The Trauma Script

When tragedy strikes, it’s natural to be devastated. But psychologist George Bonanno finds that many of us recover from life’s blows more quickly than we might expect. This week, we talk with Bonanno about his research and why it has changed how many scientists think about trauma and resilience.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Say the words "fairy tale," and a pleasant vision comes to mind. Beautiful princesses, charming dwarves, and adorable animals. But in their original incarnation, fairy tales were a lot grislier than the sunny stories we tell today.

• 0:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Grimm's fairy tales, first published in Germany in 1812, included stories like "The Robber Bridegroom." It told of a young woman who visits the home of the man to whom she is engaged, only to discover that he is the leader of a band of cannibalistic robbers. She hides and watches as the robbers murder another young woman, cut her up, and eat her. She exposes the robbers by giving the authorities a victim's severed finger, which has a ring on it.

• 0:55Shankar Vedantam?

  In another tale, called "The Juniper Tree," a stepmother kills her stepson, chops him up, and serves him in a stew to his unsuspecting father. His sister collects the boy's bones and buries them under a juniper tree. The boy is reborn as a bird who kills the stepmom by dropping a stone on her head.

• 1:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Even "Snow White," the sweet story we know from the Disney version, was far scarier in original form. The evil queen, jealous of her beautiful stepdaughter Snow White, tries several times to kill the girl. After the evil queen is caught, she is forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and dance until she dies.

• 1:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, these collections of gruesome and ghastly tales are often presented to children in highly sanitized form. As parents and teachers, many of us are worried about causing irreparable psychic harm.

• 1:54Shankar Vedantam?

  But what does that say about earlier generations of caregivers who happily read these stories to their kids? Did they care less about the well-being of their offspring?

• 2:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Historical accounts do not suggest these stories traumatized children in the past. Indeed, the enduring popularity of grisly stories, sometimes over centuries, suggests there was robust appetite for such tales. So, what changed?

• 2:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, we take a deep dive, not into the world of children's fairy tales, but the larger question of how we think human beings respond to accounts and experiences of tragedy, and how they actually respond. Grief, trauma, and resilience. This week, on Hidden Brain.

• 2:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Farmers Insurance. At Farmers, they believe insurance should be in terms you can understand. Like with coverage on a page, you get a clear view of what is and isn't covered in your policy in plain, simple language, so you're not left with any surprises. Does your insurance do that? Check them out at farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or affiliate. Products not available in every state.

• 3:27Speaker 01

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• 3:57Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:32Shankar Vedantam?

  I grew up in India, where traffic accidents and deaths were commonplace. I personally know multiple friends and family members who died in traffic crashes. When I first came to the United States, I was surprised that people talked a lot more about traffic safety, even though the roads were much safer. In time, I came to realize that the very ubiquity of traffic fatalities in India made people more blasé. Things that happen every day fade into the background. Airplane crashes, which are rare, draw intense attention. The same thing happens to cultures over time. Things that were surprising in one day and age become commonplace in another. And things that are seen as commonplace in one day and age can come to be seen as shocking.

• 5:17Shankar Vedantam?

  At Columbia University, psychologist George Bonanno, who has studied how many cultures today have come to think about suffering and grief and tragedy very differently than people did in the past. George Bonanno, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Shankar. I'm very happy to be with you, to talk with you.

• 5:35Shankar Vedantam?

  George, I'm wondering if I could start with a personal story. You grew up in Chicago. How would you describe your relationship with your dad?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  I would say it was a very complicated and fraught relationship. The neighborhood I grew up in was a Sicilian neighborhood, Sicilian immigrants. And it was a tough neighborhood. My father would beat us at times. The beatings were not as bad as the anger that he exhibited. He would go into these rages, and he was a very scary human being then.

• 6:06Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that he himself was someone who took on a lot as he went through his life. And in some ways, you saw that, and perhaps alone among your siblings, you actually empathized with what he was going through. Can you describe what that was like, George?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, my father worked very, very hard, and I think was becoming depressed. He'd also had serious health problems. He'd had several heart attacks. He is becoming diabetic, so his life was kind of slipping away from him. And I would catch him at times, lying in the dark in bed, and I would go in and talk with him. And he would say to me, basically, you know, "Don't try to talk with me." And so I think there was a kind of a sense that he gave up what he wanted to do, or he gave up the sense of he could have done other things in life.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  So it all came to a head when I finished high school, barely finished high school, and then I left home. And my father had said quite infamously in my mind, "If you leave now, don't come crawling back."

