You Died to Self: The Cultural Shape of Post-traumatic Growth for Immigrant Women

The quatrain above resists translation, less for its grammar than for its argument. Someone has been killed, and the poem advises thanks. In the Persian mystical tradition this death is not literal; it marks the dissolution of an ego-bound self, which the tradition treats as the condition for becoming whole rather than as a defeat. Seven centuries later, psychology restated part of the same idea and called it posttraumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996).

What follows makes three claims: that growth accompanies suffering rather than following it, that our instruments carry the cultural signature of the tradition that built them, and that Persian-speaking immigrants already hold, inside their own culture, the resources likeliest to support growth which they utilize intuitively. 

Growth and Suffering Happen Together

Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) defined posttraumatic growth as positive psychological change after a highly challenging life crisis, located in five areas: relating to others, new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change, and appreciation of life. Among 230 Persian-speaking refugees from Afghanistan and Iran living near Berlin, 69 percent screened at high risk for depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress, and those same people showed resilience, psychological flexibility, and growth at the same time. Women screened more severely than men (Firoozi et al., 2026).

The pattern reaches well beyond displaced populations. Zerach (2024) sorted 885 Israeli women combat veterans into four groups by pattern of symptoms and growth. Two groups combined symptoms with growth and together held about two thirds of the sample; only 5.5 percent scored low on both. More combat exposure raised the odds of landing in a symptom-and-growth group rather than lowering them. In short, growth does not wait for suffering to end; it often runs alongside it.

The Instrument Carries a Cultural Signature

Tedeschi and Calhoun measured spiritual change with two items, one asking about religious faith and one about spiritual understanding. Tedeschi et al. (2017) later expanded the instrument, adding six items on spiritual and existential change, because the original pair worked poorly where traditional religious belief mattered less. That revision admitted the problem without solving it.

What has happened since suggests not that growth is missing in non-Western groups, but that the five-part structure does not survive translation. Vukčević Marković et al. (2025) gave the inventory to 249 refugees traveling the Balkan route, three quarters of whom were men. They found three groupings: how a person sees herself, her relationships, and her philosophy of life. Together these accounted for 44.9 percent of the variation in answers. Spiritual change did not stand on its own, and the authors offered no explanation. 

The pattern repeats, and never in the same way. Kaya et al. (2026) found that the Turkish version of the expanded short form collapsed into one general growth factor rather than five, with a sense of coherence and meaning-based coping carrying the effect from psychological flexibility through to growth. Not every result runs that way. Caycho-Rodríguez et al. (2025) tested a Spanish short form with 1,820 bereaved adults across four South American countries and found four factors, with spiritual change standing on its own. Kasiianenko (2025) confirmed all five in Ukrainians, but only after dropping the 27 women and analyzing the remaining 508 men. An instrument tested on men and released for everyone is a problematic practice from APA’s viewpoint. Meanwhile Tedeschi et al. (2025) issued a ten-item short form and described it as globally applicable.

My claim here stays narrow. No one has yet tested whether the inventory means the same thing to Persian-speaking and to Western respondents, so no one should assert that it does. What I can say is that the structure shifts from language to language, that the shifting concentrates in the spiritual items, and that a low score may hide growth already underway.

Four Doors into One Room

For this study I examined the narratives of Persian-speaking immigrant women in California, from Afghanistan and from Iran, reading them for lived meaning and for the shape of the story each woman told (Nourmanesh, 2024). Four women took part, and I was one of them. I chose autoethnography: analysis from inside a culture offers a different vantage, not a compromised one (Adams et al., 2015; Chang, 2008). Four participants prove nothing on their own; I offer them as documented cases in a literature that holds very few. Taheri et al. (2024) sampled three windows across twenty-five years and found only ten qualifying articles on trauma and growth among refugee women, all of them in the final window, and little has appeared since.

My participants described domestic violence, psychological abuse, gaslighting, abandonment, the sacrifices of motherhood, and a fear of retaliation that outlasted resettlement. Two findings surprised me. Not one of them called herself a victim, and one told me that stepping into the cycle of oppressor and oppressed was itself a trap.

The second finding is harder to measure. All four of us said we had handled our trauma, and spirituality was the one thing all four of us named. No two of us practiced the same one. One woman held an observant Muslim faith. One had moved from Islamic mysticism to Christianity and spoke of being reborn in the Spirit. One said she had no religion, that her religion was Love. I found mine in the arts and in the Persian literary canon. An inventory that asks about religious belief will find the first woman and perhaps the second. It will not find the third or the fourth. Musse and Garrison (2025) met this problem and built a growth model for Somali refugee women out of the Somali concept ka bogso, i.e. being healed toward wholeness in community.

The Body Keeps the Record

The body kept a consistent and severe record. One woman developed an autoimmune disorder. Another had nightmares with serious physical consequences. I had chest and back pain, a depressive phase that would not lift; and, in an otherwise creative mind, I stopped dreaming altogether. This matters for assessment. Jesuthasan et al. (2025) studied 594 women refugees in German reception centers and found two paths from accumulated trauma to lower quality of life, one direct and one running first through somatization, then through distress. The body comes first in that sequence, not last. Kandahari et al. (2026) interviewed 23 Afghan refugee women in the San Francisco Bay Area and found them naming their distress in the phrases their culture supplies for suffering, and in the body, rather than in the words a screening tool listens for; something I witnessed serving refugees of Alameda County. 

