Best of Series: The New Science of Resilience With George Bonanno

In this episode, I talk to George Bonanno about trauma and resiliency. We start off by discussing what people get wrong about trauma and how this led to the invention of the PTSD diagnosis. George defines what resilience is, how it’s different from growth, and its paradoxical correlation to individual differences. Finally, he elaborates on how the flexibility mindset and sequence help us get through personal traumatic events or global tragedies like 9/11 or the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
part of the best of series, where we highlight some
of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy. Today we have
George Bonano on the podcast. Doctor Banana is Professor of Psychology,
chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, and

(00:22):
director of the Lost Trauma and Emotion Lab Teachers College,
Columbia University. He's the author of the Other Side of
Sadness and The End of Trauma. George, so great to
finally chat with you on the Psychology Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
It's great. So I'm very happy to be here. I'm
happy to you invited me.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Thank you. You know, we have a lot to talk
about in this topic that you study is extraordinarily germane
to the moment that we will live in. It's interesting
because I think that if I read your book correctly,
you said you started writing it before the pandemic hit,
so you almost had to kind of add that extra
chapter at the end about the pandemic. Is that right?
How did that come about?

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, Well, I was working on the book and I
planned to be in Europe for a sabbatical and touring
around Europe and giving lectures and working on the book further.
So I started the book and I was going to
do the you know, do the bulk of it. And
then the pandemic hit and I had the shuffle on
home right quickly. So I thought, okay, this would probably

(01:22):
would probably make sense to include this whole experience in
the books. As it began to become clear that it
was going to be a long haul, so I began
keeping a diary. And that was a fortunate decision because
then the last chapter of the book is about the pandemic.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, yeah, it's good that you keept a diary. Right. Well,
before we get into your seminal work on resilience and
the latest idea is in your new book, let's go
back a second because we both shared a mentor, Jeromo Singer. Yes, yes,
so you know, may he rest in peace. Let's talk
about that work you did with him a little bit

(01:59):
and how it how did it lead to work and
interest in resilience.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, well that's a very interesting question.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
How do you go from daydreaming?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, well I didn't do daydreaming work with Jerry. I
worked on really personality and experimental but there is a connection.
I worked on personality and experimental psychology with Jerry, and
my dissertation was actually a very set of studies on
it's called dichotic listing the different inputs into each air

(02:32):
and it was very intense experimental. I was in the
lab a lot, creating stimuli, you know. And by the
end of that experience, I decided, and this is how
it led me to what I do now. I decided
I wanted to switch directions. And I had a chance
to go to England at Cambridge and do some further
experimental work, and I decided no, I wanted to get

(02:55):
closer to what to really my clinical training and to
a more applis And then I had an offer from
Marty Horowitz, who was one of the original founders of
the whole idea of trauma in San Francisco. And it
was introduced to Marty through Jerry, through Jerry's singer, and

(03:18):
so I knew Marty through Jerry. So Marty, Marty Horowitz
offered me this position out in San Francisco, a very
nice position, and he was conducting bereavement work out there,
and he was asked if I would basically come out
and run this study that he was doing this new study,
liked being the kind of organizer of it, and I

(03:40):
was very I was a little confused by all that
because I was really not interested in bereavement. I didn't
really know much about it. But this is where the
work I did with Jerry really came to the fore.
Jerry always used to say, where's the data, and that
really was emblazoned in my mind, and when I began

(04:01):
to look into the Bremer literature, I found myself saying,
where is the data for these assumptions? A lot of
assumptions about prevent didn't make sense to me, and as
far as I could tell, they had no empirical basis.
So when I took the position in San Francisco and
began to develop this study, and we had a big
team and we had was well funded, so it was

(04:22):
really kind of fun to try to work it out.
So we just you know, the more I looked at
the literature, I thought, there's so much I can do
here and test these ideas, test really what the rest
of psychology was doing with the methods I knew about,
And that started the whole thing, because we designed this
longitudinal study. We got a broad sample, you know, pretty

(04:45):
much everybody, anybody who lost a loved one. It wasn't
just limited to people seeking help or a clinical sample.
And right away we found abundant resilience. We didn't use
that word yet, but we you know, and but we
saw it, and we you know, we didn't know what
quick to make of it, and we were very I
think I was a little reluctant about where we would

(05:08):
publish this and how it would be be responded to.
But we were able to publish his work in some
of the top journals in mainstream psychology. We continue to
do that work and eventually, I, you know, shifted over
to doing trauma work more broadly. But it really all
came from this whole idea that I learned from Jerry Singer.
Where's the data that is so cool?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
You know, I never heard that story before. So I'm
going to ask you that question, and it's it's nice
to think that Jerry played a helping hand in the
seminal resilience research. I never even knew that, you know,
you contribute to it. So I do ask, you know,
why is the conventional wisdom about trauma so wrong?

Speaker 2 (05:49):
That's a great question. I think it. I think there's
at least three sources that led us to somewhat astray.
I mean, there was, you know, trauma has a really
curious history. There was hardly any mention of trauma in
historical record until really the nineteenth century, which is very interesting.
But then once it really once it kind of began

(06:11):
to take hold, then it really became a crucial issue
in a very i'd say controversial and you know, tension
field issue until nineteen eighty when the diagnosis was first
the PTSD diagnosis was first formalized, and then it really
took on a life of its own. And I think
one of the main factors that we sort of got

(06:31):
on the wrong foot was that a lot of the
research and certainly a lot of the writing about trauma
came from a clinical perspective. So people who worked with
trauma patients, researchers who worked with severe trauma and PTSD,
there was a lot of interest in understanding and treating PTSD,

(06:52):
which makes perfect sense, but that led to a kind
of a skewed view. When people work with PTSD, they
begin to think that everybody must be traumatized, because that's
what they see. They don't see resilient people. They don't
see people who have gone through a potentially traumatic event,
and you know, basically, you know, been okay, they don't

