The Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with oneself is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, The Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
The Outworker
#056 - George Bonanno - The Truth About Trauma: Most People Are More Resilient Than You Think
George Bonanno reframes trauma by showing why it can’t be understood in isolation. Resilience is the missing half of the story. He explains how most people recover without lasting damage, why resilience is a flexible outcome rather than a fixed trait, and how fear-based narratives around trauma often prolong suffering. With insights on adaptive coping, storytelling, and the cultural myths that distort our understanding, this conversation offers a more complete, empowering view of how we respond to adversity.
Timestamps:
00:00 Trauma Becoming A Buzzword
02:49 Looking At Trauma In Isolation
05:40 Defining Trauma & Resilience
08:59 Resilience Is An Outcome, Not A Trait
17:33 Trauma Is An Invention
20:37 Narrative vs. Physiology
23:19 Pain, Trauma, & Mental Wiring
30:41 Finding Comfort In Feeling Bad
34:43 System vs. Individual
36:49 Media Pushing Trauma
41:54 Loneliness & Virtual Connections
46:28 Searching For Meaning vs. Problem Solving
50:22 Finding Growth In Suffering
53:00 Benefit Of Distanced Self-Talk
55:53 Consumption vs. Creation
1:00:16 Feeling Pain, But Not Attaching To It
1:03:05 Connect With George Bonanno
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What’s up outworkers. George Bonanno reframes trauma by showing why it can’t be understood in isolation. Resilience is the missing half of the story. He explains how most people recover without lasting damage, why resilience is a flexible outcome rather than a fixed trait, and how fear-based narratives around trauma often prolong suffering. With insights on adaptive coping, storytelling, and the cultural myths that distort our understanding, this conversation offers a more complete, empowering view of how we respond to adversity.
Tim Doyle (00:06.624)
Why has trauma become such a buzzword?
George Bonanno (00:11.266)
I think there are a host of factors. There's not a great answer to question, but there are, I think, a couple different things we can tease out. So it begins in 1980 with the formal creation of the PTSD diagnosis. And initially, that was very important historical development because it allowed people to treat trauma.
You know, the Vietnam War had ended years earlier, but none of those vets were able to actually get adequate treatment because there was no diagnosis. So the PTSD diagnosis was a big deal. But then a lot of books began to appear about PTSD and it gradually made its way into the news. And PTSD is kind of a scary thing, right? It's an event that takes over your life and you keep reliving it. It's a kind of a horror story in a way. And it's very, you know, it's not a pleasant.
Disorder to experience but so the public is getting kind of a one-dimensional view about this of what? PTSD is and you know, I think then the internet happens not long after that and It makes perfect sense that online sources both journalism and social media they tend to To put on there what we react to right what gets people to pay attention, you know journalism you have to get clicks and
Social media has algorithms to tailor content. And all of those things tend to focus on disturbing content, because that's what draws our attention. We're kind of wired to respond to danger. We're not so much wired to look at nice things. We do that too. But we're really wired from a survival point of view to react to danger. So suddenly these danger things are getting more and
presence in our lives and that just kept going until people gradually began to get the idea that everybody's traumatized, everything is trauma. And I think it's starting to change now a little bit. There's a little bit of a correction been happening, but it's still fairly ubiquitous.
Tim Doyle (02:20.226)
We naturally pair things, failure and growth, pain and healing, stress and coping. But with trauma, from my perspective, it seems like we just look at it in isolation and just understand it in isolation. And we rarely talk about it in relation to resilience or even ever even knew that that pairing went together between trauma and resilience. Why do you think that is?
George Bonanno (02:50.146)
I mean, I'm speculating. I've coined a phrase, the resilience blind spot, in part because trauma has a heavy emotional side to it. know, when we, well, first of all, when we're exposed to what I call a potentially traumatic event, I try not to use the word traumatic as much as potentially traumatic, because events are not traumatic, they're potentially traumatic until we actually have trauma reactions.
