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Humans Are More Resilient Than You Think

2022/1/12
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Honestly with Bari Weiss

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The podcast discusses the perception that younger Americans are more traumatized than previous generations, questioning if this is a genuine increase or a shift in cultural perception.

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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. And over the past few years, I've noticed this trend online where more and more people have been using the word. It's trauma, baby. Trauma. Mental health check. Trauma, trauma, trauma.

Your trauma is not your fault. You can't think your way out of trauma. There's hidden trauma. Childhood trauma. If you had trauma as a young kid, where you grew up in a very traumatic environment. Collective trauma. Generational trauma. Emotional trauma. Give yourself permission to unmoor your sense of responsibility from the past. There's trauma bonding. Trauma healing. And place it on your healing. Trauma survival. So many trauma survivors struggle with a sense of responsibility and blame.

It's been fascinating to see that often just the slightest upsetting experience is being casually understood to so many people, especially younger people online, as their trauma. And maybe if it was just a shift in language, like how literally no longer means literally, I don't think I would have noticed it.

But the thing is, it's not just a rhetorical shift. There are new studies showing that younger Americans are reporting that they feel like they're living under near constant trauma. One study put out by the Center for American Progress and the University of Chicago showed that in January of 2020, so before the COVID pandemic, 82 percent of Gen Z respondents reported regularly feeling so sad that nothing could cheer them up.

Ninety-five percent of Gen Z respondents reported that poor mental health interfered with their daily life and activities. Gen Z has been dubbed the most stressed-out, depressed generation in history, with 57 percent of Gen Zers reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression. And I've been puzzled to figure out what exactly is happening here.

Of course, mental health is less stigmatized than it used to be, which is great and important and surely accounts for some of this. But are things really worse now than they were for the generation that experienced World War I or World War II or the Spanish flu pandemic or the Great Depression? I mean, why does it feel like young Americans walking around Manhattan are feeling more traumatized than people that survived concentration camps?

And so I reached out to my guest today, George Bonanno. He's a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, and he heads their loss, trauma, and emotion lab there. He has spent 30 years studying the nature of human resilience in the face of loss, grief, and what he calls potentially traumatic events.

His new book is called The End of Trauma, and his research on these subjects will be surprising, not only to therapists and those in the psych field, but I think to anyone who feels a bit confused about this cultural moment. I left this conversation with a good deal more hope than I started with, and I hope that you will too. Stay with us. My trauma is on my mind. You'll be coming.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. George Bonanno, thank you so much for talking with me today. Hi, it's my pleasure to talk with you. My pleasure to be here.

So trauma is a word that seems to me to be everywhere I look these days. I see it on my Instagram feed where people are talking about trauma, but they're not referring to things like a very serious car accident or abuse or neglect.

Very often they're referring to things like having an overbearing mother or a perfectionist father. People talk these days about the trauma of disagreeing with other people. Managers, I've heard, talk about being traumatized from having to do the very managerial task of firing somebody.

Just even recently, Best Buy and Levi Strauss offered their employees a session with a racial trauma specialist for those who were distraught over the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal.

So it seems to me almost like any negative experience is being talked about, at least in popular culture, as if it produces these psychic wounds that will torment us forever. And even if they aren't actively tormenting us, there's this idea that they are subconsciously influencing our behavior and that it's doing so indefinitely.

George, where is all of this coming from? Where is this idea of trauma sort of affecting us at every turn and from every corner of the culture? What are the roots of that idea?

There are many different routes to this problem, but I do think it's a serious problem because people who genuinely suffer from traumas that we think of as causing prolonged difficulties resulting from a violent or life-threatening event, we're now minimizing their experience in a way by equating all these different experiences under the rubric of trauma.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that trauma is a misnomer almost in every case, even in the case of violent or life-threatening events.

In my own work, I don't use the word trauma. And I try not to use it. I use the term potentially traumatic or potential trauma. In my publications, I use the acronym PTE, a potentially traumatic event. And that's because no event is inherently traumatic. Even the worst kind of violent or life-threatening event, they're only potentially traumatic.

And when a person is deeply affected by one of those events and traumatized, which happens in about 10% of less of the people exposed to the most severe events, sometimes it's a little bit more, those people are traumatized. So then we have a potentially traumatic event that in some people results in prolonged trauma reactions. But we know for most people, they don't. These events, even the worst events, don't.

cause traumatization. They don't cause prolonged trauma in most people. Then when we move to the kind of events you were just talking about, the more mundane everyday events, the kind of things that happen on a regular basis, those events are not

traumatic events either. And typically those events will not cause prolonged trauma reactions. They may cause other things like depression or distress. So all of this kind of the way this word is used now in the general culture is really all based on this misnomer. And it's more than just a linguistic shift. It's really, I think, quite dangerous because it does, I think it harms people. It minimizes people who are generally traumatized.

So as we're going to be talking, I want to separate out what you're describing as a misnomer, the way that this word has sort of been stretched beyond any reasonable definition to your definition of what trauma or rather a potentially traumatic experience is. How do you define it?