(07:12):
see those people. So the news from that area was
that PTSD is really prevalent and it's this difficult and
tractable problem, which eventually that that work paid off and
that good treatments were developed for PTSD. But that news
sort of trickled out into the general public. Trauma is

(07:33):
really a PTSD is a common response, very common response.
And of course the media played its role. It's a
good story, right, and so that was the kind of
a story that made its way into the public. And
I think so the second factor is the media, and
I think the third factor is that human beings we
want a simple story, you know, we don't want a

(07:55):
complicated story. We want it. You see this now with
the internet, we want memes and sound bit So these
three things conspired, I think to the idea that trauma
leads to PTSD, that these you know, the really undesirable
even horrific things people go to are going to cause
PTSD in a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, I mean, you say in your book that PTSD
was invented, and you go through the whole history of
that and you say, quote, the PTSD diagnosis, with its
various subcategories, is one of the most complicated and heterogeneous
diagnoses out there. Can you explain to the general audience
what that means? Yeah, there's a lot of jargon in there.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah. So the PTSD diagnosis has had originally three sub components. First,
you have to have the there's an a criterion you
have to qualify as having a potentially traumatic event or
traumatic event. And that criterion has been a bit of
a Pandora's box because it started out fairly prescribed boundaries

(09:00):
of really something outside the range of normal human experience,
something really unusual, really difficult. But then as people began
to say, well we have clinicians began to say, well,
we have patients who clearly have PTSD, but they don't
have one of these events, so we need a broader criteria,

(09:22):
and the definition of that a criteria began to expand,
which was a bit of a Pandora's box because it's
now clear now we have this ambiguity about what is
and what is not a traumatic event. After you get
over that hurdle, then there are three subcategories, and it's
a bit of a menu driven approach. You need one
of these, and three of these and two of these, etc.

(09:43):
From these different categories, and that leads to a kind
of almost impossible number of combinations of possible symptoms, so
that one person may get the diagnosis to have these
cluster as long as they meet those criteria, and another
person may have these cluster, and you can literally have
hundreds of thousands of these different combinations. So it looks like,

(10:06):
you know, too many people can have the PTSD diagnosis
and have very different profiles. That got even worse with
the latest incarnation of the DSM, the basically the Bible
of Mental disorders that the American Psychiatric Association puts up
the DSM made it created another subcategories. Now there's four,

(10:27):
which increased the number of possible variations. So that's a
real problem because you have too much heterogeneity simply means
too many different variations.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, that's for sure. And you found that that resiliency
is not necessarily the opposite of psychopathology. Yes, right. I
think that's interesting because some people kind of may view
them as oppositans of the same pool, and so I'd
like you to explain that and also explain, you know,

(10:57):
how resilience can come across in sudden, unexpected ways.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Well, so the idea that resilience is not necessarily the
opposite of psychopathology PTSD. In the work that I've done
for the last twenty five years, we follow people over
time and we use we use my own data and
other data we can get our hands on, and we
look for patterns over time, and we find that there's
a handful of these typical patterns. One of them is

(11:27):
chronic psychopathology. But what I like about that is having
defining as a trajectory is we don't need the PTSD
diagnosis and the PTSD diagnosis as many flaws. So we
have this diet. We can identify a pattern of chronic
psychopathology that's really just a trend in the data, irrespective
of the diagnosis. Then we identify a pattern of resilience,

(11:50):
which is really we call it a stable trajectory of
healthy functioning. We find that the majority of people, typically
after a potentially traumatic event, they are able to basically
get on with their lives and function pretty well with
alcohol lot of symptoms. They're able to have positive experiences,
you know, be close to other people you know, work

(12:12):
and concentrate and have joy in their lives pretty soon
after the event, except it varies, but sometimes it's a
few days afterwards. Sometimes it's a few weeks afterwards. Even
though they were pretty shaken at the time, they were
able to dust themselves off as a decent metaphorm move on.
But those are not the only two patterns. We also
find some people who have a lot of trauma symptoms

(12:33):
early on, and they struggle sometimes for months, and then
they gradually begin to get better. It might take them
a year or two. We find that pattern. Then we
find another pattern where people maybe have a fair amount
of PPUs D symptoms or other symptoms and they're struggling,
but then they're not getting better, and they sometimes get

(12:54):
worse over time. That can be caused by any number
of things like maybe there's an injury that doesn't get better,
or maybe they get depressed about the fact that they
are not getting better, or reasons that we just don't
know yet. And so those are all different patterns, and
the only one of those patterns that maps on the
PTSD is the chronic trajectory. So there's a lot going on,

(13:16):
and it simplifies it too much to say there's just
one or the other.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Yeah, And most importantly, you say quote, in almost every analysis,
the resilience trajectory was the most common pattern observed. That's groundbreaking.
I mean, that's groundbreaking.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yes, and we've been breaking that ground. I mean, I
like to think it's groundbreaking. I don't know if everybody
thinks that. But we've been showing this now for about
twenty thanks Scott. We've been showing this for about twenty
five years, and it has gotten a lot of traction
within the profession, and you know, it's really been sort
of I think at this point it's almost irrefutable. We've

(13:54):
just shown this so many times. And one of the
studies we did we reviewed all the studies. I think
we've reviewed sixty seven different analyzes that showed the same
thing and all kinds of different events, and the mean
across those events was about two thirds, So about two
thirds of the people in all those different studies showed

(14:14):
this resilience pattern. It is really the norm, the norm,
the most common pattern.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
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in the field of post traumatic growth. I noticed that
you don't talk about the post traumatic growth research too
much in your new book. I'm actually just having Richard

