WE DISCUSS WITH DR. BONNANO ABOUT TRAUMA AND RESILIENCE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, everyone, This is California and you a podcast that
brings you the latest news.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
From across California. Now here's your host, doctor Carlos. Hey,
welcome back everybody. Today, we have a great guess, Professor
George A.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Bonano.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's bo Na double noo, professor of clinical psychology at
Columbia University. He has research different kinds of potentially traumatic
events such as terrorist attacks, disasters, wars, assault, life, thread
and the injuries. But we're going to talk to him
about his new book called The End of Trauma, how
the new science of resilience is changing how we think

(00:40):
about PTSD.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
This is really a.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Fascinating book for me, folks, because you know, I have
a podcast in special Forces, so it's always been really
interesting to see how they respond to some of the
issues they've dealt with. So I'm kind of really excited
about talking about this. Before we get started, you know
what to do, share, subscribe, hit that I like, but
you know we like it. It's not wasting any more time.
Welcome to the show, Doctor Bonano.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Walk sir, Well, nice to be with you, Carlos. Nice
to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I should have warned you my voice changes when get
on the show. But either way again, folks, the books
called the End of Trauma, how the new science resilience
is changing how we think about PTSD. I guess what
was your epiphany, professor, that all of a sudden you said,
you know what, we were looking at this wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh, if there wasn't epiphany, that was quite a while ago.
Back when I first began to do this research, I
was studying bereavement, how people respond to the death of
a loved one, and I wasn't This was as a
kind of an odd story. I was. I just finished
my PhD, and I was kind of looking to change

(01:43):
directions a little bit. I was trained in research methodology
quite well at Yale and at Yale University, but I
was offered a position in San Francisco running a large
bereavement study at the medical school there, UCSF, and I
wasn't that interested. To be perfectly honest, I didn't know
much about bereavement, and I was hadn't hadn't really considered

(02:07):
studying bereavement. But when I looked at the literature, it
seemed to be woefully out of date. The literature really
seemed to have not caught up with all the advances
in research psychology, all the methods we were now using,
so I kind of had I did that. This really
piqued my interest that I kind of had an open

(02:29):
chance to use a lot of these methods that hadn't
been used before in the study of loss and really,
you know, try things out, finally, try to learn more.
Pretty much anything we do did seem like it would
show us something that hadn't been examined before. And almost
from the beginning we began, well, what I should say,
one of the dominant assumptions at the time was that

(02:52):
grief the death of a loved one, was overwhelming and
mostly debilitating for most people, that most most people who
suffered a loss could benefit from psychotherapy, That it was
a long drawn out period of pain, and that if
one didn't go through this long process of grief recovery

(03:12):
grief work, that they would suffer only further in the
long run. That didn't make any sense to me, given
all that I knew from the rest of psychology. So
we immediately began to test that, and we began to
track people over time, and what we saw from the
beginning was that the majority of people were basically doing okay.

(03:33):
Nobody's happy when there's a loss. Nobody is free from
any suffering at all. You know, it's a difficult thing.
But most people we found could function well enough to
get on with their lives. They could work, they could concentrate,
they could have meaningful relationships with other people. So we
saw that just about from the beginning, tested it a

(03:54):
couple more times, and we began to then publish that idea,
and that was kind of the epiphany right then, you know,
to be fair that we we as a scientist, you know,
I wanted to really double check on that. So we
continued to do lots of other studies, continue to do
more research, and then we also began to study more

(04:15):
things in the realm of trauma, like sexual abuse, like
terrorist attacks, and we saw the same things there.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Interesting, I guess you got a little flashbacks of Kubler
Ross for a minute.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well, that was one of the questions was people had
at the time. It was kind of there was a
lot of acceptance, a lot of belief in those Koubleros
stages of grief, and now I think there that's much
less so because there was never really any evidence for them,
and at the time we didn't see anything any evidence
for that either. And at some point, you know, that