Well, actually, I often my work is considered fairly. I don't know what the word would be radical or, you know, I've always taken a lot of chances in my work. But in this case, I'm not a potentially traumatic event is really the characteristic definition in the DSM definition.

what people call the Bible of psychiatric disorders. And internationally, we have the ICD, which is the International Classification of Disorders. And both of those diagnostic nomenclatures, which are the professional diagnostic nomenclatures,

A potentially traumatic event, they don't use the term potentially traumatic, which is, I think, part of the problem. They use the word a traumatic event is something that is actually kind of horrifying, violent, always linked in some way to serious injury or death or sexual violation.

natural disasters, terrorist attacks. And now we have, I think, also the category of life-threatening medical events. Those are really the extent of those events. You can witness something, you can experience yourself.

Something can happen to someone close to you. But those are the kind of events we're talking about. Those are actually what professionally how traumatic events are defined. And it's even a misnomer using the word traumatic in this case because in the professional diagnostic manuals, the event is only part of the criteria. You need to have had one of these events. And then you need to show trauma symptoms, enduring trauma symptoms. They're two separate things.

So let's start with an example to help make this come alive a little bit. And I think it's an example that most people would believe would be truly traumatic. And it's an example that you open up your new book with.

It's a story of a man named Jed who had this truly horrific experience. Can you tell us the story of what happened to Jed? Sure. And Jed had just an absolutely horrific experience. He was working in a restaurant in New York City, a very high-end restaurant.

He was leaving the restaurant about 1.30 in the morning on a very cold winter evening. He went to cross the street and a sanitation truck came around the corner, violated the law. It's not possible to turn on red in New York City. Turned on red, basically knocked him over.

pulled him underneath the truck and all the wheels of the truck on the side he was on ran over his left leg and hip. So first the front wheels, then the two sets of double back wheels. Sanitation trucks, when they're fully loaded, are about 25 tons. And they just crushed his leg to a mass of blood and bone.

And he was there on the pavement. He was screaming wildly. The ambulance was delayed. The fire department arrived. They tried to comfort him as best he could. When the ambulance finally got there, they had to lift him up, which was, again, incredibly painful, and take him to the emergency room. They quickly put him into a medically induced coma. He was in the coma for six weeks, and he had nightmares and all kinds of dreams, positive dreams, but also nightmares during that time.

And they, at one point, decided there's no way they're going to be able to save and

save him without amputating his leg and part of his hip. So the entire leg is gone, part of his hip. I think he had something like 22 surgeries and it took about six weeks. And about six weeks later, they brought him out of the coma, which is a slow process. His family was extremely worried. They were extremely worried. How was he going to take waking up and seeing that a huge part of his body was missing? And to their surprise, when he woke up,

He knew his leg was gone. He remembered everything. He either put it together or he may have incorporated it into his dreams, learned it in his dreams. So a lot of what went on in the hospital made its way in disguise form into his dreams.

And initially, when he came out of this coma, it took a few days to gain consciousness. He had a breathing tube in. But when he became fully conscious, he was, in his words, I think he was just pummeled with memories of this event. And he couldn't believe all these things he had to process. He knew his leg was gone. He knew what happened to him. And there it was for him to make sense of for the first time.

And it took a few days. And then to his surprise, I think to everybody's surprise, but above all to Jed himself, he stopped having those memories. He stopped experiencing any kind of intrusive thoughts and nightmarish images that just stopped. And that was really surprising to him. And he basically assumed, if I should have PTSD now, how come I'm

this is all stopped. How come I'm basically okay? The thing that struck me so much about reading that story is, you know, we live in a world where people say things seriously, like they are traumatized by Halloween or they're traumatized by high school math. The story of Jed, you know, Jed should be kind of the very picture of real trauma. And yet,

He doesn't understand himself that way. You know, and the line you have in the book is Jed sort of asks himself, why was I doing OK? Because I think based on popular perception of the way trauma works, he would have imagined himself to be traumatized. So why was he doing OK? Well, in Jed's case, unfortunately, it's hard to know because trauma

We can't go back into his mind during that time. However, Jed himself wanted to know so deeply that he ended up becoming a clinical psychologist. He had been dabbling in psychology, taking some classes, but after the accident, he decided to go back full time. And he earned a master's degree, then he earned a PhD, and he actually came to work with me, which is how I met him.

But Jed's case, though, illustrates the fact that so many people are in fact exposed to these highly aversive events, these things that we think of, horrifying, life-threatening, the kind of events you would never in a million years want to go through. And they come out basically okay. And the interesting thing is they don't know why.

And part of what I've been trying to do in my own work is to work that out. What is it that we do? I think that it's one of the reasons why people don't know is because the field, the mental health field, the field of psychology and psychiatry that studies trauma has focused so heavily on PTSD. So Jed would not be a kind of person that would even come to the attention of this sort of trauma establishment because he wouldn't have PTSD.

As I was reading his story and some of the other stories in your book too, I was thinking to myself in another time, right? Even two generations ago, the kind of physical horror that happened to him that day was more normalized. It was a more regular part of life. You know, is there something about the normalcy of horrific events happening, physical and otherwise, that makes us more immune to

maybe is the word, to experiencing them as traumatic? I think that historically we have not been nearly as susceptible to the idea of trauma as we certainly are now. But I think, you know, we've always been wired to perceive and react to threat. And when we do that, we generally have a pretty good set of tools to manage threat.

there really was never a PTSD diagnosis until 1980. And there has always been some reluctance on the part of the mental health world to go that route because it's kind of a Pandora's box. And as we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years, we've opened that Pandora's box and we're sort of flooded with it now. But by 1980, it became pretty clear that we do need a diagnosis so we can identify people who are traumatized and people who need treatment.