(15:47):
Tedesky on the podcast on Monday, so it'd be nice
for him to follow your episode. Yeah, yeah, And so
can you just tell me what you think of the
post traumatic growth literature? Be honest and tell me, you know, like,
in a way, aren't you kind of like one of
the founders of the field inadvertently, Like I know that
you don't explicitly work in that, but I wanted to

(16:09):
ask you, like, don't you see yourself as weighing a
strong foundation for that work.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
I don't know. I'm a little ambivalent about the concept,
and I think in part this is back to show
me the data. There's a lot of I mean, basically,
people report growth, but it's hard to know what that
really is because the people typically reporting growth are the
people who show the most severe symptoms. And there are

(16:36):
some studies that measure growth a little bit differently, and
I do find evidence for it, And to be honest,
it's hard to believe that there isn't growth from these
growth from adversity, and you know, I've experienced it personally,
and I know there's some ways that we can show it.
But I think the way it's commonly measured, and again
I get back to data, the way it's commonly measured

(16:58):
is seriously flawed. Ironically, I was in an airport where
a flight was delayed, and I sat down next to
this man in the airport. We started talking, were having
the greatest time talking, and I asked him who you know?
At one point we got around introducing ourselves and he
was Richard Tedski and he was a super nice man, right,
and so he and at that time I was openly

(17:20):
critical of the concept, and he knew that it was
kind of funny we would sit down together. But I
just to say it more briefly, I think it's real,
but I think we don't know how much, and we
don't know what it really is yet because we haven't
been able to track it or tap it so well.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
Well, on first blush, it looks like your research program
and findings are very well aligned. Although I suppose I
should ask what is the difference between resilience and growth?
I mean, that's the key thing. If we can really
operationalize those two.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah. So, I actually wrote a paper once called post
traumatic growth and Resilience two sides of the same coin
or different coin. I think that was the title.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
That's exactly what I'm asking you.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Yeah, so, I think that I think that resilience is
not the way we look at it is not post
traumatic growth. It's basically people going back to where they
were in the since before before the event. They're doing
well before the event. Is we track people before and
after events. They're doing well before an event, something happens,

(18:23):
there's a little perturbation, a little disruption for maybe a
couple of weeks, and then they're back to being okay.
I don't think it's necessarily true that some of those
people haven't grown. But but I don't know. I don't
think we've actually got got at that in a very
good way. We haven't. We don't know how to measure that,
is what my assumption is. So that's what that's the way,

(18:47):
That's how I think of it. That they're they're not
they're not necessarily overlap, but at least for some people,
they might.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Gotcha that this has really helped me understand the differences
and similarities between your prom and there and the postmatic
growth program. That's actually a topic of my next book
is postraumatic growth. So I'm really trying to think this
through very thoughtfully. It is true that there's a lack
of studies that have a control group that can actually
I mean, it's hard to have a control group within
person for these kinds of post traumatic growth things. You

(19:17):
can't obviously bring a someone who's died. You can't bring them.
You can't control conditioning, you know. So it's it's it's
tough to actually scientifically answer the question would they have been,
you know, are they better off in terms of some
areas of growth and if they didn't have the situation.
So yeah, so the jury still out and the science,

(19:40):
you know, let's listen to Jeromal Singer, you know, let's
let's look at more data.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
I will say, I will say sorry if I can
add one more thing please. I just went through a
fairly difficult time with a surprising neurological problem that took
me off guard, and at one point it was looking
very serious. And somehow during that, during dealing with that,
I had these kind of series of epiphanies where I

(20:06):
realized I'm going to be okay, you know, I can
I can use some of the tools I've worked with
and some of the tools I've written about the book
and just cope with this one piece at a time.
And then it was almost almost happy at that point,
you know, And I really I realized this is really
a kind of growth experience. So in this adversity, it
was definitely a growth experience. And I think that's the

(20:28):
kind of thing that that that people really mean when
they talk about growth, and and I'm not sure we
get at that, but I, you know, I think that's
that's real. You know, that kind of thing is real.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Well, I certainly think so. And I think that humans
in a lot of ways need to overcome adversity in
order to have meaning in their lives. We don't really
get terrible meaning from bastatically positive experiences. Maybe we do,
Maybe we do, but not to the same sort of degree.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
Yeah, not to the same degree. I don't, thank you, yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Or flavor. So what is the resilience paradox?

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Okay, the resiliant paradox, which a very I don't know
if happy is right. We're it excited may not be
the right error, but that was it was an important
turn for me. I've been trying to understand this for years.
So we know, we know we can identify people who
show these resilient outcomes. They're resilient to these highly diversive events,

(21:27):
these potentially traumatic events. So we can identify those people.
We can identify the things that correlate with that outcome,
the things that happened early on. You know, we can
we can measure things right at the time of the
event happens. We can sometimes if we have the right
kind of data right in our study, we can identify
what they were like before, and what what characteristics and

(21:49):
traits and behaviors they had, and see if that predicts
or correlates with that outcome. And we find we find
a lot of these things. So you know, you often
read about the key five traits or you know, the
key seven traits, the magic bullets of resilience and magic
traits and resilient people. But when we study and try
to identify the different things to correlate, we find more

(22:11):
than five or seven. We find lots of them, and
we other people find lots of these, and we keep
finding more. So you have all these things that correlate
with a resilient outcome, and you know, and they correlate.
But then when we try to use those things to
actually predict, so who's going to be resilient when this

(22:31):
next thing happens based on these traits or even when
it happens we now measure these things certain traits, who
is going to be resilient based on these traits? We
find that we can't do it very well. It doesn't
predict much. So in the statistical terms, the effects of
each one of these these factors is very small. Essentially,