(04:49):
began people began to say that, and I began to
make that point as well, that there really is an
evidence for these stages of grief. It's not what people
go through.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
But Frazier showed it.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Braezer, there's a TV show. I'm I don't watch TV
very often.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah, he lost his.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Radio show and then he had went to the four
stages of grief in the episode.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
I see.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
But let me ask you this, So, what's your take
on the bereavement exclusion? I see, there was a big
stink about that when they started taking that out of
the DSM if it was a d s M four
or five, but they started moving that bereavement exclusion out
of that category as a subset of depression.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Any ideas on that.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
If I'm not a big fan of diagnoses in general,
so I don't pay that much attention. But if I
understand your and I think diagnoses are important. They're social tools.
I don't think they're scientific tools, and I don't think
they actually reflect very well the biology of what we're experiencing.

(05:49):
There isn't any there isn't much of a concordance. But
as I understand it. If a person was grieving, they
would be given us standard depression category, or they've given
a standard diagnostic category, typically depression. And then over time
it began to become a parent that grief warranted its

(06:12):
own diagnosis for treating people who are who could not
get over losses. People were suffering from profounded reactions to loss,
and I think that was actually a good thing, and
we the research really supports that as well, so that
that's how that's where the shift happened.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
We interviewed doctor Allan Francis a few weeks ago and
it was funny because he was mentioning about that. He
made an interesting comment, how do you have a timeline
for grief? Do you have a timeline for the loss
of a of a parent?

Speaker 3 (06:44):
I don't know. It was kind of an interesting statement.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
I know if you yeah, but I would say that
we we can do that. So I think that, you know, greef,
there's grief, there's I think the terms are a little
confusing sometimes when the way people talk about it. But
there is grief. You know, people we feel grief, but
there is also debilitating grief, and those are two different things,

(07:09):
you know, when we feel grief, we feel sadness, we
feel pangs of missing a person. But if we can
continue to function, that's the that's really the key distinction.
Can a person continue to function and if a person
and if a person's not, if a person struggling to
function past say six months, I think that's kind of

(07:30):
you know, that's an arbitrary number, but that's when we
begin to say, Okay, there's something is not working here.
A person shouldn't be suffering that long. They can miss
the person, they can feel pangs of sadness, they can
you know, people say they never get over a loss,
and that I think is often true, but it's there's
a difference between those reactions and functioning and when a
person's when an event like a loss is getting in

(07:54):
the way of a person actually living their lives in
a fulfilling way. Then I think after so of time,
we wanted them to find that and say, Okay, now
we need to maybe offer clinical help for this person.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's good. That's good. I'm gonna bring it back to
your books. I mean, I mean, take it too far
off the book, But.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
In the end of Trauma you talk about PTSD and
you talk about resilience, So tell us a little bit
about what you found there is.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
I find resilience to be As I mentioned just.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Before the show, I have a special podcast just with
Special Forces operators and I find them to be very,
very interesting because of what they can handle, what they've
dealt with, and how they operate compared to And this
is not a pejorative towards the rest of the military,
but they're different.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Special they really are.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, the mentals, the cognitive flexibility that they have is
beyond normal that I've ever seen. And how they respond
to things, it's different. But so what did you find
out about resilience and PTSD.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Well, resilience and PTSD are not opposites, and I think
that's a big misconception. There's PAS, which is a prolonged
trauma reaction that's basically a trauma reaction that a person
cannot get over there it's impeding their functioning for a
period of time and it's chronic. Then there are but

(09:13):
that's a very that that PTSD reactions occur in a
small minority of people. Right, So, say you know anywhere
between five percent and the most I think you ever
see is about thirty percent After a certain kind of
you know, after an event. It doesn't really get higher
than that. Thirty percent is a lot of people. Typically,

(09:34):
as I said, it's lower, and we estimate for the
military it's about seven percent based on the on the
trajectory studies, not diagnostic studies, but trajectory studies. But then
you have such let's just say arbitrarily picking upper ten percent,
say there's ten percent PTSD after a certain event, a

