Go through the motions. Do what you’re supposed to do, adult well, and you’ll be fine. It sounds like you’re saying that. That’s bad advice.
Krista St-Germain: [Laughter] Well, I’m not against act as if like I really do know that you can smile at yourself in the mirror and actually change your mood. So it’s not that that advice is completely terrible, but I think, can we do can we do it in a way that is authentic and is in pursuit of what we care about, as opposed to doing it in a way that feels fake or phony, or doing it in a way that is in pursuit of what other people have told us to care about, right? It feels different to me, but I don’t think we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is. There is a little bit of truth to acting your way into something that matters to you.
Gabe Howard: Krista, I’m just curious. You’ve talked a lot about how trauma can be a springboard for growth, and in some ways that that sounds off to me like something bad happens, but you can use it as a springboard.
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, I mean, so in my own personal life. Right? My husband died when I was 40. He was killed by a drunk driver. And that was the most awful thing I ever experienced, right? Bar none. I didn’t want it to happen. I’m not grateful that it happened. I used to think that in order to experience post-traumatic growth, when I first learned about it, that that that would mean I would have to be happy that it happened, which is really, really off putting.
Gabe Howard: And we’re back discussing post-traumatic growth with Krista St-Germain.
Krista St-Germain: Who would ever be happy that something you experienced as traumatic happened? That just doesn’t make sense. I even read in a book. Side note and I won’t mention the author, but this is actually what they said is in order for you to grow after trauma, you have to be grateful for your trauma. 100%. No, right? No, not at all. So I think that’s why we experience it as off putting is because we misunderstand that, because we’ve decided to make changes after something happened, growth that that has something to do with wishing that it happened when that is not the case at all, or being happy that it happened. It’s really just saying, no, this happened. What do I want to do with it? Who do I want to be now that it has happened? Am I living life the way that I want to live it? And that can be like a wakeup call of oh, actually, no, maybe I’m not in this particular area.
Gabe Howard: It really sounds like to me the old trope of the tortured artist in mental health circles, right? It’s like we have to talk about how Vincent van Gogh is an incredible artist because he lived with severe mental illness. And I always stand up and say, no, no, he lived with severe mental illness because he was sick. Okay, so now we can just move.
Krista St-Germain: Mm-hmm.
Gabe Howard: That along. He was a great artist because he was a great artist, because he had raw talent, because he worked hard, because he practiced, because whatever. Why are we taking Vincent van Gogh’s humanity and reducing it to a brain disorder, as if
Gabe Howard: It was some sort of gift? It sounds to me like that’s what you’re describing when you say that people have to be thankful for their trauma or give credit to their trauma. I really see it as, no, this is this is the the rising Phoenix. This is proof of the human. I’ve lost my words. I’ve gotten so annoyed by that. It’s just, why can’t people be empowered to create greatness from darkness and see that as triumph of the human spirit instead of.
Krista St-Germain: Mm-hmm.
Gabe Howard: Sort of putting them in this corner where they have to be grateful that something bad happened. That sounds so mean.
Krista St-Germain: I know it’s just something just very superior that we have created and I see it coming from multiple places, and I see a lot of people falling into it and I know for sure I struggled with it, which is I remember hearing it, I feel like it was like Oprah, maybe a long time ago. Who said something about you can’t be. You can’t be grateful and sad at the same time? Something like that, right? Which fed this belief that I was kind of building, which is that, you know, happiness is the goal and sadness is not. And so therefore gratitude is better. And I think that gets like extrapolated into post-loss or, or post-trauma, where because we might have come into it with the idea that happiness is better, sadness is bad, therefore gratitude is better. Then we try to force ourselves into believing things that we don’t actually believe, so that we will create this experience which we we have been taught to believe we’re supposed to have. Which is also why we were not very good about supporting people who were going through something. Right? Like, if we aren’t comfortable with emotion, then it makes sense that we would want to try to make them feel better because we don’t know how to be comfortable when they aren’t. And so we do it to other people and we do it to ourselves.
Gabe Howard: What are the steps if somebody is listening right now and they’re like, okay, you’ve convinced me. I want to be better. I want to move on. I want to get past the trauma. And I like this idea of doing well and living an intentional life. But what we haven’t exactly stated yet, Krista, is okay. Step one what is step one of post-traumatic growth?
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, I wish it were that simple.