After that diagnosis, there was a great deal of attention and research by the psychiatric and psychological establishments to understand that diagnosis. And most of the people working in that area were looking at PTSD. They were focusing on people that came to them, people that they would find for research purposes who had prolonged PTSD symptoms.

And that led to a lot of papers, it led to a lot of books, and the books and papers and

articles that were coming out were basically all about the intractability of PTSD, how hard it is to treat, how difficult it is, how damaging it is, etc., which all makes perfect sense given that that's what the field does. But that eventually trickles down into the general public. If you look at books about trauma, you don't see many books like mine that are about resilience and about a broader view of trauma.

They're generally about how to get through it, how to deal with all these horrific things, how to get over your traumatic event. And those books trickle down to the general public and it leads to this idea that we are all traumatized or we can be traumatized easily. And our natural inclination to focus on threat

does in fact then say, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, trauma, oh my gosh. And this is actually one of the other facets of these potentially traumatic events that is completely misunderstood in the general public. Most people, when exposed to a violent or life-threatening event, do experience

short-term reactions from two weeks to a week or sometimes even just a few days, sometimes even less. It varies depending on the event and the person. But most people get pretty upset sometimes.

Most people will have what are commonly known as intrusive thoughts, images, maybe even a few nightmares about the event. That's so common. When you're in a situation where you really could have been seriously injured or even killed, something really horrific, it's going to intrude on your mind for a little while. And that's completely, utterly adaptive.

Even being a little on edge is adaptive. You know, if you think about just a few centuries earlier, that was extremely adaptive because you never know how long a threat's going to be around you. Those short-term reactions generally run their course, you know, as I said, in a week or two at most.

For most people. For some people, they don't. For some people, they turn into prolonged trauma for lots of reasons. But I have many friends. I had a friend recently who was in a very, very horrible situation, a very scary situation. He thought he was going to die. And afterwards, he told me that he was starting to have nightmares about it. He was thinking about it all the time and feeling uneasy. And he said to me, even knowing what I do, knowing where my views are, he said to me, I think I'm traumatized.

And I explained to him very cautiously because I try to stay out of my friends' lives if I can help it with my information. But I basically said, I don't think what you experience is that out of the ordinary. And I don't think you've been traumatized. If it doesn't go away in a month or two, then maybe you're traumatized. But typically these things go away. And they in fact did with this friend of mine.

And it's a very common misnomer, very common mistake people make to think, I'm traumatized now. And I think we've been so, right now it's ubiquitous in the culture to reinterpret any slight mistake

kind of, you know, uneasiness as if we've been traumatized. I guess I'm struck with what is the incentive, right? Like what is there to gain from someone framing themselves as traumatized or as a victim? I was thinking about this the other night. I was at a Jewish event and my wife and I were speaking with this much older woman asking her about her life.

And she had a story that was very typical of that generation. She was born in a DP camp, displaced persons camp. Her father had been part of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He had survived Majdanek and he lived for the last nine months of the war in a hole that he had dug in the ground in the countryside. And I doubt, certainly not her, but I doubt that her father would have ever described himself as

as traumatized in the way that a lot of people in my generation who live very coddled lives describe themselves. So what I want to understand is what has changed? What is the incentive for people to want to sort of hoard their trauma, if I can use that verb?

Well, I think because the term, and I'm speculating here, and I don't think I can speak for every person out there, but I think that in general, because the word has become so ubiquitous and the idea has become so ubiquitous and we've become so focused, it seems to me anyway, we've become so focused on everything that can harm us that when we have something that causes what we think are trauma reactions, it removes us completely.

from any responsibility. The event is causing this for me. And I think it's even more ubiquitous with the idea of hidden traumas. It's a very popular idea right now. You know, people, most people have gone through at least one and usually several violent or life-threatening events in the course of their life. And we, when we, we usually forget about those events, surprisingly enough, we forget about them.

And I've had this own experience in my own life. I've almost drowned in a river, in an ice cold river twice in my life. I've had a gun pulled on me. I've got a whole list of these things. I'll just say this one phrase. I was a wayward youth.

And I got in a lot of trouble. I did a lot of stupid things. And I got myself into mixes where I was in life-threatening situations. And I barely remember those things now. When they happened, I thought, even sometimes I thought, wow, cool. You know, I mean, I was kind of excited that I'd been through something. So, you know, there's a good story behind it.

And I think that's the experience for most people. Memory researchers know that if you really want to probe people's memories of the past, you have to kind of get them engaged in a narrative discussion for some time to tweak their memory. Otherwise, they won't remember things. And so when we're, you know, just cruising around in our daily life and somebody says, you know, a therapist or somebody else says, you know, talks to you enough that you suddenly remember one of those events, then you think, I have a hidden trauma.

And I think the value there is that it or the, you know, the currency there is that that gives us an excuse. I hate to use that word because it sounds judgmental, but it gives us an excuse for whatever difficulties we're having. We're having those difficulties because we have a hidden trauma when, in fact, it was an event that didn't really upset us that much at the time. But it sounds like the hidden trauma. Yeah.

I want to pick up on this word currency because I think it's really, really important, right? When you're talking about your wayward youth, the thing that granted you currency was having these adventures, maybe even having near-death experiences, surviving them and being able to kind of have bragging rights. These days, currency is running in a different direction, right? The thing that grants you status is

is being the victim. So to what extent do you see this subject and the currency that saying that you're traumatized grants you as being a part of the picture?