(09:57):
bombing or a natural disaster there or something like that,
that's ninety percent of the people who don't have PTSD. That
category then has lots of other patterns of outcome in it.
Of the people who don't develop PTSD that ninety percent.
And typically we define resilience in my research as a
stable trajectory of healthy functioning because we map different patterns

(10:20):
over time. So people who are basically at before and
after an event have relatively few symptoms, they're functioning pretty well.
That typically we see in around two thirds of the
population exposed to an event, So around two thirds of people,
and that's across all kinds of different events, averaging across
all these events, it's around two thirds. So that means

(10:43):
then you know, say let's say five to ten percent
show PTSD, two thirds show resilient. That's still room for
other types of outcomes, and we see one pattern we
call acute recovery, So people show high levels of symptoms
right after the event and then they gradually return to
sort of low levels of symptoms, but it takes them
a year or two. That's different than chronic PTSD, which

(11:07):
goes on for a long time. Then we also see
a pattern, for lack of a better word, we call
it worsening or emerging or delayed something like that, where
people are struggling but they're they're they're not they don't
reach the high enough levels of symptoms to meet criterion
for say PTSD, But they're also not in that resilient

(11:28):
group either because they're struggling a bit and they gradually
get worse. So we see that pattern as well. So
all that's to say is you have a category like PTSD,
which is serious, difficult, painful, really struggling to function. But
then you have all that, you have several other categories
or patterns over time, one of them being resilience, one

(11:50):
of them being worsening, one of them being recovering, et cetera.
So it's really much more heterogeneous than just saying PTSD
and resilience.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Interesting, And I do want to talk a little bit
about your other topic you mentioned. I think it was
called a flexibility sequence in a little bit, yes, but
before we get to that, just to make sure I
have an understanding. So your argument is basically PTSD exists.
Because I know some people are going to say, oh,
he doesn't believe in PTSD, but PTSD exists. But it's
either an orber diagnosis or a misdiagnosis.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
Well, I don't know, I don't I don't know if
I put it exactly that way. PTSD is definitely, definitely,
definitely taps into something very real and very difficult for people,
whether we call it PTSD or we call it you know,
in my work, we just we map different patterns over time.
So we just measure this trajectory of high levels of

(12:45):
symptoms PTSD, symptoms that don't go away, that won't go
away for a long time. But that's that's definitely real.
Whether it's overdiagnosed or not is an empirical question. I
think it probably is overdiagnosed. But I think what's more

(13:05):
obvious or more defensible is to say that it's people
in the general public often think they have PTSD at
a at a rate that's much beyond what's actually actually
evident in their functioning. It's a very it's very common
now to see things as being as traumatic, as being
see oneself as being traumatized. So there's a kind of

(13:30):
an over emphasis on it right now.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
I think, yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
I noticed that a lot where there's there's there's a
mini traumas and then there's big com traumas and they
got complex traumas, which a lot of people are not
really happy with that one either.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
No, Yeah, and that that's a complicated That complicated complex
trauma is a complicated diagnosis. But I think, yeah, there's
a tendency to try to see well, there's always been
a tendency to overestimate the prevalence of PTSD, but that
was really I think more methodological than actual. So you know,
if you get a sample of people who've you know,

(14:08):
in a research study or you know that have been
doing that have sought professional help, you're going to see
higher levels of PTSD because they're seeking help, right So
there's a tendency to think think that's the norm. But
when in the research that I've been talking about, when
we get a sample of people, we try to get
anybody we can who's been through an event and follow

(14:30):
them over time, and that's more of a population level sample,
and that's a representative sample of people who go through
an event. And then we don't see as much PTSD
when we do that, because we see all these other
patterns as well.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
I'll be curious to know.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
I was reading a book and was talking about PTSD
seem to be more prevalent among individuals who suffered sexual
abuse as a child compared to other forms of abuse.
I don't know if you bumped into that at all.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
Well, I've done some research on sexual abuse, and sexual
abuse is harmful for sure. I don't think that it's
actually true that it tends to lead to higher levels
of PTSD, but I mean it certainly does lead to
a number of people with PTSD. One of the problems
with something researching something from childhood is that a lot