But most people will respond to a highly aversive, a life-threatening event with some distress and what we might call traumatic stress, which is really a kind of a very intense stress reaction that might involve nightmares, a few nightmares, intrusive thoughts, you we're thinking about it when we don't want to. And our minds, I think, do that naturally as a way to help us adapt to those events, you know, and something really dangerous happens.
It's adaptive and it's a good survival strategy to make sure we understand what happened. So, you know, we can maybe prevent it in the future, we can avoid it, or we can learn from it in some way. And I think our brains do that somewhat naturally. We're trying to get a better sense of the world and our brains try to predict the world. That's basically what our brains do. And our brains are trying to predict the world that now has a very dangerous event in it that hurt us psychologically, even if it's briefly.
So we might have to, our brains will repeat it a lot and we'll kind of, you know, think about it a lot. And those feelings, those come with very strong emotions too, like fear and other emotions. And when we feel emotions, it's well researched that when we feel emotions, we don't, we tend to think that they're going to last forever. It's hard to imagine that they won't last forever. So I think when we're in the midst of feeling the distress of having gone through something really horrific.
It's almost impossible to think about resilience. It just doesn't seem to make sense even. I'm traumatized. And I know people in my personal life will ask me if I think they're traumatized or if I think they have PTSD, even if it's only been a few days. So I think those two are kind of, they don't feel like they're even compatible when we're in the midst of feeling upset.
Tim Doyle (05:12.844)
Yeah, I think that's the really interesting thing about trauma and you got at it a little right there is we go into this internal, internal reflective process of like, is this trauma? Is this not trauma? Am I supposed to be feeling this way? Am I not supposed to be feeling this way? How do you define what trauma and resilience is?
George Bonanno (05:33.73)
Well, I define a potentially traumatic event or I don't have a real hard hard fast definition I think a potentially traumatic event is something typically that involves Violence or life-threatening a real physical danger in some way, but you know, that's a fairly Fuzzy definition because lots of things come in in relation to that then there's a broader category of you know extreme adversity which might be like, know losing a loved one or divorce or
financial problems, these things that are very difficult and frighten us and can invade our lives. That's what a potentially traumatic or a highly aversive event is. Then a trauma is, or a trauma reaction, there's traumatic stress, which is a short-term reaction, and then being traumatized really means that we're not getting over it, that a month or two more after that event, and we're still struggling a lot with that.
Then we're somewhat traumatized. And then we get in the realm of how long will that last? Professional help might come in then. And people who suffer chronic trauma are then people for several years or longer are still struggling with that event. Resilience, on the other hand, I define resilience very operationally because I'm a scientist, right? So we track people over time.
And I can argue this point or discuss this if you would like. I don't think people are resilient or not resilient. Resilience is an outcome. We are resilient to something. So when something happens, if we show no lasting harm and we sort of return to our normal level of functioning within a short time of anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, we're like kind of more or less moving on in our life, that's resilience.
That's the resilience. I call that the resilience trajectory. But so those are the basic definitions that we use in the research.
Tim Doyle (07:40.898)
So correct me if I'm wrong, but a follow up question to what you're saying about resilience there, is it like we get a taste of resilience and we get opened up to resilience, but that never becomes a part of who we are.
George Bonanno (07:53.798)
right. Resilience is the way to talk about the outcome. And I don't think it, doesn't quite work to think of resilience as what people have in them. People are not resilient. And the reason is because basically empirically we've never been able to find it. Now, resilience is a word, just like trauma is a word. So when we know in English, particularly American English, we can't control words. know, words become whatever people want them to be.
But when we think about these things professionally or scientifically or in the mental health world, we do need clear definitions. Now, one of the things that I get into a lot in my recent book, The End of Trauma, is that there's a process. So I've been studying resilience for a long time and studying trauma and resilience for a long time. And we've identified this resilience trajectory that I just described.