Oh, I think it's very much becoming a part of the picture. I think this is fairly recent. I would say within the last 10 years, this is really taking off. Because even 10 years ago, my son, we were hiking up in the mountains. He was really quite young. So it was longer than that, maybe 15 years ago. He had slipped up in the Adirondacks where there's primarily slate and

And the slate rock is really sharp on the edges. You know, it's like these sheets of rock. And he flipped coming down a hill quite fast and he fell and he ripped open his leg. You could see the bone. You could see the muscle. And it was pretty gruesome. And we had to get an emergency crew and I had to run down the mountain and find someone with a phone and call the emergency crew.

They came up and he was, you could see he was white as a ghost. He was scared out of his mind. We got him. The emergency crew came up. They put him in a stretcher that the EMT told me, you know, just, he said, dad, I just want to tell you, we might have to bring a helicopter in here. And I want to prepare you that he might lose his leg.

He didn't lose his leg. They didn't need a helicopter. They brought him down. They got him to the hospital in a nearby city. And basically, they thought it was kind of miraculous. There was no real damage, even though you could see the tendons in the bone. And it was a big gash, you know, about three or four inches wide. They just sewed him up. And he was basically, after a little bit, he was going to be okay. My son was thrilled after that.

As soon as they put the anesthesia in, I could see it in his face. It stopped hurting. He couldn't see the wound anymore because they had it covered from him. And then they did the stitching and they told him basically, you're going to be okay. And from that point on, he was thrilled because he knew he was going to go to school with a huge scar on his leg. And that was going to give him all kinds of cred. He wasn't telling anybody he was traumatized. In fact, he was telling us that right away he was fine.

And so that was only about 15 years ago. I don't know what would happen now. You know, I've now, because I'm a parent and I'm in New York, I talk to the teachers sometimes now. They ask me things and they're, they're, they now talk about the children like they're made of tissue paper. The slightest thing, how do I talk to them about this? You know, I mean, one, one teacher asked me, I think somebody's parent had died in

during the summer and the child is coming back and the teacher said to me what do I do

And I remember thinking, talking to her and I said, how about nothing? You know, the child probably doesn't want to be singled out. He'll deal with it like most kids have done since the beginning of time. It's not a pleasant situation, but he'll deal with it. And I think she looked at me a little bit like, are you serious? And I was quite serious. It is basically what we've been dealing with since the beginning of time. Things happen to us.

Speaking of the beginning of time, one of the details that stuck out to me in your book was this example that you use from the Iliad, which is obviously one of humanity's earliest written texts. And it describes these horrific battle scenes in vivid detail. I remember it vaguely from my time at Columbia. But one of the things you note in your book is that even though the text describes the

horrible loss and grief, there's no mention of anything like lasting trauma. You say, "The idea that a dangerous or frightening event might cause lasting psychological difficulties doesn't appear in recorded history literally anywhere until relatively recently."

And I read that, I thought, how could this possibly be true? So tell us a little bit more about when it did appear relatively recently, when it started to emerge based on the research that you did for this book.

Yeah, that was surprising to me as well. And so I spent a lot of time digging and doing the research. And I think it's pretty much the shared psychological conclusion that, you know, others who have done this similar kind of historical research have come to the same conclusion. I don't think it was the case that potentially traumatic experiences happened.

didn't exist. And I don't think it was the case that some people weren't traumatized. I think they were, but there wasn't a way to think about it and understand it until more recently. And the first inklings of it in the 17th century was a guy named Samuel Pepys, who is famous for his diaries. He was an aristocrat in England and

But he talks about there was the London fire and he was in charge by the king to kind of survey the damage of the London fire about it. About half the city burned, if I'm remembering correctly. And he basically was quite emotionally distressed by it. And for about six months afterwards, he was having nightmares.

In the diary, he says that he just doesn't know what to make of it. He can't understand why is he having nightmares? Why is he dreaming of fire? Why is he being anxious in the middle of the night because of fire? He didn't know what to do with that. It still didn't enter into the common, really, language until the late 19th century. Around the late 19th century, there were beginning to be a lot of industrial accidents.

And I think it was 1888, there was a book using the word psychological trauma. I think it was called Traumatischen Neurosis. It was a German book, neurotic trauma, the neurosis of trauma. It was the first time it was really used as a kind of in relation to psychological events, not physical events.

Then came World War I, and there were many soldiers experienced what we came to call shell shock. And often, though, at the time, many of those soldiers were not believed. There was the famous phrase in England, shot at dawn. They were shot at dawn for their cowardice. World War II came around. It replicated again with World War II.

Then the first diagnostic ideas came around, but they were largely blaming the person, blaming the traumatized person for their weakness. And that just kept accelerating until the Vietnam War and the soldiers coming home in the United States with all kinds of problems that couldn't be treated. So that led to the birth and death.

in 1980 of the PTSD diagnosis. But you know that the pendulum kept swinging in that direction as we've been talking about, and it just kept becoming more and more and more a part of our daily life. I think to the point where it's now swung so far in the opposite direction from where it's been historically that we're now becoming sort of obsessed with it. And we know we see trauma when trauma isn't even there now.