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And that was emblazoned on my mind after that.

• 7:26Shankar Vedantam?

  So you did end up leaving at the age of 17. You traveled widely, including to other countries. Sometimes you slept outside. When you were 23, you found yourself in Colorado, and you got a call in the middle of the night. I understand that initially you decided to ignore the ringing phone?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Well, the phone rang repeatedly, and I was with somebody. I was with a woman that I was very interested in. And I didn't answer the phone. After several repeats of this ringing, I decided there was something very much important. Got up, answered the phone, and it was my older brother telling me that my father had died.

• 8:06Shankar Vedantam?

  What went through your mind in the hours and days that followed, George?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Well, we were beginning, actually, to move towards some sort of reconciliation. I don't think that was likely to happen, but we were somehow trying to find each other a little bit. And I was not sure at that point. I had not experienced this kind of death before. And I was wondering what would I experience. And what I experienced was essentially silence.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  It was in the wintertime. Everything was more or less frozen and covered with snow. And I walked out, went for a long walk, and everything was slow and silent and peaceful.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  The silence somehow seemed... It wasn't what I expected, but it seemed like a natural process.

• 9:01Shankar Vedantam?

  It was George's first real experience dealing with death. He expected he would have tears, but none appeared. People moved hesitantly around him as if they were worried he would splinter into tiny shards if they said the wrong thing. This too felt strange. George felt grateful that his father's pain was over. He felt relief. In time, he became a researcher who studied how people respond to losses and setbacks.

• 9:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Over and over, he saw examples of people who did not follow the conventional script. One was a college student whom George calls Julia.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Julia was home from college and she was at her family's home. She was preparing dinner with her mother and the phone rang and she heard her mother cry out in anguish. And the news was that the father had been bicycling home from work and was hit by a car and he was in the ICU, the intensive care unit. Julia and her mother drove to the hospital and just as they arrived, he died. Julia reports that she was absolutely stunned and she remembers crying a lot, but everything else is kind of a blur. She fell into this state where she was very upset, was having difficulty sleeping, et cetera.

• 10:31Shankar Vedantam?

  So after the initial shock of her father's death, Julia went back to school, plunged into her schoolwork. When friends asked her if she wanted to talk about her father's death, how did she respond?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  For the most part, she did not want to talk about her father's death. She wanted to simply be with her friends, as friends, as companions. And she really didn't want to think about it, to dwell on it. She'd already suffered some before she went back to school. And I think now she was very clearly focused on simply doing what she was doing there, engaging in that work and not dwelling on it. She, I think, did well. And then she came home quite excited because she got an internship at a newspaper. She was excited to be doing that.

• 11:17Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that Julia's mother had some firm ideas about how Julia ought to be responding to her father's death. How did her mother respond, George?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Well, her mother was quite worried that Julia seemed to have forgotten her father. She was acting essentially as if life had returned to normal. And her mother worried that she had denied her grief. This was the phrase that Julia used, that she denied her grief, and suggested that she, Julia, see a grief counselor to get at the bottom of it.

• 11:45Shankar Vedantam?

  And did she?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  She did. And it was interesting because the counselor asked her a lot of questions about her relationship with her father. And Julia said something to the effect of, I'm not stupid. I could see what he was aiming at. She was not happy about this, but she played along with it for a period. And then I think what happened was, if I remember correctly, the number of sessions that would be covered perhaps by insurance had run out. And it was a sort of a natural ending point. And her mother agreed. She said, I don't want to do this anymore. And her mother agreed that she could stop.

• 12:24Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, it's striking, George, that Julia's mother felt she had to go to therapy, not because Julia's grief was destabilizing her, but because she wasn't, in her mother's eyes, experiencing enough grief.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yes. It's a very common assumption that grief is something we need to do and that it's painful. It has to be painful. That's the assumption.

• 12:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Another person you encountered was a young man you called Jed. He had been working in New York City as an aspiring musician when he suffered a terrible accident one night. What happened to him, George?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Jed was working at an upscale restaurant in the West Greenwich Village. It was about 1:30 in the morning on December 21st. It was very cold, about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. And he walked to the corner. He remembers seeing the walk signal shimmering off the frozen pavement. So he walked into the intersection, and a garbage truck, a sanitation truck, made an illegal right turn very fast and clipped him and pulled him under the truck. It ran over his left leg and hip and just crushed it to massive blood and bone. It was a horrific accident.