(15:23):
of the conclusions are based on retrospective memory. So you know,
you give adults questionnaires about their childhood's it's very hard
for us to report accurately on our past. And if
we're suffering at the time we try to remember, we're
more likely to remember or even over remember things than

(15:45):
if we are asked when we're feeling good and we've
actually this has been actually shown empirically that if you
track people over time and then ask them about the past,
if a person is suffering, they're more likely to remember
things in the past or even over remember things compared
to someone who's not. But then they're the the there are,

(16:06):
you know, So if if one really wants understand how
childhood sexual abuse would impact adults, it requires following people
over time or having data on people over all across
that time span. And there have been a few studies
like that and they see levels of PTSD that are
fairly similar to other kinds of traumatic events.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
So you're saying more like a perspective.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Study, prospective or longitudinal either one, you know, and those
are hard to do. It takes a lot of money,
a lot of time. But you know, if we want
to understand these things, and these are serious problems, so
we should devote the time and energy to do it properly,
to do it right. And when we do that, we see,
you know, yes, sexual abuse causes harm in people, but

(16:49):
it also there are people who are resilient, There are
people who struggle and get better, So we do see
all those things as well.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
I figure out how I frame this question. I think
I have two and maybe I can consolidate one. So
I want to talk about flexibility sequence. But I also
wanted to see if the biopsychosocial model shows anything in
regards to resilience and people who might have more resilience
than others. Is there a biological component contributing as well
as a psychological component contributing?

Speaker 1 (17:19):
There there there is well. First of all, to be
really clear, I don't think that there are resilient people.
I don't think people are resilient. I think people show
resilience after something happens, but we're not very good at
predicting who those people will be. And that's been something
I call the resilience paradox, that we we can measure

(17:42):
all kinds of things that that correlate with resilience, but
those things actually don't do a very good job of
predicting who will be resilient, and there doesn't seem to
be any kind of a resilient type. I think that's
kind of a myth that there are resilient types, you know,
and that that myth is kind of that you know,
you were resilient type, and therefore when something bad happens,

(18:05):
you will just kind of naturally cope with it, and
we don't really see that. So and you know, for example,
we did a study with when we looked at the
genetic profiles. We use what are called polygenic scores. These
are genome white scores. We had twenty one different polygenic scores,
and we used machine learning to look at how these

(18:26):
polygenetic scores mapped onto the resilience trajectories and the other trajectories,
and we did find prediction. We did find that there
were certain polygenic patterns, that genome white patterns that predicted
who'd be in the resilience trajectory and who not. But
the effects are small, and this is true of everything

(18:47):
else we've looked at. So we can predict it a
little bit. If I could put this in sort of
just plain English, we can only move the needle a
little bit. We find something that only explains a little
bit of who will be resilient than who not, and
then there are other factors that explain a little bit.
Nothing we've ever found does more than that. So no

(19:09):
or no magic genes, there no magic bullets, or no
magic personality tricks. There are no magic you know, ways
of being that that tell us who will be resilient
and who not. It's basically in the bottom line is
it's work being resilient, right, you have to when something
bad happens, we have to get in there and face
the event that we're struggling with. You know, something like

(19:31):
a potentially traumatic event is painful, right we you know,
we don't want to think about it. It's haunting us.
We're having nightmares, maybe we're having intrusive thoughts, we're frightened,
we're maybe you know, elevated to arouse, all those things
we associate with PTSD, and people do have those reactions.
It's very natural when there's a life threatening experience. It's

(19:53):
very natural to be shaken and to you know, to
maybe be ill at ease and you know, maybe dream
about it. But at that point we have to kind
of really dig in and face the event and get
through it. And that's what my research has been about. Now,
this is what the flexibility or the flexibility sequence you mentioned,