So if anything is sort of more abused and overused than the word trauma, I would say it's the diagnosis of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Let's start by just clarifying what is PTSD and what isn't PTSD? And can you just help me draw some lines? Because again, it's just so overused that I'm confused about what it really is. Sure. That's absolutely imperative. Great question to ask. Well, PTSD is unlike most

psychiatric disorders in that it has two parts. Most psychiatric disorders are descriptive. So depression, for example, which is one of the more well-known disorders, has a list of symptoms. That's it. But PTSD is one of the only psychiatric diagnoses that has an event criterion. You have to have experienced what's called a traumatic event, what I would call a potentially traumatic event. And

And you have to first have one of those, and then you have to have the symptoms. And the symptoms until recently fell into three categories. Intrusive cognition, so, you know, intrusions, nightmares, what we consider flashbacks, those kind of things. Avoidant behavior, where you're kind of just can't, you're staying away from things, you're avoiding things, you're deliberately avoiding places and people, et cetera. And then physiological arousal, being on edge, being geared up.

Those three components. And they have to have lasted, the symptoms have to have lasted for at least one month or longer before you can have the PTSD diagnosis. As I mentioned earlier, that most people have a few of these reactions early on, but they go away.

And it's not like depression. It's not like feeling sad. Like a great example is devastating financial loss. A devastating financial loss causes depression, maybe anxiety, too, because of all the consequences. It doesn't cause PTSD typically because it's not a violent or life threatening event.

One of my producers spent a month in Iraq and it was during a really heavy fighting period between ISIS and the Iraqi and American special forces. And while he was there, he saw horrible things. He heard the airstrikes. He saw death and disfigurement. He met and interviewed people who had been raped and tortured by ISIS.

And when he came back to America, he went to see a therapist who specializes in PTSD. And not because he was reeling per se, but because he wanted to make sure that he was being preemptively smart about his mental health. And this therapist basically said to him, you know, despite what you've heard, PTSD is real, but it is a very rare phenomenon. And the therapist listed, like you just did, the specific symptoms and said, if you don't have these symptoms, you're

probably you were just sad and upset about what you saw. And that's actually a totally healthy response. And you're not traumatized. You're just having a very human response to what you saw.

To me, this was a rare story because I was surprised, and maybe this is an indictment of the mental health field at the moment, maybe not, by the forthrightness of the therapist that he went to. Do you think that more mental health professionals need to be more direct about this important difference and maybe indulge their patients a little bit less? I think what the therapist did in the anecdote you just told is absolutely correct and

I think it's not as common as it should be. There are therapists out there who would not have gone that route, who would have probed and probed and probed. And you can kind of create trauma that way. I hate to sound accusatory in that sense, but one can actually create trauma. One can tell a person that, in fact...

They're having worrisome symptoms and that can make them become even more preoccupied and it can lead to more symptoms down the road. And I wish it were more common than it is, that the therapist would behave more like the therapist in the anecdote. I mean, not to be too cynical, but isn't there a very clear incentive for the therapist to coddle people's trauma because it leads to more sessions? Or is that too cynical?

That's pretty cynical, but it has an element of truth. I think there's another explanation though besides just that view, which is that therapists, especially therapists who study, who focus on trauma, they see a lot of traumatized patients. Even if say five to 10% typically of people going through these horrific events develop PTSD, they're likely to see a lot of those people. And they make very

Very fundamental errors in interpretation, the same errors that any human will make. The fallacy of the law of small numbers is one that the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky talked about.

that basically when you see a lot of people who fit a category, PTSD, you tend to assume that's more common in a general population than it is. So they begin to develop ideas that PTSD is more common. I mean, I've given talks in various contexts and I, and it's not, I wish it were more uncommon than it is, but a therapist will sometimes come up to me and tell me, you know, I don't know much about research, but what you told us just now is wrong. Yeah.

And, you know, that's... And why are they saying that?

Because they see a lot of traumatized patients and they just can't believe that most people are not traumatized, as I'm saying, even though that's what the research has shown over and over and over and over ad nauseum. You know, it's been documented so thoroughly and yet their reality is what they're seeing is that, no, I'm seeing all this trauma because that's who comes to them. People who've been traumatized come to see a trauma specialist.

Well, if anyone is justified, I would say, in describing themselves as having PTSD, it would be combat veterans. And I think the sense that most civilians, me included, by the way, have is that many soldiers are traumatized. And there's all these statistics we read about how veterans are 50% more likely than civilians to commit suicide. They're more likely to be homeless.

You did a study of more than 100,000 soldiers, American soldiers, and that study showed that 83% of soldiers showed what you called a resilience trajectory. What does that mean, a resilience trajectory? Well, we track people over time. So in this particular case, we had data on these soldiers before they even became soldiers, when they were in basic training, then when they were deployed, and then afterwards.

So this is just, you know, it's called prospective data, data before and after something happens. So it's very good data. And we use data like this and probably, you know, there have been about, I don't know, I've lost count at this point, well over 50 studies where we simply track people over time and we use computational modeling to identify the prototypical patterns.

And one of those patterns is chronically elevated PTSD symptoms. Another one is a gradual pattern of recovery. So some people show elevated symptoms for a while, a few months, maybe a little longer, and then they start gradually getting better.