(22:52):
what we're saying is that if you have one of
these things, it gives us a little bit of a
greater chance of being resilience. It moves in the know
just a little bit of being resilient. And if we
think of it as a pie chart, which is I'd
like to do it that way, resilience is a pie
and the things that the factors that the traits of
resilient people, whatever you want to call them, are slices

(23:14):
of the pie. And these are very small slices. So
that's kind of the paradox. We know what correlates with resilience,
but we don't We're not very good at predicting resilience
based on these things very interesting.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
I mean I would argue that the characteristic neuroticism it's
quite strong, isn't it negatively predicting resilience.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
I don't think it's quite strong. I mean, it correlates
pretty regularly, but the correlation is probably I don't know
small neuroticism though, I think I don't know if it's
a trait. So that's you know, not likely that people
are not likely to be as resilience as eurotic. I
don't know if we've measured that one. But it's even
the things you would think like optimism or social support,

(23:58):
social support, you know, be able to rely on friends
and relatives for emotional support and super that's a real
common trait or real common you know, resource to have
that's correlated with resilience regularly, but it's never that big,
right when you look at the you know, statistical terms, again,
the variants explain the amount of the likelihood of being

(24:22):
resilient that we're actually we're actually explaining with that. And
I've puzzled over this for years, so maybe we need
to add them up. Maybe we need to have a
lot of them, you know, and even recently we've been
able to do machine learning. You know, when we take
a bunch of these things, seventy eighty variables. We have
people's blood, you know, so we can I don't mean

(24:43):
to sounds gruesome, but we have you know, we have
people's We can from blood, you can measure immune functioning
and stress levels and the blood and all kinds of
other things. And when we have all those things together,
we do a better job. When we have lots of
these things, like eighty different factors, you do a better
job of predicting resilience. But then we break it down.

(25:03):
In one of these studies we published in the Journal
of the American Medical Association, we break it down. We
find that if we only use the biological factors, we
lose a lot of our predictive power. If we only
look at the psychological factors, we lose a lot of
predictive power, even more predictive power. And even with eighty together,
we're still not doing really well. We're doing pretty well.

(25:27):
And it's harder to predict resilience than the other patterns
because resilience is a large it's a large group of people,
so there's going to be a lot of different kinds
of people in that group. So I mean, normally we
don't have access to all these hidden things in our
bodies and all these many different variables. So normally we
only have access to a few of these things. So

(25:49):
the individual factors still don't tell as much of the story.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
I think that is very very interesting and puzzling. I
try to understand how that does else with the argument
about the three aspects of the flexibility mindset optimism, confidence
and coping and a challenge orientation. Doesn't that kind ofradict
to what you said if you if you're making the
case there are at least three things that are important

(26:14):
to cultivate, aren't you making the argument those three things
are important? These things?

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, that's a great point, Scott. It's a great point
because because it does sound like I'm trying to contradicting myself.
But the flexibility mindset, there are two pieces my my.
My answer which I finally began to realize to how
we're able to be resilient despite this paradox is that
it depends on the situation. Every situation is different. We

(26:42):
have to kind of we have to we have to
embrace every situation and in a sense work it out,
and we have to really get into those situations when
something happens to work it out for what's happening in
this particular situation, and what works in one situation doesn't
work in another situation. And even when we find something
that works in the situation we're facing, maybe the next

(27:03):
day it won't work as well because the situations changed.
So there are two pieces of this flexibility process. The
flexibility is how we do it. There are two pieces
of this. One is the mindset I call the flexibility mindset,
which is comprised of optimism and it's called challenge orientation.
It's thinking of difficult situations is challenges rather than threats,

(27:28):
and we might initially think of them as threats, but
when we then shift to this thinking to an appraisal
of them, is you know, this is what do I
need to do here? What's the problem? And then the
third piece is being confident in our ability to cope.
And these are probably not the only way to it's
find out the only way to have this mindset, but
it seems to work really well for what we know now.

(27:51):
And the reason that say optimism, which is one of
the things that correlates with resilience. The reason that that's
useful here because it doesn't make us resilient. What it
does is that it contributes to this mindset which sort
of gets us going. It gets us into the game.
The mindset really helps us to, you know, face this

(28:13):
potential trauma. Because the potential trauma and the things it
causes us just about everybody. You know, it's disturbing, it
causes nightmares, and you know, we think about it when
we don't want to and we're a little bit on edge.
That's a very common response, even among resilient people. We
have to kind of deal with that. And when we
have those reactions, the last thing we want to do

(28:35):
is sort of face a head out and think about it.
But when we do that, we then a lot of
this other process happens, a flexibility sequence. But in order
to do that, we need to face it. We need
to sort of get ourselves into the game is I
like to put it, And this combination of optimism, confidence
and coping and challenge appraisal kind of work together to

(28:57):
make us do that. To help us do that, they
tell us, you know I can do this, you know
I'll be able to do this. It'll be Okay, let
me just get in there and do it. And that's
how those those processes work. They don't make us resilient,
but they kind of get us into it, get us rolling.
And that's a big difference. We still may not be resilient,
and we still may not cope. Okay until we do

(29:18):
the rest of it.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
I think, I think I see what you're saying. You're
making the point that it's more the flexibility mindset is
more than some of its parts, and the energy, the
synergy of these three are important. Now is that has
that been empirically tested that hypothesis, like in the sense
like if you want to get nerdy for a second, like, statistically,
have you put these three in a sort of multiplicative

(29:41):
sort of way within a person?

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Let's get nerdy? I like that. Do you see what
I'm Yes, Well, we we've we've we've only done it
certain ways and and and basically what we know about
these three is that when they're together, they influence each other.
So optimism gives people, people become more confident. And this
has been done largely with a technical path analysis. So

(30:09):
you're already to say, okay, what leads to less depression
or less PTSD after this event. So optimism then makes
people more confident. When people become more confident, they also
become more optimistic. When people become more confident, they also
tend to be more likely to see it as a challenge.
And people see it as a challenge, they become more optimistic.