(20:14):
that's what it's about. It's how people do that because
we've decided, you know, after doing this research, they've been
doing this about thirty years. When we keep mapping these
different patterns, finding that most people are resilient, some people
develop PTSD, some people struggle longer, and then you know,
get better, et cetera. And instead of thinking in terms
of the traditional focus, since nineteen eighty when PTSD became

(20:38):
a reality, when it became an official diagnosis, the focus
has been on PTSD and everybody's been trying to understand PTSD,
which makes perfect sense. We want to help people. But
now that we have all this data and we've followed
people over time for so many years, now we know
most people show this resilient pattern, it's kind of shifts

(20:59):
them a bit. So what we're doing is we're trying
to understand what is it that these people are doing
when they show that resilient pattern. What is it when
somebody gets through an event like that and they're okay,
basically they're continuing to function in a healthy way. What
is it they're doing? How can they do that? Once
we understand that, then we can maybe help people who

(21:21):
developed het do we have a better understanding of what
is missing In a sense, or how we can help
them get better. And that's where the flexibility part comes in.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, really reminded me again of the Special Forces when
I saw, because I believe it had you had like
three steps. I think it was awareness, acceptance and adaptation
to triple A. And it's interesting that's every time I
heard a story from them.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
That's kind of what they did.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
They became aware, they accept what was going on. I
got to keep moving on. They tell me ninety five
percent of the time everything goes wrong when you're on
a mission. Nothing goes wrong in practice, but every time
you go out in real life missions that something's going
to go wrong and you have to adapt. And it
was really interesting to see that. So the flexibility flexibility sequence,
there's three steps.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Then there's three steps, and that's there are three steps
in the sequence, and that's you know, at least for now,
that's what we think, you know, based on the research.
It's probably a lot more nuanced than that. But the
three steps of the sequence are kind of what did
you say, you said, awareness, acceptance, and adapt and adaptation.

(22:26):
That's pretty good. That's interesting. It's not quite those it
doesn't quite map onto that, but the three this flexibility
sequence involves what it called context sensitivity, repertoire and feedback.
So what we find, and this really comes out of
the experimental emotion regulation literature and really just a lot
of psychological research we've pulled together to make this model.

(22:50):
And so context sensitivity is where you basically assess what's
happening to you and you you you set a goal
to try to deal with that. So you kind of say, Okay,
this is what the problem is right now, this is
what I'm struggling with at this moment, and what I need.
You kind of decide, Okay, what do I need to do?

(23:11):
So say I'm you know, I'm having nightmares and I'm
not sleeping. Well, okay, so what do I need to do.
I need to find a way to stop having nightmares
and sleep better. That could be a simple goal. Or
I'm feeling really anxious, Okay, I need to find a
way not to feel so anxious. You know, And whatever
the problem may be, we don't. It's not a process

(23:31):
of looking at the whole picture. It's really about the moment, right,
So that we assessed the moment and we set of go, okay,
I want to be able to to do something to
sleep better, to get some rest, to get this off
my mind. Then we move to the next step, repertoire,
where we actually do something. We select a strategy, a

(23:52):
strategy from our repertoire, but here we ask ourselves first,
we ask ourselves what do I need to do? Now?
We ask ourselves what am I able to do? What
kind of tools do I have in my toolbox? If
I can use a metaphor what am I able to do?
So first, what should I what do I need to
do now? What am I able to do to address that?
And then we pick something from as our best guess

(24:15):
from what we have in our repertoire of strategies, and
then we try that and we move to the third
step feedback. And in this case, this is I think
a step that's very underappreciated, because we have to ask
ourselves is it working what I tried to do? And
if it's not working, then we try something else. We
go back to the second step to our repertoire again.

