Michael Brady

Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is commonly understood as positive psychological change following trauma and has been the subject of extensive empirical research. Far less attention, however, has been paid to negative psychological changes that are not themselves clinical categories, yet plausibly mirror PTG in structure and scope. In this paper, we introduce and analyze the concept of post-traumatic diminishment (PTD): substantive, non-accidental psychological change in the aftermath of trauma in a direction opposite to growth. After articulating the conceptual constraints that PTD must satisfy, we consider embitterment as an intuitively plausible candidate for PTD. Drawing on psychological and philosophical work, we argue that embitterment, while an intuitively plausible candidate, cannot fully account for PTD, since its central features are not necessarily or essentially negative. We propose instead an aretaic account on which PTD is best understood as movement toward vice. This framework captures PTD’s essential negativity and also preserves symmetry with virtue-based accounts of PTG. It also explains why embitterment often, but not always, constitutes PTD. Finally, we clarify the relationship between PTD and embitterment, arguing that the two overlap without being identical.