Abstract

Post-traumatic growth research faces a gap that measurement reform alone cannot close. More than half of trauma survivors report meaningful growth; fewer than one in ten show verifiable change. This paper argues that the gap has an ontological source: PTG research is built on a substantivist model of the person — a bounded individual who acquires growth as a property — when what trauma survivors actually describe is something different: a reconfiguration of their relational world. Drawing on Whitehead's process philosophy, Emirbayer's relational sociology, Barad's agential realism, and Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, I propose that the person is a relational configuration, trauma disrupts that configuration, and genuine growth is its re-emergence at higher complexity. I further argue that meaning-making itself — the central facilitating mechanism identified by Mangelsdorf and Eid (2015) — is a relational emergent property rather than an individual cognitive operation. Drawing on Park's meaning-making model, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Hermans's dialogical self theory, and Neimeyer's narrative reconstruction framework, I propose a six-level Relational Meaning Emergence Scale (RMES) as a testable operationalization of this claim. I derive three falsifiable empirical studies, reframe each of the five PTGI domains as relational network predictions, and propose a Relational PTG Index (R-PTGI) as a network-based measurement complement to the classical PTGI.