That's different than, you know, the chronic pattern. And then the third pattern we commonly see, in fact, the most common pattern that we see in the majority of people we've studied, in every study, the majority is what we call the resilience trajectory. It's

basically maybe a little bit of disruption in functioning. A few of those trauma symptoms early on in the first couple of weeks or so, a month or so at the most. And then it's basically a return to just basic mental health from then on. And it stays that way. And we've

seen this for every kind of event. We've seen it with the military. We've seen it with veterans and soldiers leaving the war. We've seen it with spinal cord injury patients. We've seen it with automobile accidents. We've seen it with terrorist attacks. We've seen it with hurricane survivors. We've seen it with all kinds of different events. We try to study as many of these kinds of events as we can. As we say in my lab, anything really bad that happens, we're going to study it.

And so, you know, these trajectories have been replicated so many times. You know, you've probably heard about the replication crisis in psychology. There's a great...

deal of interest right now in the fact that so many key phenomenon in psychology are not easily replicated. Well, this pattern, these patterns that we study have been replicated over and over and over and over. And we did a review recently of, I don't know, 60, 70 studies. And this pattern, the resilience pattern that I just described, it

stable, good health soon after the event was always the majority and was observed on average in two-thirds of the people exposed to these events. The section of your book maybe that was the most striking to me of all was victims of 9/11 that you studied, including people who were in the towers that day. And even among them, you saw this pattern of resilience.

Can you talk about some of those victims, or maybe they wouldn't even describe themselves as victims, and what you learned from their accounts? Yes, absolutely. I mean, that was probably the single most moving research I've ever done because we interviewed people. We tried to do this as quickly as we could, and we collaborated with some people who were crackerjack epidemiologists who were collecting data, but we wanted to do a study of

Well, we actually brought people into our research offices and interviewed them at length. And then, you know, we did physiological studies. We did all kinds of other studies with the same group and followed them over time. Those interviews were just amazing.

And I mean, you know, we were on the edge of our seats talking with the people in those studies. And there's a chapter in my book which I relate three stories, I kind of intertwine them and tell their story across the course of that day, 9/11.

And all of them faced life-threatening danger the entire time they were in those towers. When they got out of the towers, they saw bodies falling from the towers. People were jumping. They ran for their lives when the towers collapsed.

They all thought they were going to die for sure. One fellow, whose story I told, got caught up in it and was knocked off his feet in a cloud of dust and didn't know where he was. He fell to the ground, swept up into ashes and glass. Another person ran. They got out of the tower. One person was way up high on the top of one of the towers and barely got down in time and had to run for her life. Another person ran.

was in one tower when the planes hit and got down, had a long walk through the stairways with glass and water and fumes and, you know, all the people crowding in the stairway to get out. And then she saw another plane, the other plane hit just as she was walked out into the daylight and again thought she was going to die. Nobody understood what was happening. And then they watched the towers come down at close range. And it was the most,

dramatic, disturbing, emotionally shocking events you can imagine people go through. And they all basically were okay in the end. They showed these three different patterns, which is why I included them in the book. One person was resilient. One person showed this recovery pattern, took her a while to recover. And another person suffered from chronic symptoms for a while.

But, you know, that kind of work, when we brought people like that to our offices and interviewed them and then followed them over time, I mean, that's one of the first times we were beginning to see these kinds of resilience patterns. The prevalence of resilience after potential trauma was after the 9-11 attacks. One of the things that you write about is, and I remember this distinctly, is that

experts after 9-11 forecasted that there was going to be kind of an unprecedented mental health emergency in New York, especially. FEMA allocated mental health aid totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in free therapy. The city started to train an army of volunteer therapists. But that predicted mental health crisis. It never happened, did it? No, it did not happen. And that was...

an enormously interesting event because it the whole world was watching after 9/11 as you mentioned all these resources were allotted all the institutions were on an alert preparing for the worst preparing for this huge onslaught of PTSD and traumatized individuals and it didn't happen people were upset very upset

And there were trauma symptoms early on, but by a few months, they were almost gone. And by six months, they were literally almost gone, especially in New York. You know, there were certainly traumatized people. Don't get me wrong. There were lots of people who were traumatized, but they were never the majority.

They were never the majority response. Even the people that were right there in the towers and got out or, you know, even people that were injured in the attacks, the majority of those people were not traumatized. They show no lasting harm. And I think that the lesson here, unfortunately, was not that well learned.

In retrospect, a lot of mental health professionals and others and journalists as well will basically not are not likely to admit that they were wrong about those events. Right. What you're saying is, yeah, it's upsetting and it should be upsetting, but that's just part of the normal spectrum of human response to an upsetting event. It's not necessarily traumatizing. And that's the distinction. That's absolutely the distinction.

After the break, why George Bonanno goes running without a shirt in the dead of winter and why you might want to try it too. We'll be right back.

We know that the statistics say that most people that are exposed to violent or life-threatening events, the kind of events we've been talking about, do not end up being traumatized by them. And you have this phrase that stuck with me from your book, and you basically say, as you've said, you know, that those events are only potentially traumatic, and, and here's the key line, a good part of the rest of it is up to us.

I know a lot of people who will find that idea extremely hopeful because it means that we don't have to be the victims of our experiences or circumstances.

But I also can hear, and I hear them in my head right now, people who would be sort of enraged or upset by that idea because you could see it from the perspective of it putting a burden on people who have been traumatized as if it's somehow their fault. In other words, they could have chosen to respond differently. Do you get a lot of pushback from people about

About that theme that this this notion that a good part of the rest of it is up to us to some extent. I mean, I try to emphasize that a certain chunk of people will always be traumatized by these horrific events. It's a smaller chunk than most people think.