(24:37):
And the reason I think this is so important because
a lot of people give up at this point. They think, I,
you know, I'm feeling really lousy and I tried this
thing that I normally do and it didn't work. I
don't know what to do. I can't deal with this,
And there's a kind of a sense of throwing up
one's hand saying I give up. I can't cope with this.
But that's actually quite natural. Human beings cope by trial

(25:01):
and error. We figure it out. So in this model flexibility,
it's about adapting oneself to the circumstance. So I thought
this would work. I normally when I'm feeling anxious, say,
for example, I exercise, or when I'm feeling anxious, I
distract myself whatever is we normally try to do. It

(25:23):
didn't work this time, or I do yoga. It didn't
work this time. So then we have to try something else,
and we go back and make our next best guess
at what might work, and if that doesn't work, we
try again, and if that doesn't work, maybe we go
back to the beginning and think again about the situation.
What is really the problem here? That maybe I'm misunderstanding
the problem, and I can go through the cycle again.

(25:45):
And you know, that's the kind of thing we see
resilient people doing. So far from the research, that's what
that seemed to be. What it is that people do
to get through these events. We've been able to study
this a lot now and we found most people are
able to more or less do this to least a
moderate degree. So from you know, at this point, we're

(26:07):
just trying to understand it better to continue with this research.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
It's so amazing because I know, I was talking to
a couple of guys the other day, a couple of
Green Berets and a Delta guy, about doing a podcast
together with a couple of athletes, because when I've interviewed
Olympic athletes or professional athletes, they have a very similar
mindset of which you just described. If something goes wrong,
I remember you remember Larry.

Speaker 4 (26:28):
Holmes, Yes I do remember, yeah, yeah, if you guys don't,
he balks a long time ago, but he fought Muhammed
Ali and then Tyson.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
I was blessed enough to interview him, and I asked him,
what did you think about when Tyson knocked you down?

Speaker 3 (26:44):
Did you think it was over?

Speaker 2 (26:46):
And the mentality always struck me because he said over, No,
I had to figure out that didn't work. I got
to try something else to figure it out. And I
started hearing that over and over again.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
With every athlete.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
The Olympic athletes tell me the same thing I never
thought about. I just had to figure out how to
do it.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And this is not I I you know,
I've been studying this, as I said, for about thirty
years and then one and I was actually studying flexibility independently.
Is the kind of second stream of research. And then
at one point I realized that these things actually fit
together really nicely. It's not it's research, and it's I

(27:23):
think I would say high level research if I can
be immodest, but it's not rocket science to use a cliche.
You know, this is what people have been doing. You
can actually find this kind of thing in Aristotle.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
You know.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
And then I'm going to blame I'm going to completely
botch up the name of Aristotle's famous book on ethics,
Nickelmedian Ethics. I'm going to get it wrong. But in
that book he says some things like this is also
a Stoic philosopher Seneca, who is I think a Roman
who says similar things. You know, this this idea is

(27:58):
is kind of been a because this is really seems
to be what humans do. But when we as I mentioned,
most people that we've studied have at least moderate skill
in these things, except most of us don't know it.
And I think it's because we learned to do this
as kids. As we developed and become adults, but then

(28:19):
it's overlearned. We're not thinking about it so much and
we're looking for maybe something more elaborate, you know, but
it's really basic. The basic processes we know how to
do already usually interesting.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
The book again, it's called The End of Trauma, How
the New Science of Resilience is changing how we think
about PTSD.

Speaker 3 (28:38):
I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
Can get to it at Amazon. The author is Professor
George A. Bonano bo n A double n O professor.
I guess we got about another five or ten minutes,
and I guess one of the questions I wanted to
throw at you. Do you think I've heard this? So
this is kind of one of these things just popped
up in my head. Now it'side of my script. But
I've been hearing about how today's society is not allowing

(29:05):
individuals to mostly be resilient, to not to be able
to overcome. There's more of a issue with internal locus
to control and more of an external locus or control
problem happening. Do you think that is that impeding anything
in regards to what you're talking about in regards to
resilience and overcoming challenges, Maybe we're a little softer in
today's world than we were.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Fifty ars ago.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
You know, I.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Fully understand what you're referring to, and I do believe
one can see that we haven't seen it. We don't
have any you know, empirical evidence that people are less
resilient than they used to be and things like that,
although we haven't really tried to test that, but it
does seem to me. You know, I'm I'm at a university,