(30:30):
When people see it as a challenge, they become more
confident to all these things tend to work together, and
in the book, I argue that they have the synergistic effect.
And you know, I mean that's that would be be
nice to do more research in that, you know, But
I'm just you know, those are questions for further work.
You know, there's certainly a lot of researchers can be

(30:51):
done on all these things.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Oh yeah, for sure. And I think that it's a
it seems like a very reasonable hypothesis. And yeah, like
those three things, I mean, I want more of them
in my life. If I could turn up the lever
manually and I could choose three, that would be in
my top list for sure. Well, tell me, you know,
unpack a little more of the flexibility sequence. You started

(31:14):
to talk about it, but I think there's more of
the sequence than what you mentioned.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
So we do that, we the mindset gets as going
as I mentioned, and I just want to repeat that
if some people are not so optimistic or they're not
so confident or coping, it doesn't matter so much. I
think the mindset is what matters. And as long as
people can generate that mindset, I can do this, you know,
or I will do this. Let me just figure out

(31:38):
how to do this or what do I have to
do here? Right? So, you know I want it's really
the act of embracing the stressor event, this potential trauma
sort of head on. It doesn't mean, you know, diving
into it. It means really just thinking about it a
little bit. And this gets us into the flexibility sequence.
That the flexibility sequence has three parts. And so I

(32:02):
mean the basis of flexibility is that what I call
flexibility is this capacity or this this process I should say,
of working out what's going on as a stressor you know,
this this potential traumas happened to me. It was an
ugly event. I'm now thinking about it. It's popping into

(32:22):
my mind. I feel bad about it, you know, I
feel it's I feel like I'm in a day in danger.
I feel maybe humiliated you know, I just had a
nightmare last night. I can't quite work it out. I'm
an edge, you know. Am I traumatized? I'm traumatized. That's
a common assumption. So but if that's a that's a
thinking about it is I'm you know, in that terms,

(32:44):
I'm traumatized. This is going to be bad in the future,
that doesn't get us anywhere. Instead, if we think about
the fact that this happened, there are these ugly things
associated with these things we don't want to think about,
but they happen to us, and it's it's making us
very unhappy in the moment. They're making us. It's finding
we're finding it difficult to get on with our lives.

(33:04):
So what is it that's happened to me? What is
it that I need to do here? And if we
think about that, we begin to see at least some
kind of answer, at least for them the immediate moment
in this situation. What are these nightmares about or what?
You know? What are these images that are bothering so much?
And when we see when we think about that, we

(33:24):
can then think about what can I do about it?
What is it that I need to do? And we
might decide, Okay, I need to find a way to
get this off my mind, or maybe I need to
talk to people about it, or maybe I need to
you know, get out of the house and you know,
go for a walk, or maybe I need to just
somehow clear my clelear my head. Whatever we think about that,

(33:46):
whatever might seem appropriate. Then we moved to the second stage,
which I call repertoire, which we kind of say, okay,
be I need to distract myself and clear my head
from this so I don't think about it so much.
What do we have in our repertoire that we can
do that. You know, people vary and the skills that
they have, So what do I have in my repertoire
that will enable me to sort of meet this challenge?

(34:08):
And then we try something and that leads to the
third step was where we then evaluate it. That's called
the feedback responsiveness step. We just say, okay, I tried, say,
you know, distracting myself. Did it work? Is it working?
You know, if it is, let's keep doing it. Or
you know, if it isn't working, let's maybe modified a

(34:29):
little bit or try a different way to distract ourselves.
Or maybe we need to you know, try something completely different.
This didn't work. Maybe what I need to do is
to talk to my friends about this, or maybe what
I need to do is give myself some time alone
or I can really think about this, or maybe what
I need to do is, you know, and get engaged

(34:50):
in a task that's that's more fulfilling for me, or
you know, we go to this process. We might This
is I think some level is very simple, a process
of working out how to solve the particular problem we're
confronted at that moment, and you know, maybe later there's
another problem, Like Okay, I'm not I'm distracting myself a
little bit. I feel a little bit better, and I'm

(35:12):
still frightened about what happened. Maybe I need to learn
about it or read about it, or you know, or
maybe just you know, spend time with really close friends
who make me feel safe. You know. Whatever we think
about and instead of thinking how will I not be traumatized,
we're thinking instead about right now, what's the thing that
I need to do right now to take to take

(35:32):
on just a piece of this. I think it makes
it more manageable. It gives us a sense that we
can actually do this and as we as we manage
little pieces at a time, we do begin to feel like, Okay,
I got this, I can handle this, you know, and
it's a you know, the next day it'll be different. Maybe,
you know, the situation changes, there might be something else.
But you know, that's I think when we break it

(35:55):
down these pieces and you know, take it kind of
one step at a time, we move forward.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Word, what incredibly important research you're doing. Well, so, I mean,
how do people become flexible in the first place? What
are the you know, genetic environmental determinants of that.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah, well, I don't know about the genetic because we
haven't looked at that yet. We have looked at the
genetics of the trajectories, and there is a genetic piece
to it, small piece like everything else. But first of all,
we have to think about, well, how do we become flexible?
As you just said. In the book, I have a

(36:31):
chapter on the developmental piece to this, and in fact,
we learned to be flexible. Everybody learns to be flexible
to some extent as they grow up. And some of
the research that we've done we found that most people
aren't already somewhat flexible, you know, and that was I
was very happy to see that because we're arguing that
most people are resilient, and I've been arguing that they

(36:53):
do this by being flexible about each you know, each
event at each time. We better find that most people
are flexible, and that is what we found in a
couple of different studies. Some people are extremely flexible, but
most people are at least moderately flexible. So the way
we this happens in development is each one of these
pieces has a kind of a developmental trajectory. For example,