• 13:44Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm assuming he must have been rushed to the hospital immediately.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Not immediately, unfortunately. So the emergency responders came. He recalls this all vividly because he was awake for the whole thing. He was screaming wildly. The police arrived, the firefighters arrived. He remembers that the ambulance was delayed. I believe he thought it was delayed in traffic at 1:30 in the morning. That's possible in New York. He remembers hearing the first responders yelling, "Put a rush on the bus", which is first responders speak for "Get the ambulance here". And they told him afterwards that if it wasn't so cold, he probably would have bled out and died because he was bleeding so profusely. But the cold weather slowed the flow of blood. And then eventually the ambulance came and they got him to the hospital.

• 14:32Shankar Vedantam?

  What happened there?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  They put him into a coma and kept him into a medically induced coma for six weeks. I believe he had 20 surgeries, if I'm remembering the number correctly. And he'd also experienced a number of infections. And they kind of rebuilt his body to function without so much of it. About a quarter of his body was lost in this accident.

• 14:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Did he end up losing the leg?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  He lost the entire leg and part of his hip. So, you know, he's a handsome man. And when you see him on the street, people sometimes do double takes because so much of him is gone. You know, at first it seems not possible that so much of a person could be gone. And yeah, so he gets around quite well on different kinds of equipment, crutches and such. But yeah, a lot of him is gone.

• 15:22Shankar Vedantam?

  So describe for me what happened in the days and weeks that followed this horrific accident and his recovery in the hospital. I mean, he comes out of this, but he's clearly mangled in some ways.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35Shankar Vedantam?

  What happens to him mentally, psychically?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Well, his, his family was first very worried at how he would react when he woke up and found so much of him was gone. You know, he woke up with tubes coming out of him and, and a chunk of his body missing. But he said that he already knew it's somehow gotten into his consciousness through sleep or how it not clear how, but he already knew. But then he began to have these just vividly intense memories of the entire accident because as I mentioned, he was fully conscious for this accident. So he was replaying all of these memories for several days. And then to his surprise, and I think to maybe everybody's surprise, it more or less just stopped. It took about a week and then that all of these intrusive memories and

• 16:20Speaker 02

  intense replaying of the accident simply just stopped. And he was confused by that.

• 16:30Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, his confusion seems to reflect the same concerns that Julia's mother had. In other words, Jed was doing relatively well, but he found himself asking why he was not doing worse?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yes, he, he was wondering, his exact words, why was I doing okay? And he said, this is really my question, why was I doing okay? He'd already taken psychology classes before this accident, but he went back and finished his master's degree and then he ended up getting a PhD in clinical psychology. Actually, he came to work with me, which is how I know him. And he's now a professor of clinical psychology in a, in a university.

• 17:11Shankar Vedantam?

  George was surprised by his own reaction to his father's death. He expected tears, but felt only a deep silence. Julia's mother was worried she moved on too quickly from the loss of her father and that she was not grieving properly. And Jed was surprised he was less traumatized than he ought to have been. Are these three people merely aberrations from the way most people respond to grief, disaster, and tragedy?

• 17:40Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, George begins to systematically study what happens to people after they suffer major setbacks. The answer surprised him. It may surprise you too. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 18:10Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar.

• 19:12Shankar Vedantam?

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• 19:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 20:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us know how people are supposed to behave after suffering a major loss or personal setback. The loss of a beloved friend, spending extended time in a war zone, going through a natural disaster. All these stretch the limits of the human mind and bend us toward trauma. Spend a moment on YouTube or TikTok and you will see many accounts of how trauma is supposed to affect the human mind.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Three ways that childhood trauma shows up in adulthood.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Did you catch this profound insight into trauma from Encanta? People with a history of trauma have something called a paralysis of initiation. They're not self-starters.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  You realize that everybody's personality is literally just a trauma response. That highly ambitious, motivated person, trauma response. That people pleaser who's so nice to everybody, trauma response. The types of people you're attracted to, trauma response.

• 21:08Shankar Vedantam?

  At Columbia University, George Bonanno studies how people respond to setbacks and disaster.

• 21:15Shankar Vedantam?

  One telling moment came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. Experts were very sure about what would happen in the aftermath of the horrific attacks.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  The general consensus really was that this was going to be a mental health crisis of unprecedented proportions. People were basically arguing that there were simply not enough resources for the kind of mental health problems that were coming. And famously, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, allocated, I believe, about $130 million, which at the time was a lot more than it is now, for emergency funds in New York, mostly to provide free therapy for New Yorkers. So there was this overarching belief that this is going to completely overwhelm the population. We're going to be basically a city of traumatized people.