We've identified this over and over and over in response to all kinds of highly aversive or potentially traumatic events. And it seems to be on average around two thirds of the population exposed to almost anything will show that pattern. So about two thirds of people on average, sometimes a lot more, sometimes a little bit less, will show that stable trajectory of healthy functioning. Then the other one third of people unfortunately will show either long or short
Bouts with traumatic stress that you know that's that go last a little bit longer than it just a few weeks And they have to struggle with that but in trying to understand who is resilient and who not or who is Who is showing that resilience trajectory and who not we've been stymied for a number of years because When we you know, there's a kind of a myth out there I think that there are a few key traits to resilient people and you see this in
websites, see this in magazines, newspapers, in books, the five key traits of resilient people, something like that. And that's kind of a myth because first of all, we don't ever see people who are resilient. But when we look at those traits, those traits don't actually predict who will be resilient. so that's one big problem with that idea. Another big problem with that idea is that when we measure this resilience,
George Bonanno (10:18.306)
trajectory, when we identify people who showed that resilient pattern and we look at who they are, what their life is like, we don't find three or five or seven key traits. What we find is 50 or 60 different features that can correlate with that. So we just keep finding more and more. And if these are resilient traits, then there are 50 or 60 of them. And that's been the case for some time. And so if that's the case, then how do we make sense of
What is a resilient person then? It's clearly not one thing because there's too many different characteristics that have been associated with resilience. So eventually that led me to the idea of some other, led me to some other work I was doing which seemed to fit very closely with this, which is what I call flexibility, a regulatory flexibility. We can call it flexible adaptation that people adapt flexibly to these situations.
And that's a set of skills that most people have, but you have to use those set of skills. So they're not just there and they work, there are things that we have to do. So we have the capacity to adapt. The human mind has the capacity to adapt. And that's really a nice feature of the human mind, actually. We are very adaptable creatures, much more so than many other creatures for lots of reasons that I could get into if it's interesting. But that...
capacity to sort of flexibly respond to adversity is a key feature of human beings. And some people are more flexible than others. And some people have these skills and they're not even aware of these skills. But it's those skills that allow us to be flexible. And there's still the question of why isn't everybody resilient then? And that's a question that has a kind of a reasonable answer, which is that life happens.
You know, it takes us about 25 years for our takes about 25 years for our brain to be more or less fully developed and that's part of the reason we're so flexible. We have this long developmental period but a lot can happen in those 25 years that makes some people is that that make that stress response not quite as functional as it could be. So that's that's a long-winded answer to the question.
Tim Doyle (12:43.202)
What are the biggest traits you've found for resilience?
George Bonanno (12:46.284)
Well, there really aren't any. This is kind of interesting. There are a lot of things that we tend to think are like sort of the top traits. Like, you know, there's some things that are consistently associated with resilience, like social support, you know, a network of supportive people, problem solving ability, maybe positive emotion, maybe, you know, emotion regulation skills. But none of these things really explain a lot.
And that's kind of interesting. And in the language of science, the effect size is small. What that means in plain English is that if you look at a trait or a characteristic and then how well it predicts whether somebody will be resilient, it only explains a little tiny bit of that prediction. And that's called a small effect. And in fact, some colleagues of mine recently explored this a little bit and they looked at 50 or 60 research studies that had measured resilience.