Narrative as the Site of Growth

Trauma injures while installing a story. Much of that story arrives from outside the person, from what narrative practice calls dominant discourses, i.e. the accounts a culture supplies about how a life ought to go, which run quietly inside her as her own commentary (Gehart, 2023). Growth, on this understanding, means telling your own voice apart from the one handed to you, then rewriting the story (Feinstein & Krippner, 2009). Marshall et al. (2025) found that free expressive writing changed nothing measurable in anxiety, stress, physical symptoms, or life satisfaction, while turning-point writing, a structured account of one pivotal event and how it led to what followed, beat it on posttraumatic growth. What carried the effect was how coherently the writer connected cause to consequence. Yao et al. (2025) pooled trials of writing after bereavement and found a small effect for writing alone that nearly doubled once a reader responded. Disclosure is not the active ingredient; structure is, and it works better with company.

I designed a three-session protocol (Nourmanesh, 2024). In the first, each woman would take two assignments: a written or drawn account of trauma and a reading of Parsipur’s (1998) Women Without Men. In the second, I would read her text back with her, listening for the words, phrases, and voice that revealed a dominant discourse, and we would use the novella’s characters as figures against which she could place her own path. I designed the third as group work, in which the women would read and retell one another’s accounts, because shared telling builds common ground and restores the capacity to trust (Herman, 1997). They declined. None would enter a group setting or circulate what she had written. I report this as a finding, not as attrition. One woman asked me whether writing could help at all and traced her doubt to an inherited understanding in which a written document is a danger rather than a relief.

Historical trauma remains a contested idea. Mutuyimana and Maercker (2023) reviewed 52 studies and found no agreed definition and an evidence base drawn almost entirely from Indigenous American communities (see also Nagata et al., 2024). Turjanmaa et al. (2025) studied 94 mother-and-daughter pairs among Ingrian women whose families were persecuted under Soviet rule and found distress rising precisely where the mother knew more of the family history than the daughter did. Silence travels as reliably as story. For Iranian participants the caution is not only inherited. Iran criminalizes memory work in the present, and transnational repression reaches the relatives who stayed (Moss et al., 2022; Mousavi, 2024).

Lee et al. (2023) found that interventions built on disclosure work least well in cultures that prize emotional restraint. The session that never happened tells us something about the limits of asking people under surveillance to write themselves down. It points to where a culture’s own vehicles, e.g. recitation, poetry, mark-making, oral telling, carry what a writing protocol cannot (Davis & Magee, 2020; Scott, 2021). That these remain untested is no small gap. 

Implications for Practice and Training

Structural conditions limit what any method can do. California is home to 10.9 million immigrants, 28 percent of the state’s residents (Public Policy Institute of California, 2026). Yet of 3,847 mental health facilities surveyed nationally, only 5.6 percent offered services in one or more of the languages that survey groups as Asian; a grouping that includes Persian too. That share has fallen since 2021 (Suryavanshi et al., 2026). Cultural competency still matters. Current guidance adds cultural humility and structural competency to it, and the difference is that a clinician can complete a competency and cannot complete humility (Foronda et al., 2016; Schouler-Ocak et al., 2026; Zhu et al., 2023). Bunn et al. (2026) reviewed whole-person service models for displaced communities and found that only 11 of 35 frameworks reported outcomes at all, and that 91 percent of those reported symptoms. A field that counts only symptoms will not see growth when growth occurs. 

Conclusion

Western instruments are not invalid, and cultural practice should not replace treatment. But a measure built to find growth through one tradition’s language for the sacred will miss it in those who grew through another, and a system that judges itself on symptom reduction will never notice.

Three commitments follow, and each is testable. Clinicians should assess the body, because in this population distress often arrives there first, sometimes only there. Researchers should examine an instrument’s structure in the language of the people answering it. Practitioners should begin from the vehicles a community already trusts—poetry, shared telling, dancing—rather than a protocol that asks for a written record from people with good reason not to leave one. This is not settled practice. Aqtam et al. (2025) searched for narrative therapy in conflict-affected Palestinian communities, whose own tradition offers sumud (steadfastness) and hikaye (storytelling), and found no qualifying study.

None of these calls for new theory. It calls for practitioners willing to let the people in front of them teach, and for training that treats it as a skill to build rather than a temperament to hope for.

About the Author

Shirindokht Nourmanesh, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology from Sofia University (2024). Her research addresses immigrant women’s narrative, embodiment, and posttraumatic growth. She is a developmental editor and literary translator working in Persian and English, and leads workshops at the intersection of writing and painting, where creative practice serves as a tool for healing and for changing the narrative. She designs and delivers training, curriculum, and program evaluation on trauma-informed, culturally responsive practice for schools, clinical teams, and immigrant-serving organizations.