• 22:06Shankar Vedantam?

  And early research did seem to confirm that there was widespread distress. Even, you know, sitting in Washington DC, I was a reporter at the Washington Post at the time. I still remember sitting on the edge of my bed one evening, a couple of weeks after nine 11, and I remember wondering if I would ever feel better. So the effects of this were real, and they affected a lot of people, not just in New York, but around the country.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Yes, and actually, I think it affected people around the country in some ways even more, because there were no cues that this had happened in the past. I vividly remember, you know, I was having nightmares about planes crashing where I lived in New York City. It was a lot of uncertainty, and uncertainty makes people uneasy.

• 22:49Shankar Vedantam?

  There were reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that 7.5% of Manhattan residents met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and that proportion rose to 20% for those in lower Manhattan, who were close to the World Trade Center, and maybe 30% for people directly affected by the attacks. So the numbers were incredibly high in terms of the expectations and the predictions right after the attacks took place.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  So initially, it looked like, I wouldn't say it looked like an unprecedented epidemic, even at that point, though, because those numbers are not that different from other kinds of major stressors. But they were high. Yes, they were very high.

• 23:29Shankar Vedantam?

  So researchers continued to survey New Yorkers in the months and years following nine 11. What did they find, George?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Well, the numbers dropped precipitously, and by six months, they were more or less back to normal. They were quite low by six months for the city as a whole.

• 23:45Shankar Vedantam?

  How did researchers respond to this? In some ways, what happened was at odds with the predictions that people had made.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say there was a little bit of denial about this. There were a lot of mental health professionals and researchers who simply didn't focus on that so much, and there was no shortage of psychological casualties because of the number of people involved. So they were focusing on that. But some mental health researchers argued that, basically, this indicated that we were wrong about our prognoses, that this was, people were upset, but being upset at something of that magnitude is actually what you would expect. And so being upset for a while, especially when the damage, you know... Reverberated through the city for some time because it damaged infrastructure, it required rethinking many things.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  That was actually quite normative and that was what that was what dissipated. So we mistook that kind of emotional intense reaction as psychopathology.

• 24:49Shankar Vedantam?

  The PTSD researcher Patricia Resick famously said, "Strong emotions do not equal psychopathology," which is the same idea that you're talking about just now.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, she was. She was actually, I think, had said that very strongly, yes.

• 25:12Shankar Vedantam?

  So a similar shock to the system came 20 years after nine 11, this time in the form of the COVID pandemic. And this, of course, affected not just the entire country, but the entire world. And the illness and death caused by the pandemic, as well as the disruption caused by schools and workplaces shutting down, were expected to have significant effects on people's mental health. What were the predictions this time and were those predictions born up?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Again, there was a prognosis of overwhelming mental health problems that overwhelmed the system. This was going to, again, be a problem of such magnitude that the mental health resources we currently had would not be able to handle it. And many mental health experts were assuming we need to do something to take care of this looming disaster, this looming mental health disaster.

• 26:01Shankar Vedantam?

  And what happened eventually?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  What happened eventually was that the pandemic did not have nearly the psychological impact that people thought it would have. There were a lot of studies done and I don't know if I can call to mind all of these different kinds of studies, but one of the best examples is suicide. People thought suicides would skyrocket during the pandemic. And in fact, suicides stayed the same or declined globally. In my own research, and we tracked people over time, and we found that people were as resilient and as healthy as they always had been. And this has been seen also all over the world.

• 26:42Shankar Vedantam?

  George, many people believe that we respond to difficult or traumatic experiences by going through a series of stages. This idea was popularized by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who said, "We go through denial, followed by anger, followed by bargaining, followed by depression, and finally, acceptance." Talk about how this theory has gained widespread traction and whether there's much evidence supporting it in scientific circles.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Well, initially, the theory, Kubler-Ross had proposed a theory to account for how people face their own death. And there's hardly any data on that, any research on that, for obvious reasons. People are not interested in participating in research as they face their own death. But then it got foisted onto how people deal with the loss of a loved one. And she didn't actually do that. That was really other people that did that, other theorists. And it became very popular. I think the reason that it became popular, because it's a sort of a roadmap. Something like grief has got lots of existential threat involved in it. We don't think about death very much, and life and death, and suddenly, we've lost

• 27:55Speaker 02

  somebody, we don't know where they are, what that means. And this theory provided very clear answers. Unfortunately, it's far too neat and tidy to actually be true, and the research has never supported it. There's not really been any evidence that it's actually what people go through. And a lot of research, it contradicts it.