Gabe Howard: Yeah. I think the listeners do, too. [Laughter]
Krista St-Germain: I know, right? Don’t we all? If somebody could just give us the steps. I think we want to be mindful of approaching trauma differently than we might think about post-traumatic growth. And by that, I mean, you know, post-traumatic growth is something that any of us can create simply by, like doing a little assessment of how we’re living and what we value. Right. And checking for alignment and misalignment and then making choices accordingly. It’s not a super complicated thing. It has layers like anything. And I think there there are depths to which you can do that work. You know, I love doing it very deeply in terms of helping widows go through and like, uncover the things that they believe that maybe they didn’t choose for themselves. But just by nature of being human and being socialized in particular ways. We’re all walking around with this set of beliefs that maybe we actually don’t want. And so it can be as simple as being like, do I like my job? No, I don’t, this is not what I want to do. Okay, change my job. Do I like my relationships? No I don’t. Okay. Change my relationships. And it can be much deeper of what do I actually believe about myself? What do I believe about, you know, the world and really challenging those things. So it can be easy. It can be deep. Let it be what you want it to be.
Gabe Howard: Can you do anything to force post-traumatic growth? How do we get started along this journey?
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, I don’t want to think about it as forcing. I would say we’ve already started. I mean, if someone’s listening to this, they’re already started, right? Because now what’s happening is that they’re probably curious about it. And I think curiosity is such a beautiful opening, right? It’s like, oh, I wonder if this is possible for me. Oh, I wonder, what ways have I already created something that I didn’t even set out with the intention to create? Right. And then we can just kind of look for where are the areas of conflict in my life and where are the areas of misalignment. Right. If conflict is misalignment, where am I not feeling aligned? When I look at my relationships and I look at what I do for a living and I look at my faith and you know, just how I’m experiencing the world. Where does it feel like I’m not aligned? Or maybe I’ve just been going on autopilot through and now is my chance to just check in with myself again. It doesn’t have to be Batman heroic level save the city stuff, right? It can just be like, oh, this relationship is no longer working for me. I think I need a boundary here. That’s growth. It doesn’t have to be big.
Gabe Howard: Krista is post-traumatic growth something that everyone can experience? Is it a conscious choice? Do you have to work on it? What are the expectations for post-traumatic growth to work in someone’s life?
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, I see it as definitely a choice that we can make. And my favorite way to think about it is like thinking about it like a tornado, right? Because partly because that’s I live in a place where we have a lot of them. You know, it’s if if you live in a house and the tornado comes and knocks down your house, you’re going to need a new house, right? You can, you know, find the plans for the house that you used to live in and give it to a builder and have them build the house that you used to have or as close as possible to it. Right. Or if you want, you can ask yourself, what might I want to be different about this next house that I’m building? What did I learn about living in the house that I used to live in? Do I want more light? Do I want a bigger closet? Do I want a different kitchen layout? Like, what have I learned? And then update the design of the house if you want. Does that mean you asked for the tornado to come? No. Does that mean you’re happy the tornado came also? No. Is it morally superior if you update the design of your house? Of course not. Right. It’s just that we all get to make choices about what we want and who we want to be, no matter what happens to us. So in that regard, I believe everybody can create post-traumatic growth.
Gabe Howard: I know that we’re nearing the end of the show, and I have always found you to be extremely motivating and really give me personally, a lot of courage to to move forward and delve into areas that I may be avoiding. And I want to give the audience the same opportunity to hear your pep talk. Krista, can you motivate our audience to move forward and just reassure them that that they can do this?
Krista St-Germain: Well, first of all, thanks for the vote of confidence. [Laughter]
Gabe Howard: You’re very, very welcome. It’s my pleasure.
Krista St-Germain: I love knowing that my work is helpful. Like you’re already on the path. I think that’s what I want people to hear there. We we make the idea of moving forward or creating growth or change into such a big thing. And it doesn’t need to be big. Like, think about it in terms of little teeny tiny steps that you’re probably already taking that when you take feed on each other, right? So you make one little small change and you feel the energy and motivation of that one little small change, and you get the confidence from having made that one little small change. And then that gives you the willingness to be courageous, to make the second small change. Right. And it’s just those little small changes over and over and over that build on themselves and create a momentum. And, and people are already on their way just by listening to you. I know they are.
Gabe Howard: Krista, thank you so much for being here. Where can folks find you online?
Krista St-Germain: Yeah, The Widowed Mom Podcast is my podcast, which I realize is very, very specific. But if anybody wants to learn about grief and post-traumatic growth, you don’t have to be a widow to listen or a mom. And then CoachingwithKrista.com is where you can find all the links and the socials and the things.
Gabe Howard: Krista, thank you so much for being here. And a great big thank you to all of our listeners. My name is Gabe Howard, and I’m an award-winning public speaker, and I could be available for your next event. I also wrote the book “Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations,” which you can get on Amazon. However, you can grab a signed copy with free show swag or learn more about me just by heading over to my website, gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this podcast, please follow and subscribe to the show. It is absolutely free and you don’t want to miss a thing. And hey, can you do me a favor? Recommend the show. Share your favorite episodes on social media, send somebody a text message, bring us up and support groups because sharing the show with the people you know is how we grow. I will see everybody next time on Inside Mental Health.
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