(37:15):
being sensitive to the context the senses the problem. We
call that context sensitivity, but it turns out you can
you can actually see this just in thinking about development.
There's research showing all these things developed slowly in people.
But think about context sensitivity or reading the situation like
what's happened? I mean, now, what do I need to
do now? And as classic example, with children, as they

(37:37):
go in different situations, their caregivers and their teachers teach
them how to read the situation. You know for the
famous line, and you know most infamous is that what
you say to a child, you use your inside voice here.
You know, essentially whoever's telling that the child a teacher
or a caregiver or somebody else. You're saying, in this situation,

(37:59):
you have to be quiet. And so children begin to learn, oh,
this is a situation when I when I have to
be quiet and you know, behave. And this is a
situation where I can just run loose. And this is
a situation where I have to be polite. In this
situation where I can stick my finger in my friend's
peanut butter sandwich because nobody, you know whatever. I'm in
the cafeteria. And I grew up with lots of brothers,

(38:21):
so I know about this. And this is the kind
of a through the course of development, as as our
brains are out, we get more cognitive skills. We really
learn to read the intergies of situations very well. And
we do this to the point where it's it's an
overlearned behavior. You know, it's an overlearned skill. In other words,

(38:42):
did we get to do it so well we don't
even know we're doing it, which I think is why.
And the same with the other pieces. You know, we
learn different coping behaviors and emotion regulation behaviors, and we
learn to pay attention to whether they're working or not.
The reason I think it's important to name it in
this book is because most people don't even know they

(39:02):
do this, you know, And so I think we can
use this more effectively in our lives when we know
this is actually the process and we can we can
also shore up any deficits we might have in any
of these things by you know, by thinking about it
directly and practicing it, and you know, see if we
can improve these things.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, one thing you talk about that's very helpful is
the importance of goal directed self talking.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so self talk. There's a lot
of been a lot of work on self talk. We
all sort of talk to ourselves and sometimes we talked
to ourselves out loud, and often we do this again
without being aware of it. But self talk is a
very it's very effective, and it's it's very a nice

(39:51):
way to be able to access things we do. So
one of my favorite examples is, you know, you're you
try to do something really difficult, like I think the
book is example of make a difficult basketball shot, or
prepare a really kind of elaborate meal for guests, but
you don't for your guests in your home, but you
don't quite know if it's going to work out okay.

(40:13):
And then it does work out okay, and we might
be thinking to ourselves, wow, I wasn't sure I could
you make this recipe? I make this basketball shot, but
I put a lot of effort into it. I'm usually
pretty good at these things. As I took a chance
with this, and they seem to really like it. That
is the thoughts going on in our head. But we
then concretize these by saying to ourselves you know privately,

(40:35):
yes you know, or something along those lines, you know,
something simple like that. And in that space of self talk,
yes you know, we can also we can go the
other way too, where we could ourselves criticize ourselves. You know,
you idiot, you dummy? What made you think you could
do that? And that's Those are examples of what's called
automatic self talk. We don't we're bare the way we're

(40:57):
even doing it. That that condenses a lot of cut
things going in our brains. It's a simple phrase. But
then intentional self talk is when we actually use self
talk to remind ourselves or to help ourselves do something.
So there are lots of self talk that we can
use for this flexibility mindset and flexibility sequence. For for example, optimism,

(41:21):
a great piece of self talk would be like, it's
going to be okay. The future is generally always okay,
and this will be okay too, This will pass. These
are common things people say to themselves. It will eventually pass.
You'll eventually recede into the background. It will be okay.
Confidence and coping, you would say, you know, you know
you can do these kind of things, so you know
you'll find a way to do these things. A challenge appraisal,

(41:46):
you know, we might say to ourselves, so what really
is the challenger? What do we need to do? And
the same I think that sort of leeds into the
flexibility sequence. The self talk for the flexibility sequence might
be like, for the context sensitivity is is kind of
what I just said. For challenge appraisal, what's happening here?
What do I need to do? What is it that's

(42:06):
bothering so much? Bothering me so much? And then the
flexibility sequence, I'm sorry. The repertoire part is what am
I able to do? What am I good at? What
can I what can I use here that I am
able to do? And in the last part really is
the feedback part. The part week sort of decide how
it's working. It's basically simple, is this working? Is this?

(42:29):
Does this seem to be? Like? Is the problem still
there today? That I do it? And those you know
in the in the book, I listed a chart of
these sort of basic self talk for these for the
sequence and the flexibility mindset, and then a few other examples,
and then you know, I suggest people can make up
their own if they're not comfortable with these. And of

(42:50):
course there's another kind that Ethan Cross has done a
lot of work on what's called distance self talk or
objective self talk. And then in that case you're talking
to third person, you use your own name, so you
might say you might say, for example, you know, Scott
you can do this, or you know, Scott, you've done

(43:10):
this before. You know you can do this, you know,
things like that, and that's very effective.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Actually, yeah, I think that relates to like Kristin Neff's
research and self compassion. She often says, treat yourself, you know,
like you treat a friend and say and be like Scott,
you know, like I love you. You know you can
do this, yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I think also when you're
speaking into about yourself and a third person. There's a
certain kind of how you can applaud yourself much more
easily in a sense or you know, or or remind
yourself that you can do things, you have done things,
and you're good at some things. You know.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, are there any other era
tips for being able to boost your flexibility mindset? And
you're the whole sequence that you're talking about other than
self talk and what you've talked about already.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Well, I think one of the things we've learned that
we haven't used this whole thing in any kind of
training or intervention yet, although some colleagues of mine have
and mentioned that in a kind of a loose way.
One of my colleagues, Wendy Lichtenthal, who's in the book
I talk about her. She's a really, really terribly talented clinician.