• 28:17Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that one of the tenets of the theory is that you have to go through each stage in order to get to the next stage. So if you try and skip a stage, you'll end up suffering for a longer period of time. So in some ways, the theory is surprisingly prescriptive, if you will. It says that you have to go through stage one before you get to stage two, or stage three comes before stage four. And again, this doesn't quite match the scientific evidence on loss and bereavement, right?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  It does not match the evidence at all. You know, many people don't go through any of these experiences. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies to how people cope, how they react to things like the death of a loved one. And this precision, this sort of sequential perfection, in a sense, doesn't really accommodate it. And it's ended up, I think, for all the comfort it might give some people at being a kind of a roadmap, it also causes a lot of harm. Because when people don't experience those stages, other people then argue that perhaps there's something wrong with them. They're not doing the grief properly, and they're going to suffer more if they don't straighten up and do the, you know, do the stages in sequence.

• 29:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm, and in some ways, this matches, you know, your own experience. You experienced this deep silence after your dad passed away, which is not really, you know, reflected in the stages of grief. Julia's mom was really upset that she was not grieving enough. Jed was surprised that he was not reacting with trauma to what had happened to him. And in some ways, all of you were basically saying, here's the model of how we're supposed to respond to something terrible, and what's wrong with me that I'm not fitting this model?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I actually recall in my own experience that after my father died, I returned to Colorado where I was living and went back to work right away. And the people at work kept telling me, you know, you don't have to work. It's okay. You can take some time off. And I think they were worried that I was, you know, inappropriately coming back to work, when it's really all I wanted to do. I wanted to, you know, and it makes sense because when people come back to work, come back to something that's rewarding to them, they're telling themselves and showing themselves they still have a role in life. They still have an identity that's not lost.

• 30:40Shankar Vedantam?

  You've found that there are many trajectories that characterize how people respond to adversity and loss. One of these patterns is, in fact, marked by what you call chronic grief. What is this, George?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Chronic grief is, simply put, the inability to get over the loss. We measure it in very clear ways, you know, having a lot of the kind of symptoms we associate with grieving, but struggling to function, struggling to think, to concentrate, to be close to other people, and it just simply can't get past that. So they're suffering, and suffering for months and often years.

• 31:15Shankar Vedantam?

  How many people experience this kind of chronic grief, George?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Best estimates, I would say, are, at the most, about 10% and usually less.

• 31:33Shankar Vedantam?

  A second trajectory that you've identified is what you call the recovery pattern. What is the recovery pattern?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  The recovery pattern is very interesting. It's a pattern that begins with a lot of difficulty, struggle, difficulty, high levels of symptoms and distress, and then gradually, over the course of a year or two, the symptoms and the distress diminish and the person moves back toward their baseline, where they were before. It takes time, but they're steadily getting better.

• 32:01Shankar Vedantam?

  A third pattern that you've noticed is characterized by a delayed onset of symptoms. What do you mean by this?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Well, delayed symptoms, first of all, we don't really see that with grief. There is really no evidence for something called delayed grief. We do see this when there's a trauma, a potentially traumatic event, but we don't see the classic idea of delayed PTSD. Classically, it was a thought that people would be functioning just fine, and maybe this would be connected to the idea that perhaps they're in denial, and then out of nowhere, they would suddenly develop PTSD. And the same thing was said for grief as well. That people aren't grieving, like Julia, perhaps. Her mother might have thought, she's going to have a full-blown grief reaction, it's just going to take up on her, so dwelling inside her as if it's a thing.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  It's dwelling inside her and is going to come out and grab her and then she's going to really be suffering. But the mind and the body don't work that way. Their grief and emotions are not dwelling inside us as things. And when we have seen those patterns, they're not quite as dramatic as that. We see with delayed PTSD, for example. People are struggling, not doing very well, but they're barely getting by, and they get a little bit worse. Their level of distress, their symptoms increase slowly, and they cross a line to where they're now sort of officially really suffering. But they've actually been struggling all along. That's the pattern we see.