Most people think, but there are complicated reasons why one person is traumatized and most people are not. There are lots of factors that go into that. And it's hard to know exactly, but the people that are severely traumatized, genuinely severely traumatized, there's all the...

the attention and help they can get. But for the rest of us, we really do need to take responsibility. We really do need to dig in and deal with it. Now, I don't simply say, you know, come on, you know,

Tighten up your bootstrap. Buck up. Pull up your whatever those various phrases are. I mean, I try to think about what it is that we actually do that gets us through those events and then try to articulate it and learn from it and expand it and maybe someday teach people about it. But my book was in partly an attempt to do that. So it's not a simple thing like, you know, you just have to do it. You're not trying hard enough. It's in fact...

The things that I've seen that resilient people do are things a lot of people do. They just aren't aware of it. So I'm trying to make people aware of it. And we need to focus more on that. What is it I can do? And we tend not to think of what I can do. We tend to think only in terms of this happened to me.

I'm trying to shift, I suppose, the narrative a little bit from these horrific events happen and you're traumatized to these potentially traumatic events happen. But most people are OK and you can be you're likely to be OK, too. So, you know, think about what you can do here. What is it that you can do to get past this? So let's talk about what you can do and what your research has revealed about the nature of resilience here.

I've sort of always believed that people are either born generally optimistic or not, that they're born generally psychologically strong or not, resilient or not. But reading your book, I came away thinking that that view of things is mistaken. Tell me why. Well, I think that

And we basically are actually generally resilient and generally psychologically capable. We just don't know it. And I think that we've fallen into the trap, I think. And this kind of goes hand in hand, I think, with the idea that everybody's traumatized. There's also the idea that if you're resilient, it's because you have the magic pieces. You have the magic traits. And I think we see a lot of those things.

A lot of media articles, a lot of discussion. Anytime something major happens, the five traits, what are the magic pieces that resilient people have? The seven traits, the three traits of highly resilient people. But in fact, that's completely wrong because there are no magic traits. Nothing works all the time. Everything in nature has costs and benefits. Everything in nature is bound by a situation. It works. Sometimes in other situations, it doesn't.

And those are simply strengths we might have or tools we might have, those traits. But they're not going to just magically get us through an event. We have to work it through each time. We have to actually embrace it and we have to struggle through it. There's no way around that simple fact.

What I appreciated so much is I had been thinking about resilience as a noun and you're describing it more as a verb. You say resilience is really a process rather than a trait that's inherent in a person.

Can you explain what the process of resilience looks like? Yes, absolutely. You are resilient to something. So it is definitely, and it is a process. So as I've said, we've tried to understand it for a long time and we finally came up with a kind of began to break it down into some key components. And I call the overall thing flexibility. And it has two key components. One is a mindset, a way of thinking that we all are capable of having, I think.

And it's kind of an attitude, way of thinking, a conviction that I'll deal with this. I'll get through this. I'll do what I have to do and I'll get through it. And that's a simple way to think. And we've been like that, I think, as humans have always been like that to some extent. We can break it down in optimism, something called challenge appraisal, confidence and coping. But, you know, it's really anything that a person can do to develop this attitude or to reinforce his attitude.

You know, recently I did a podcast with Joe DeSena, who runs a kind of an obstacle course race, you know, in the cold or people have to climb up walls and then dive in ice cold water. And they do it outside, you know, and then climb up a muddy hill and all these different things. And there are a bunch of people doing this like maniacs.

And they're trying to get to the end. And they end up helping each other. And it's exhilarating. You basically feel like, I can do this. I didn't know I could do this. In my own personal life, I do this weird thing where I run outside just in my shorts and sneakers all winter long. And I run on the step. No shirt?

No shirt. I run into steps in the park and I'm a skinny guy. You know, I'm basically a skinny guy. So there's not much body fat on me and I'm getting older, you know, so as you get older, you have harder time. Your metabolism is slower and you just don't have, you don't generate the heat like you did. But I go out there, you know, all winter long. I do breathing exercises first.

I started doing it six or seven years ago. I got down to zero once, which was the coldest it had ever been here in New York. And, you know, people, my neighbors, other people, they said, there's that guy again. There's that nut. There's that crazy guy. There's that crazy guy. The park service one time, I was talking to a guy who was in the park service, and he said, you know, we call you Tarzan whenever they see me.

But, you know, I do this thing and, you know, it's just one thing I like to do. It's absolutely exhilarating. And just when I come in from that, like a half hour, it takes me to run the steps. And I come in and I'm warm by the time I come in, even when it's really cold. And that just doing that gives me the strong sense. I can do that. I didn't know I could do this and I can do it. You know, that raises a really interesting question, which is, are you doing it because you want to build that thing?

strength in yourself or are you doing it for some other reason and that's sort of the net benefit? That's that it was not the reason I did it. It was a net, it's really a net benefit. It was, I did it because I got curious about it. I'd heard about a Dutch, there's a Dutch guy, Wim Hof, who does this. And I, at first I dismissed it. And then I learned that there were some scientific experiments that

which showed that his body actually changed when he did the breathing exercises. Then he ran out, you know, he was, he could tolerate cold. He was more impervious to illness, you know, and I used to get, you know, four or five colds a winter. Now I haven't had a cold really for six or seven years. It's kind of remarkable.