and it measured all these different predictors. And they found in some studies, a certain variable would predict resilience nicely, but in other studies, it wouldn't predict it at all. And still in other studies, it predicted it negatively. So it have predicted less likelihood of resilience. And that really fits the flexibility idea really nicely. So if I put the flexibility idea a different way, I would say it's the ability to use the right behavior at the right
time in the right situation. And that's another way to say that also is that whatever the traits and characteristics we have work sometimes and sometimes they don't work. They don't work in every situation. And that's, think there are so many myths layered on top of each other, so many misunderstandings. It takes a while to wade through all of this. But one of the key misunderstandings that's developed over the years with our sort
obsession with trauma is that there's this idea that any event that's kind of a generic idea of trauma any event that causes trauma reactions is the same right so that like any you know these are traumas and this category of traumas will cause PTSD that's a widespread assumption but in fact if we think about it even just for a little bit say being caught up in a hurricane is extremely different a very different
George Bonanno (15:12.328)
experience than say being in a terrorist attack or being abused or being in an automobile accident. Each one of these things is a very different experience and presents us psychologically with a very different challenge, a very different way a set of coping skills are needed and the aftermath is also very different and the way it affects us is very different. So when you think about it that way all these different situations that we might be might find us us in that are that are
may be generically described as violent or life-threatening, but the actual experience and the actual stress and the actual challenge it presents are dramatically different. So coping with them and adapting to them is also going to require different sets of skills or different traits and characteristics. So that's really why the effect sizes seem so small because something works sometimes, but it doesn't work in other times. And flexibility is about figuring that out, about...
What can I do here in this situation?
Tim Doyle (16:16.205)
You talked about it earlier. I'm a big believer that the language we use within the medical space has a profound impact on our own personal wellbeing. And that's because I've personally experienced that in the past. Why do you describe trauma as an invention?
George Bonanno (16:37.762)
Well, it is an invention. It was invented or it was, you know, it was created. It was thought up. We could have, you know, used a different word. We could have come up with a different concept. I don't think that trauma doesn't exist. I don't think it and I think it probably has existed for a long time, but it's kind of interesting that we only just got around to it about it's not about 45 years ago in 1980. And if you look at the historical record,
It's very interesting, we don't see mentions of traumatic events. We certainly see mentions of grisly events, violent and life threatening events, but we don't see people talking about trauma reactions in the historical record. Until really for the first time, the first real good example was in the diaries of Samuel Peepes. Some people know what I mean by Samuel Peepes, not many though.
Samuel Pepys was an aristocrat in the 17th century who for 10 years kept the diary. And he literally wrote about everything, everything he thought and felt. And he wrote it in code and he didn't really intend anyone to read it in his lifetime. And it was over a hundred years after his death before anybody looked at those books and then they had to decode them. They were in the libraries at Cambridge. So he was completely, utterly honest.
all the way down to his hemorrhoids. He talked about his hemorrhoids, his farts. He talked about his beliefs about race and all kinds of things in an unabashed way. And he was, because he was an aristocrat, the king had asked him to survey the damage during the famous London fire of 1666. And peeps went around the city and he experienced the heat. He talked about it, how it's burning his feet. He saw the carnage and the damage.
And for six months after that, he was still having nightmares about that fire that were keeping him from sleeping. And he was completely perplexed by that. And so that's one of the first accounts. But it's really interesting that that was only appeared then because it was in code and he didn't anticipate anybody reading it. So it was kind of still a thing people didn't talk about, which suggests clearly that people were having trauma reactions before they were talking about them. We just don't know when.
George Bonanno (19:01.113)
And it's hard to know if we go back far enough that the primitive human beings have trauma reactions probably, but we just don't know. I'm going to guess they probably did. But it wasn't until modern times that we sort of then decided to define it and make it an official diagnosis. So in a sense, we invented it.
Tim Doyle (19:23.51)
individual level, how much of trauma is narrative and story based versus physiologically based?
That siren you’re about to hear? Just the universe adding dramatic effect.
George Bonanno (19:33.186)
Wow, that's a great question. What would I say to that? There's definitely a narrative, an episodic component. There's definitely a story there for sure. But what happens is it's also quite physiological because there are biological things that happen when we're exposed to great danger. You know, we have this very rapid, very intense stress reaction that happens.
that generally works quite well, but it's a physiological reaction and it sort of takes over. We don't have to think about it. When we're under acute stress, one of the hallmarks of that kind of response is that things happen without us even paying attention to them. Our body just takes over. Whereas in other areas of life, we have much more volitional control. We have less so during these acute danger moments when our internal responses sort of go on automatically.
pilot. But then we do have a story to come to take away from that. But people who are traumatized typically have a kind of a very fragmented story. It's the fleeting images and sounds and smells and
George Bonanno (20:50.58)
just fragments of pieces of the event. And one of the ways, so they can't quite put it all together, part because it's just too painful, know, we're constantly pushing those images away. And one of the most effective treatments for PTSD, like things for traumatized people, is what's called prolonged exposure. And one of the elements of that is people sit down with a therapist in a very, very safe, controlled setting, and they tell the story of the event from the beginning to the end.