• 33:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. You say that the most surprising pattern is also the most common pattern in how people respond to setbacks and tragedy and grief. What is this, what is this pattern, George?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Well, this pattern we call the resilience trajectory. Initially, when I began my career, it's very interesting. It was assumed that very few people would show this kind of pattern. They might struggle for a week or two, maybe a little bit longer, have some upheaval in their life that kind of preoccupied, and then that kind of dissipates and they're more or less functioning normally. We call this a stable trajectory of healthy functioning. And when I first began my career, it was assumed that hardly anybody would show that pattern. And if they did show that pattern, there was something wrong with them. That was the denial idea. When we began to actually look, because what I did in my research is, which was the only

• 34:28Speaker 02

  only novel thing about this research was that I just, we just looked and measured the range of possible responses to see how many people were showing these responses. When we actually did that, we found that the majority, it's almost always the majority that's showing that pattern. Most people experience short-term distress, upheaval, and then they continue to function normally after that. It's not that they don't care, it's not that they're not saddened or upset by the event, but they move on with their lives.

• 35:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Do we see these different patterns in all manner of setbacks? People getting divorced, people suffering physical losses, people with injuries or ailments, people losing a loved one? Do we see these different patterns of response for all manner of different setbacks, George?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. We've now done this, my team has done a lot of this, but other research teams are also doing this. We've seen these patterns in now about 100 different studies, actually, for everything, from the worst kinds of events like, you know, traumatic injury, mass shooting, spinal cord injury, to things that are, you know, like loss and relationship divorce. We've seen it for financial problems, losing a job, et cetera. So it's the range of anything that's sort of a serious event that somebody's going to go through that's going to upheave them, cause upheaval in their life for a while. We'll see these same patterns.

• 36:02Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to spend a few moments talking about why the popular understanding of loss and grief has come to be at odds with what the scientific data is showing. How do people respond when you share your findings about resilience with them, George?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Well, I've been doing this for a long time, Shankar. I've been doing this for about 35 years now. So initially, it was difficult. We began to report these findings in scientific journals, and they were more or less ignored. And I was young, and I'm told that I had kind of an extremely young face, so it was easy to dismiss, this is just some young guy doing this research. But over time, as we began to pile up the evidence, the negative reactions began to happen, and particularly from the trauma world. People in the trauma world would tell me, you know, you're a good researcher, but there's something wrong about what you're doing. And therapists would come up to me if I'd given a public lecture and tell me, you know, I'm sure you're a good scientist, but you're just wrong about this.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  It's just wrong. I know, and you're wrong. And that happened for quite some years. I'd say 15, maybe 20 years even, and it's slowed down a bit. But oddly, there's been a revival of this idea in recent years, a revival of the idea that everybody is traumatized.

• 37:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Where do you think that comes from, George?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Well, it took me by surprise. I think it's mostly in younger people. Probably has something to do with the internet. I know there are a lot of these cultural phenomenon like on TikTok. There's something called trauma dumping, where people go on TikTok and tell their trauma stories. And those are very popular sites when people do that. So I don't know really, besides that, how this has come about, how this has been revived.

• 37:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, it's certainly possible, George, that some of the people who come up and disagree with you are, in fact, people who have experienced chronic grief. You told me that about one in 10 people do experience long-term trauma from these experiences. So it's perhaps understandable why someone with long-term problems might generalize from their own experiences. But, you know, we don't see this with many other medical conditions. People who have terminal stage four cancer don't say the only form of cancer is metastatic end-stage cancer. In fact, for most medical conditions, if we must have the problem, all of us would want to have the mildest form of the problem. But somehow, people seem resistant to the idea of mild grief or grief that passes by quickly. Something about that seems wrong.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, grief, I think, has a different element to it. That element that somehow you are not honoring the person that had died if you move on too quickly. But there's another element to it also, which is that we are wired, if I can use that word, we're wired for threat, for danger. You know, we pay attention when something bad happens. The internet knows this, you know, all media know this, that clicks online come from really bad things that are attention-getting things, ugly disastrous things. In the modern era, just around the time of when the internet was really taking off,

• 39:16Speaker 02

  was when also these diagnoses for grief and trauma really came to the fore and lots of books were written about how bad these things can be. And the books were well-meant and they were accurate books about the disorder itself, when people can't recover. But those books got a lot of attention and I think led to the idea in the popular culture that these events are going to, you know, really harm us when they happen. I've argued, actually, that the one reason why therapists tend to think that trauma is more common than it is, and therapists do overestimate the prevalence of trauma typically, is if they see traumatized people. They see traumatized people in their practice,

• 39:59Speaker 02

  and they see a lot more than is in the normal populations than the base rates. So they tend to then overgeneralize that to the general population. It's a very human thing to do. It's not evil or dumb. It's a very human thing that therapists do because they are humans.