(44:26):
She's really good, and she works with people under great duress,
and she has been experimenting with trying to you know,
talking about them the flexibility sequence primarily, and you know,
so helping people step back a little bit and think
about this sequence and again, you know, it's really focusing

(44:47):
on what's happening in the moment rather than the whole,
you know, broad spectrum, which it often looks really bad
to people, instead of focusing on the moment what you
can actually do, and before you know it, you've actually
gone through a lot the pieces that won't make it
so it won't be so bad. So I think, you know,
one of the things, one of the insights she had
was when you're right in the middle of something really

(45:09):
really difficult, it's a little harder to develop or improve
any of these skills. And I think of them as skills.
So I think it would be really, really, a very
good way to use this this work is to is
to do this sort of in our daily life, you know,

(45:30):
and to start to begin to think about, you know,
what's happening to me right now, why am I so upset?
Which is, you know, we're often upset about little things
through the course of our daily life. And I found
that remarkably when I started thinking about how to teach
people to do this, started using it more in my
daily life, you know, or you know, I'm unhappy with something.
You know, I'm a I'm a parent, you know, I

(45:52):
have financial woes or financial stresses. I'm a chair of
a department. I you know, I you know, I do
all the other things. I live in New York City.
You know, where you're liably to get you know, on
the subway, you're liable to encounter some strange situation all
you know, at any moment, and sometimes those things are

(46:12):
deeply upsetting and you find yourself feeling really bad and
you can then at that point to say, Okay, what's happening? Why, what,
what's really bothering me about this? I know this, this
guy said something to me or you know, insulted me
on the subway or you know, but what what's really
bothering me about that? And what can I do about it?
And you know what am I able to? What are

(46:33):
the ways I can deal with this? And you know,
trying out things? And that's it's very effective because you
begin to learn more more, you know, learn better how
to use these these skills and also to improve them
if you need to. There's a lot of research showing
these individual pieces can be improved.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
That's good news. That's good news. Yeah, in everyone.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
I would think, so, I mean, you know, the I
think what we've what we've found is that the people
who are not doing well in their lives typically have
deficits in one of these areas, not all of them.
In one of these areas. That was a kind of
an unexpected finding in our research. So I think if
we just we try to use these different processes and

(47:17):
these different abilities in our daily life, we might quickly
find out where we have the sort of the weak spot,
and then we can try to work on that part.
And you know, we can think about it, try it,
you know, delve into a little bit more, and I
think I think all of these things can definitely improved,
probably in anyone I would.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
Say, Okay, again, that's good news. Okay, yeah, did do
I say something? Oh?

Speaker 2 (47:42):
I don't know me. I mean, that's not anything we've
ever tested, but I'm confident about that. I think for
most people it's probably there's win in their reach to improve,
especially if we know we can identify where we have
a week spot that we can focus on that.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
How much has your research made contact with the work
on hope, you know, like Senan Olpez's work on Hope, Not.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
At all as far as I can tell. I mean,
we you know, we've been very busy, and you know
there's a lot of room we're always looking to expand
in different directions, you know. Yeah, And you know, I
mean where I'm going in the future is really this
flexibility sequence in the mindset. Try to unpack it more
and learn how it works. And you know, when we
first proposed these things, it wasn't that long ago. I

(48:28):
first proposed a flexibility sequence about eight years ago only,
and at the time, I thought, well, if this doesn't last,
it means that somebody has improved it, and it's still
kind of the way to think about it, and it
still has mileage, and so getting me places. You know,
I'm trying to understand it better. But I'd be happy
if this, you know, progressed in a totally different direction,

(48:50):
or simplify it, or that more complex whatever it is.
I want to find out. We're going to be studying
that in the future, I think.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
A true scientist.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah, where's the data exactly?

Speaker 1 (49:02):
Exactly? So, and then there was a global pandemic that's
the title of your last chapter. Yeah, so the pandemic
hit while you were writing the book in twenty nineteen.
How did the resilience blind spot? First of all, what
is the resilience blind spot? I don't think we ever
defined that. Yeah, and then how did that show itself
during the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah, I'm glad you asked the question, Scott. So the
resilience blind spot is what happens when we're exposed to
potential trauma, and it particularly becomes a blind spot when
we have a mass trauma that exposed to a lot
of people. When we feel and this when we feel
bad about something, I mean, if you're really upset, it's

(49:45):
hard not to think that it's going to last a
long time. This goes back to the social psychologists like
Dan Gilbert, and a lot of people know Dan Gilbert
from Daniel Gilbert from his wonderful work from his wonderful
book Stumbling on Happiness, which is just a really excellent book,
very readable, and you know he had done all this

(50:06):
wonderful work on affective forecasting, which basically show that when
we feel bad and we'll feel fear, will we feel anger,
it doesn't feel like it will go away in twenty
minutes or an hour. It feels like it will last,
you know, for days and weeks. And the same thing
when we feel positive things, it just seems like it
will last forever. So when a traumatic event happens, are

(50:27):
potentially traumatic event is I like to call them. It
feels like, oh my god, I'm traumatized now, I'm going
to be this way for a long time. And I've
many friends who have told me the same thing, you know,
and they've been through something, and they start having nightmares
and start having intrusive thoughts and they're anxious that they're
traumatized now, and it's just basically not true, at least

(50:50):
not in the first week. That's really just a normal reaction.
And those reactions can be useful, but it's at that
time that we can really do the work of moving on,
getting beyond it. And but that's the resilience blind spot
that when we when we were feeling these emotions, we
can't even see resilience. And when it happens on a
mass scale, say with the COVID virus or nine to eleven,