And that's often for people the first time they've been able to do that. that telling the story from beginning to end has a very powerful healing component because it allows people to kind of, you know, put it into perspective. It happened in the past and this is what happened. And there's often blame and guilt and all kinds of other emotions that are tied up in that that people realize once they can actually tell the story from beginning to end, they sometimes realize it's not their fault, you know.
But so it's that fragmentary nature that's really characteristic of the trauma reaction. And so in a sense, converting it into a story that we know happened and we can live with is what the healing part is.
Tim Doyle (22:05.93)
Most people exposed to highly aversive or life-threatening events experience lingering short-term effects. A few days or even weeks of distress, these responses are perfectly natural. They indicate the fact that our stress response is hard at work trying to help us adapt. And I think the reason why I'm so interested about that relationship between story and narrative versus physiology.
for my own personal experiences and not talking about trauma, but talking about chronic pain and physical pain. So I dealt with a lot of chronic back pain for seven or eight months and no conventional treatments helped me. Just physically based treatments didn't help at all. And it wasn't until I started understanding the mind body connection and how I got into this mental wiring of just staying in pain that once I got that education and understood how to break out of that wiring, I got rid of my pain.
George Bonanno (22:38.228)
it's tough. Yeah.
Tim Doyle (23:01.102)
Can that same type of understanding or same type of thing happen within this conversation and trauma? Like, can somebody have traumatic thoughts or feelings or feel like they are in this traumatized state more or longer than they should be just because they've gotten within that mental wiring and that perception of their state?
George Bonanno (23:26.754)
I'm not 100 % sure I understand your question there.
Tim Doyle (23:31.67)
I guess what I'm asking is, within my experience with chronic pain and physical pain, can the same thing happen with trauma?
George Bonanno (23:44.684)
Do you mean, can people's awareness of their bodily reactions?
Tim Doyle (23:49.514)
not so much on the physical level, but I guess more so on the mental level, like I was saying, like my mind was playing a role and me staying in pain. So it's like, can somebody's mind keep them within a traumatic state longer than they need to be?
George Bonanno (23:56.585)
I see. Yeah.
George Bonanno (24:02.692)
I think so. mean, there's a lot of pieces of evidence that have been coming out lately. For example, our theories about what a trauma is can actually affect how anxious and traumatized we become. Some people have a very broad conception of things that are traumatic, and those people are more likely to develop intense reactions to stimuli.
There was some other research about trigger warnings. Trigger warnings became really popular. turns out trigger warnings don't actually help much, and they sometimes make people worse. People show more anxiety when they receive trigger warnings compared to when they don't. But I think also the idea that people have conceptions about the abnormality of their reactions. And that's become a real thing lately, which I'm curious about.
fully understand it, I think under knowing that the initial reactions that we have to highly averse events or potentially traumatic events are adaptive. The passage you read just before that was from my book, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, okay. I wanted to make sure I remembered that correctly. And so one of the reasons I mentioned that was because if we see, you know, nightmares, intrusive thoughts initially,
as our minds trying to come to terms with what happened. It normalizes them. It makes them seem less threatening. They're more benign because we can think, okay, my mind is trying to figure that out. Maybe I can do that myself too. I can do it consciously to facilitate that process. But so that, I think that's one healthy way to think about it. But the polar opposite is the fear of PTSD. And I think that's become a real thing.
where people are worried, my God, I'm traumatized, which only makes matters worse to have that fear. I had a nightmare the other day, I'm traumatized, this is really bad. And so I think getting a little bit of a...