• 40:17Shankar Vedantam?

  It's also the case that I think after mass tragedies, if you think about the 9/11 attacks, or if you think about disasters like the COVID pandemic or a natural disaster, in some ways, if I come and tell you, look, things are going to be really bad. A lot of people are going to be affected. We should do a lot. And it turns out I'm wrong. People will just say, OK, his intentions were in the right place, but he made a mistake. But if I come and tell you after an event like this, most people are going to be fine. Even if I turn out to be right, I can come across as callous.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's something I call the resilience blind spot, which is that right in the middle of, particularly in a disaster, but when we're in the middle of, in the throes of our initial reaction to a seriously aversive event, we do get upset. We have a very good stress response. Our mind-body system has a very well-honed stress response. It's been honed by millions and millions of years of evolution. And you can't activate that response without first feeling stress. So you have to be upset in order for that response to kick in. So that initial upset we have tends to blind us to the idea that we'll ever not feel that way. We have a hard time as humans with that. Our minds have a hard time with that.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And when there's a disaster or something large scale, there's a kind of a contagion that happens as well. Other people are upset too. And so they're upset, and I should be upset, and I am upset, and now you're upset. And that kind of happens quite fast.

• 41:52Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how the popular understanding of trauma, even if well-intentioned, can sometimes inadvertently create new forms of suffering? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 42:14Shankar Vedantam?

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• 42:47Speaker 06

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• 43:30Speaker 06

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• 43:46Speaker 07

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• 44:14Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What are your experiences with grief and tragedy? How have you coped with setbacks in your life? What advice have you shared with others who are dealing with loss?

• 44:27Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have thoughts or questions that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "trauma." Two or three minutes is plenty, and again, that's [email protected].

• 44:47Shankar Vedantam?

  George Bonanno is a psychologist at Teachers College Columbia University. He's the author of "The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD."

• 44:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Some of our conversation today, George, has been about how the work you've done, the scientific findings, are at odds with how our culture says we should respond or ought to respond to setbacks or tragedy or potentially traumatic events. Can you talk about some of the ways in which our culture offers what you might call unhelpful ideas about how we should respond to these events?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that there's been a tendency in the last decade in particular of focusing far too much on human frailty, I think, as if people are easily breakable. And there's been a sense of not wanting people to suffer in any way. There's a Greek concept called eudaimonia, which many people might know about, which is the kind of companion to happiness, but it's not happiness in the sense of joy and hedonic pleasure, it's a sense of reward from achieving something. And that isn't always fun.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  So I think a lot of what's valuable in life requires a little bit of struggle. And there's a tendency right now to avoid any and all signs of that.

• 46:10Shankar Vedantam?

  One implication of this idea, George says, is to not assume that painful and unpleasant life events will lead to prolonged mental suffering. That could be the case, of course, and if it is, it should be taken seriously, and people who are suffering should seek help. But it's not useful to assume that everyone, or even most people, will have prolonged grief or long-term trauma.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  I've had many experiences like this. You know, I recall once when my children were smaller and there was the preschool they were going to, and one of the teachers told me that one of the children's parents had lost a parent over the summer break. And she didn't know what to do when the child came back to the class. She asked me if she could talk with me about it, and she said, "What should I do?" And I said, "Maybe nothing." And she was quite taken aback by that. But the point I made to her was, you know, maybe this child doesn't want a lot of attention called to him. Maybe he wants to just be a normal kid in the class. Let it play out and see what happens.

• 47:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Can you talk a moment about the widespread use of trigger warnings? Many schools and media organizations are worried about the mental health impacts of sharing negative information with students, with listeners, with viewers. Do these warnings work? And how do you think they're connected with the conversation we're having about trauma and resilience?

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Trigger warnings were born out of the idea that everybody's... Well, there's a widespread idea that people have hidden traumas lurking inside them, or past traumas that were unresolved, and they're kind of somehow raw inside people. It's a very common... It became a very common assumption. And the trigger warning idea emerged from that as a kind of a way to say, you know, if anybody's got a trauma here in this room, or has a trauma lurking inside them, we're going to show some content here, or you're going to experience something if you stay for this presentation that might trigger that. And it was based on the idea that everybody's kind of walking around with these barely below-the-surface traumas that can explode at any point.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  And that's really not accurate in any sense of the word. There's really... I think we couldn't function as human beings if we were actually built like that. And the research on trigger warnings has shown fairly convincingly that they either don't help or they cause harm. People who are given trigger warnings often are more anxious than people who didn't get trigger warnings, didn't receive them.