(29:49):
so I'm around all ages of people. I'm around a
lot of younger people. I have my own kids, I've
been around lots of other people's children, and you know,
of course middle aged people, older people. And it does
seem that there's much greater focus in younger generations on

(30:10):
categorizing themselves by their deficits, by their there's a there's
a very there's this. I don't know if it's fair
to say this is a subset of the population. I
don't know if that's accurate or not. Who there are
certainly just sold me put it this way, there are
a lot of people who are clinging to some sort

(30:32):
of diagnostic category that they put themselves in. You know,
you've heard of this happening on TikTok and other social
media where people are self diagnosing, but I've been, which
doesn't surprise me. But what does surprise me is the
extent that people seem to cling to that want to
own that diagnosis. There's a lot of talk about hidden traumas,

(30:53):
that people are carrying hidden traumas inside them, which is
I think, I hate to say this, but I think
that's kind of a fiction. There's no mechanism that I
know of that can that allows us to have hidden traumas,
no neuroscience, you know, data, no brain function that would
allow us to have hidden traumas, And so I think

(31:17):
a lot of that's in the service of instead of
I try not to be too critical of people because
I don't know if I fully understand it, and I
don't you know, I'm older, so maybe I'm just not
understanding something. But it seems to me that people are
unnecessarily limiting themselves. They're they're limiting what they might be

(31:38):
capable of by by clinging to a sort of a
sense of where they're broken. And I think that's just
not a healthy thing for to be doing that. You
know that things happen to us, Difficult things happen to us,
but we do often get beyond them, and we can
adapt and change and modify time where our brains are

(32:01):
built for that, and that that that allows us to
many more opportunities for growth and development in life if
we if we take a broader attitude. So that's my
main concern, is it so it seems so self limiting
to me.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
That's interestinguse when I practice. One of the techniques we're
taught and you're and I teach, and you teach as well,
is learning how to reframe things and how to look
at things differently, So basically stop ruminating over the bad
and start looking at the positive. If you use solution
focused for instance, you can.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Go that route whatever. But it's kind of funny.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
That's what we're helping people to do anyway, is try
to get them to start looking at problems differently and
develop our self efficacy, which is kind of going on
with what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's true of a lot
of therapy interventions, you know, and there's a lot out there.
There are lots of very positively focused trends in health
also in the world as well. But it's just concerning
that there's such an adherence to in a sense by

(33:05):
so many people, it seems in this kind of self
limiting way. Yeah, it's it's concerning. I hope it plays
itself out in a good way. But we'll see.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
You know, society has any patterns, That's what I always see.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
It always goes.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Back and forth from the direction to another.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
So I'm fifty two.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
When I grew up, we had a lot of self
development guys all over the place. Jim Rohan, We used
to hear Anthony Robbins was big back then, Wayne Dyer
and a lot of these guys are kind of you
can do it. Always focus on overcoming it, no matter
what stops you keep going. Things of that nature.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean I tend to focus, you know,
I tend to think of this more in terms of
just how, you know, how humans are built. And I
think if we look at neuroscience, if we look at ecology,
evolutionary theory, all of these various actual disciplines and scientific

(34:02):
disciplines that we have come together to help us understand
the mind. They all point to the fact that the
human brain is highly flexible. It takes us twenty five
years to fully mature. We have more cortical neurons than
any other species really, and the more cortical neurons to mean,
the more basically, the more learning. It's an evolutionary strategy.