(51:14):
we we we begin to think everybody's going to be
this way. And I wrote about this recently an article
in one of the major newspapers I think it was
The Wall Streetternal if I can name names, and I
basically thought it was on the anniversary of nine to
eleven and the twenty annivers and I called it the

(51:34):
Lessons Learned from nine to eleven and the lessons we
keep relearning, and nine to eleven was a perfect example.
This nine to eleven was a horrific event, obviously, and
I was in New York at the time, and it
was really a distressing event. I was having nightmares, I was,
you know, on edge like so many other people in
the city. But the predictions, you know, that research began, studies,

(51:56):
surveys began to happen, you know, within days of nine eleven,
and they predicted a very dire outcome. You know, huge
portions of the population were feeling distressed and anxious. People
in New York were already showing PTSD symptoms, lots of people,
and it led to these sort of you know announcements
that you know, we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis,

(52:19):
and the Federal Emergency Management am see FEMA A lotted
well over one hundred million dollars I don't remember the
exact amount, was well over one hundred million dollars to
New York, so New York could provide free therapy any
and all comers. And a few months later, a lot
of those that distress and those trauma systems disappeared or

(52:42):
they they were gone. People weren't feeling that anymore, and
people didn't want the psychotherapy, and you know, the treatment
for nine to eleven the emergency treatment, and they hadn't
spent a lot of the money, so initially they spent
it on advertising, you know, like it was essentially saying,
come on, you really know you need treatment, but it's
you're afraid or instigmatized. I don't remember the exact wording

(53:05):
of these ads, I'm paraphrasing, but it still didn't happen,
and a lot of therapists were confused, and you know,
we're trying to find customers, but people were basically kind
of over it. I still remember I mentioned this recently.
I forget where I mentioned it, but about a month
after nine to eleven, I was on the Columbia campus
with my children, and there were no airplanes in the

(53:27):
sky because all commercial flights in and out of New
York were stopped. The only thing we saw were military
jet fighter planes in the sky, and it was disturbing,
you know, not to see these airplanes because where I
live in Manhattan, it's in the flight pass, so either
the planes are flying up the Hudson to the east,
I'm sorry to the west or you know, up the
up Brooklyn and the Queens to the east, or right

(53:51):
over my head in Manhattan, and there were planes in
the sky. Then about a month later, an airplane and
commercial airplanes right over the campus, and I looked up
and I felt this surge of I don't know, relief,
And I looked around. Everybody in the campus was looking
up at that plane and showing this great surge of

(54:11):
relief that I was feeling, because that plane signified we're
getting back to normal. The blind spot was in a sense,
tells you, no, that's not going to happen. So when
the pandemic hit, I was actually in as I mentioned,
I was in I think I was in Norway at
the time, about to begin my trip around Europe by

(54:33):
my train, and I had to come home and I
returned to New York and I had to quarantine, and
I was, I was. I have to admit I was
annoyed by that. I was. I was pissed. I was
because I had to quarantine, and I you know, I
felt like, come on, I was in Norway. They're not
They're only there are fewer people in Norway in the
entire New York City, right, and and you know, nobody

(54:55):
was really at that time taking the virus very seriously.
But then during my coreuarantine, by the time my quarantine
was over two weeks, the entire city was in quarantine.
By the end of the month, about three or four
weeks later, we were up to about eight hundred deaths
a day in New York. It was just shockingly horrible.
And around that time, you know, there was a refrigerator

(55:17):
truck makeshift morgue right down the street from my apartment.
There were hospital tents and makeshift hospital tents in Central Park,
and you know, nobody was out in the streets. It
was you know, I used to ride my bicycle a
little bit later, right down the middle of Times Square.
That was just the strangest thing, an empty Times Square.
And at that time, let's say, i'll say in early April,

(55:39):
there were all kinds of again the same lesson from
nine to eleven. There were all kinds of pronouncements that
we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis that were
not equipped to handle. And I decided thought, well, that's
the resilience blind spot. That can't be true. It's bad
and people are suffering, but this will will We'll get

(56:00):
used to this and we'll deal with it because we
always do. And so I wrote a piece for the
Association for Psychological Science website. They'd asked me to do this,
just some of the points that they called it an
expert commentary that was flattered by that, but they, you know,
being that I studied resilience, they asked me to say,
what does psychological science tell us about this? And I

(56:23):
made some of the points of may just discussing with
you right now, and I again said we're going to
get through this because we always do, and in fact
we have. You know, everybody they think is still stressed out.
It's a long term stressor a lot of people have had,
including myself. I've had physical problems that are that are

(56:44):
basically not tied to anything, but they're clearly stress related.
You know, small pains there, you know, small difficulties that
my doctor told me, there's so many people coming in
now for these unexplained physical problems. These are stress related problems.
And we've been under this kind of stress for a
long time, but we have dealt with it, we have

(57:05):
hoped with it one way or another. You and I
are talking right now. We're on zoom. We're not on zoom,
we're on a stone cloud, but we're talking and we're
dealing with it, and we're having a decent conversation. I
can see your face and you can see my face,
and we're smiling sometimes, you know, I mean, you know, yeah,

(57:26):
that's I think that's the lesson. And I think we'll
learn this again the next time something happens, unless we
start paying attention that this pattern.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Absolutely, and hopefully the tools in your book will also
offer people a good toolkit for dealing with any sort
of future things that arouse future challenges. George, thank you
so much for your really seminal work in the field.
I am a great admirer, as you know, of the
research you do, and I really believe in the importance

(57:56):
of it now more than ever. So thank you so
much for chatting with me today and for the word
thank you.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
I thank you very much for this conversation. It was
very nice to talk with you.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.
If you'd like to react in some way to something
you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
at Thusychology podcast dot com. Or on our YouTube page
The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of
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want to check that out. Thanks for being such a
great supporter of the show, and tune in next time

(58:36):
for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.