• 48:43Shankar Vedantam?

  In research George has done with former Hidden Brain guest Dacher Keltner, he's found that our mistaken beliefs about human fragility cause people to walk on eggshells around those who have suffered losses. In fact, research finds that even people in acute grief can smile and laugh, and smiling and laughter are correlated with positive long-term mental health.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  The research shows quite clearly that most people, even people who've recently lost a spouse within the last few months, when we did interviews, we found that the majority of people were showing genuine laughter and smiling during the interview. And that's because these are very social processes. Most of the time when we laugh and smile, almost all the time, it's with other people. And they're very pro-social, they're contagious, they connect to other people. And what we've seen in our research with grief is that people kind of go in and out of these phases. You might see somebody crying and holding their head and shaking their head because they're so upset. And then 30 seconds later, they're laughing. There's still tears on their face and they're laughing

• 49:47Speaker 02

  about something they remembered. And that laughter, we posited, laughter is a kind of a way to reconnect with the person and almost reward the person for listening, but also rewarding ourselves, letting us feel connected to somebody else. It's a very, very human process. There's been a kind of a prohibition about it for a number of years because somehow it's not respectful, it means you don't care. But in fact, it actually does mean you care enough to live your life.

• 50:19Shankar Vedantam?

  When we start by assuming most people will display resilience in the face of setbacks, George says we can discover new ways to cope. Years after his father's death, George found himself conversing aloud with his dad. Someone who was watching him might have thought that longstanding unresolved traumas were rearing their head. George says it was just the opposite. He was developing a relationship with his father that he did not have while his father was alive.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  What I had done in my own life was I began to talk with my father. And I would talk with him. And this is primarily when I had my own children. And so I was now a father. And being a father, being a parent, is not easy. And there were times when I just thought I wished that my father was alive, despite the difficulties we had when he was alive. I felt this would be different now. I'm a different person. He would undoubtedly be a different person as well. And so I began to talk with him in the elevator in my building. I live in an old building in New York, and the elevator is quite slow. So I felt safe in the elevator because nobody would see me. And I knew when that door was going to open because the elevator would stop slowly and there was a pause before the door opened. So I began to talk with my father.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  And I found this very comforting, to have these conversations with him.

• 51:38Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering what you asked your father, George, and whether he said anything in response?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  You know, I might be asking about one of my children or how having children changes the way you think. Or I was noticing things, say, I had been much more carefree until I became a parent. And I was worrying about money. And I would say something, you know, Dad, I know you were very concerned about money. You know, this is really hard. And I would really just talk with him about it. And obviously, he'd never answer back. But it was more like I would imagine how he was responding and just be able to tell him this.

• 52:21Shankar Vedantam?

  There is a great deal of variability in how people respond to difficult life events. What causes one person to suffer endlessly after a loss or setback, while others bounce back? What are the drivers of human resilience? For a long time, researchers have wrestled with the question. Many different factors, like courage, or patience, or social ties, can shape whether we are resilient. But George Bonanno has found that there is one central orientation that is absolutely crucial.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  It's a matter of really working out, what is the right situation? What is the right way to behave in this situation? What's the right way to cope in that situation? And that led me to this idea of what we call behavioral flexibility. It's a set of skills that we see in people that solve this problem. What do I need to do now? What's the problem I'm facing now? And what do I need to do about it? What can I do about it?

• 53:22Shankar Vedantam?

  We talk about this idea in our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus. It's titled, "How to Be More Resilient." If you're a subscriber, that episode should be available right now in your podcast feed. If not, I would love for you to sign up at support.hidenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. You'll have access to a free one-week trial in both places, and your support will go a long way to helping us build a show. Again, that's support.hidenbrain.org and apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 54:03Shankar Vedantam?

  George Bonanno is a psychologist at Teachers College Columbia University. He is the author of The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD, and The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. George, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  It's been absolutely my pleasure, Shankar.

• 54:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Have you had experiences with tragedy that match or contradict the ideas you've heard on the show today? Have you experienced difficulty aligning how you felt about a terrible life event with how those around you expected you to behave? If you have thoughts or questions for George Bonanno that you would be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "trauma." Two or three minutes is plenty. Again, that's [email protected]. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.

• 55:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 55:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 55:42Speaker 06

  This podcast is supported by Nurtec ODT. Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtec. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtec can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtec is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtec ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers

• 56:27Speaker 06

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTEC or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

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