(34:24):
A lot of animals are born when they are basically
ready to go at birth, right, you know, they come
out and you see a I tell a story in
the book of when I was living on a farm
briefly when I was younger, an early adulthood, and we
had goats, and then one of the goats was about
to give birth, and I went out in the barn
in the morning and she had just given birth. She

(34:44):
was licking the amniotic fluid off off the kid, the
kid goat, and the kid goat got up and walked away,
you know, and weak leg legs, but it walked away,
and it was basically already ready to function the world.
Human inference are born completely as we all completely helpless
for a long time. It's a different evolutionary strategy, but

(35:05):
that that goat is born more or less ready to
be the goat it is, and there isn't a whole
lot of room for variation. Whereas humans have tremendous we
have tremendous latitude to grow and develop and adapt to
the environment we're born into, you know, and it takes
a long time for us to fully mature. But during
that time, as we do all kinds of learning, and

(35:26):
that flexibility gets sort of built in that we can
adapt and modify ourselves. We have the capacity to do that,
and I think that's a wonderful thing about being a
human being that we should really embrace absolutely.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
I think my wife is still waiting for me to
fully mature.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, there's that too. Yeah, I'm with you on that
one too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
That's my last question will be what do you think
this can contribute to not only the general population, but
also the therapist and helping individuals the trauma.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I'm getting more interested
in that question. There is a lot of this. There
is discussion of flexibility in a number of different psychotherapies,
but it's usually in a kind of a minimal way,
as just an adjective in a sense of changing, you know,

(36:21):
there's an act acceptance commencement therapy, which talks about a
little bit more explicitly, but even in that approach, there
isn't so much discussion of the mechanism. So how is
it that people do it? So that's what my work
is about, and that's what we've been doing in my
lab is looking at the actual components of this. How
do people actually do this? How do people actually adapt themselves?

(36:43):
And that's what the flexibility sequences. There's some other pieces
of this where we've been identifying with the motivational part,
we've been studying that and the idea there for all
of this is to really I identify and learn as
much as we can about how this happens over time.
So for example, now we're working on what we're called

(37:03):
EMA studies Ecological Momentary assessment, where we get data on
people in real time as they're living their lives, so
we can actually watch this in action and see, you know,
is this what we think is happening? Is there's something
different happening. But all this is applicable to psychotherapy in
a sense from a more kind of fine grained, nuanced way,

(37:23):
I think, and that's the work I haven't done that
work yet, but you know, I'm assuming somebody else will
or you know, as we move forward, I'm developing. What
I am doing is developing a training for flexibility, which
I've never done anything like that before in my career.
Even though I'm a trained psychotherapist, I have not done
this kind of just general training, and I'm doing that

(37:46):
now for the general public. In a sense, we're just
beginning to do it. So we're just beginning to fine
tune it, roll it out. But then ultimately we also
want to develop versions of this that can be used
in clinical interventions, you know, And I have no illusions
that they'll be adopted as clinical interventions, but I think
it's a way to provide a kind of a more

(38:09):
nuanced and component driven analysis of how it works that
it can be incorporated into psychotherapy. And some colleagues of
mine who are psychotherapists have already been doing this with
the model I've developed, and they report to me. You know,
the people like doing it. People, you know, it provides
people with insights, like you did this thing yesterday to

(38:30):
cope with this difficulty you're having. But something happens tomorrow,
it's not going to be necessarily the same way to cope,
and we have to kind of go through the process
again and figure out what is it that you know
tomorrow is bothering you and how do you cope with that?
You know? So that's kind of you know, I think
this hopefully over time, will begin to if it continues

(38:51):
to prove a fruitful approach, which is what a scientist
would say. The scientists and me will say. If it
continues to be fruitful, then we can graduate and incorporate
this into interventions. Yeah, and hopefully for more tools to
help people.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
That'd be great. That's a great idea, folks.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Again, the book is called The End of Trauma, How
the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How we Think
about PTSD by Professor George A.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
Bonano, Professor Bernada.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Thank you so much for doing this, my pleasure, Kyl.
Is nice to talk with you.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
We could be here all day with this stuff. We'll
never this. By the way, folks, thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Hey, you know what to do, share, subscribe, hit that
I like button, you know we like it, and go
check out the book The End of Trauma, How the
New Science of Resilience is Changing How we think about
ptsd