So I decided to try it really for the health benefits. And to my surprise, I could do it. And then as I did it repeatedly, that began to then have these other effects, which I didn't anticipate that I'm really weren't really what I intended anyway, that, you know, I got I could do this. What else can I do? The point is anything you can do to just build this sort of sense of of embracing the challenge. That's one part of what resilient people do.

And the other part is that once we have this sort of mindset, this conviction, that just makes it a lot easier then to dig in. I like to say we get ourselves in the game. We say, okay, this thing happened to me. I'm having nightmares. I'm really uneasy. I don't know what's happening.

What can I do to get past this? And, you know, and if you start thinking yourself, well, I can do this. I can I can solve this problem. And then we get into what I call the flexibility sequence. It's a series of steps we've observed previously.

that most resilient people go through. They first focus on what's happening to them, kind of taking stock. So what is happening right now? Okay, I'm having nightmares. I'm finding it difficult to concentrate. I'm on edge. I'm nervous. I think something's going to happen when it's, you know, I have this undifferentiated sense of dread. Okay, well, what can I do about that? Well, I'm good at talking to people.

I'm good at distracting myself. I'm good at doing research. I'm good at seeking out help. Whatever we're good at, we can dig up and try it out. And then the third part is just what we call the feedback monitoring. We basically pay attention. I tried something. Did it work?

Do I feel better? If it did, great. You've got a little check mark. Okay, this works. This helps me. If it didn't work very well, you still don't feel good, then you try something else. And you keep trying things. That's a basic process. And it turns out when we study this that, in fact, most resilient people do, in fact, do this.

They just aren't aware of it. There's not anything they thought about. And we use these processes. And every time we do this, especially if we pay attention to it, we get a little more sense of, I can do this. Gosh, I just, I got through this. And then the worst thing that we're going through suddenly doesn't seem like the worst thing we're going through. Suddenly it seems like I can take this on piece by piece.

And get through it. It's what people did for a long time. And I think we still do it. But I think, you know, the focus on how traumatized everybody is can undermine that, you know, it can weaken that because we stop thinking about what we can do. Instead, we focus on what happened to us.

And these are habits, right? The flexibility mindset and the sequence that you just talked about that we can cultivate in ourselves, right? Absolutely. And in fact, that's one reason why I got so interested in this line of research. I got very excited and very interested because I thought this is basic.

These are not, you know, mystical processes. These are not the magic traits that only some people have. These are not elaborate skills. These are basic skills that we all do most of the time anyway. We're just not paying attention to that. We're not really aware we're doing it. But in fact, if you look at this from a developmental perspective, you know, from in terms of our childhood, we learn these things as children.

And we learn them over and over and over until we stop realizing we're actually doing it anymore. But we're doing something different with our kids now, right? You mentioned teachers before that treat children, and these were your words, I loved it, like tissue paper. It seems like we're not cultivating habits of resilience in our kids. It seems like we're cultivating habits of fragility.

Well, I think we're not cultivating it as much as we used to, perhaps. And we're in danger of, I think, danger of making people weaker in a strange way. And I'm not a child development expert, but this is something I see. And this is something I feel very strongly about since I raised my own children in New York City, is that we let our children make mistakes. I think letting children make mistakes is...

is the greatest thing you can do for them. And you, of course, you provide a safe base for them, you know, provide a sense of support, but you allow them to learn. You know, my son left home when he was 17. He went off in parts unknown. He didn't tell us where he was going. And this was really hard for a lot of people. It was less difficult for me because I did the same thing when I was 17.

I made a lot of mistakes and I had some serious things. I mentioned potentially traumatic events, but I learned a great deal from that. And I think I saw this in my son. He came back a much wiser, healthier person. So he didn't go to college. He just began college now at the age of 23. So when he went off when he was 17, where did he say he was going?

We only vaguely knew he got on a bus and then he ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No offense to Chattanooga, but I honestly didn't know Chattanooga was really a place. You know, it's a it's a song, you know, and I thought, really, is that really a place? Sorry about that, Chattanooga. Turns out to be a wonderful place. But he went to Chattanooga. He knew some people there through his online life. He has a big online life, like a lot of kids his age, a lot of boys his age.

And he stayed there a while. I think he got a job in a zoo and he struggled a little bit. Then he went to, I think, St. Louis again. I have no idea why he went to St. Louis. And then he came back eventually, you know, and he still struggled a little bit, but I could see some maturity had crept up in him. And he, you know, he's tried a few different things and he kept, you know, he took chances. We tried to encourage him to take chances. And now he's off at college and he's, I think, wildly enthusiastic about it now.

And that makes a big difference, makes a huge difference. My daughter went straight to college and she knew exactly what she wanted and she's thriving, you know, at college, but she's a different person. And she's actually tried a lot of challenging things, you know, and I think that giving them the chance to fail is really important. And we don't do that as much as we used to.

Well, George, next time I'm in New York City and on the Upper Upper West Side, I will look for the skinny Tarzan running in the park and I will use it as a lesson to remind myself that I am capable of much more resilience than maybe I realized. I think that your book is just such an important antidote to the popular perception of how fragile we all are and

Reading your book made me hopeful. It was a good reminder of how much human beings are capable of overcoming and a challenge, I think, in a great way to your readers about what's possible in their own lives, even in the most trying circumstances. So thank you so much for your book and thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you, Barry. It was absolutely a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

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