George Bonanno (26:12.93)
broader perspective on these kind of things and realizing that why our minds do that really helps, I think, and sort of de-stigmatizes and also makes it less threatening and less disturbing.
Tim Doyle (26:26.242)
Yeah, it's that reactionary mindset that can make it a lot worse than it needs to be for us.
George Bonanno (26:31.266)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if I may say one little thing that when you brought up chronic pain and what's interesting is that there's all this research, it's kind of related research on inflammation. So when we have an injury and you had a back, you have back pain, I've had back pain, I've had all kinds of other things, I'm clumsy, so I cut myself, I injure myself in all kinds of ways. And when you have inflammation or when you have a biological invader, know, bacteria,
flu or COVID, any of these things, we tend to get inflammation. And inflammation, this has only been known for a couple, less than two decades now. Inflammation sends messengers when there's inflammatory, when there's invaders or there's an injury or the bacteria getting in, and there's an inflammatory response, an immune response, we get all kinds of messengers circulating throughout our body, right? To say, to alert the body that there's danger here, that something's not,
Something here that shouldn't be an inflammation is a swelling of, specifically a swelling of an area to restrict movement. But some of those messengers go to our brain and they make us by evolutionary, this seems to have evolved in humans that we have these what are called illness behaviors or illness responses to immune messengers. It makes us feel lethargic.
and makes us feel like we don't want to be around other people. And knowing that really makes a difference. Knowing that, okay, I'm sick right now, or I'm injured, or I have back pain, and I feel sleepy all the time, and I don't really want to be around other people because my body wants me to feel that. My body's causing my brain to think that. And that really helps because they say, okay, well, maybe I should rest more, and maybe I shouldn't be around other people enough.
If you don't have that, the opposite is to take that literally almost and think, you know, I have no energy. I'm just a useless person and I don't want to be around other people because I'm just such a, I'm not worth being around other people. know, and people can make those attributions and become depressed because they've had an inflammatory response. So it's kind of the same ball game in a way. We misinterpret what our bodies are doing as some sign of our own failure. And that's really
George Bonanno (28:55.542)
That sends people down the wrong road, I think.
Tim Doyle (28:59.758)
100 % the same ball game and that resonates on a deep level knowledge and education for me and for a lot of people within this space within the mind body space like that is the medicine like when you have a conscious awareness of what is going on within your body like that is the true step to healing because when you're reactionary you go into fight or flight mode and that just makes things worse but when you're able to detach and understand what's going on you can kind of just be more at ease.
George Bonanno (29:05.238)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (29:28.982)
And another great quote from your book on the resilience blind spot here. This kind of blind spot leads us to doubt that resilience can never be genuine. We become suspicious. Where there is genuine recovery, we see deception. Where there is strength, we see weakness. Where there is optimism, we see only denial. And a dark future filled with hidden trauma symptoms lurking just below the surface. And I think that becomes...
a real danger within our society today because trauma has become such a buzzword and because we have such a
It's just an everyday conversation. We get into this framework and this narrative of like, okay, I should be feeling more trauma than actually feeling good. Why do you think we find more comfort in feeling bad than feeling good?
George Bonanno (30:06.167)
Yeah.
George Bonanno (30:20.082)
I wish I had an answer to that. There's a certain secondary gain to it. think when we have a reason for who we are that everybody has problems. Everybody has, mean this truthfully, all of us have flaws and limitations. We're imperfect by design. I'm sorry, not by design, but we're imperfect as human beings. We're not yet fully cooked.
We've only been on the planet in terms of the history of our, you know, the time span of the universe on our planet, you know, a flash, you know. So we've come a long way. We have a long way to go, hopefully, but we're still very flawed creatures. And part of it is because we are in a sense still growing and learning and we are flexible. So all of, since all of us have flaws, which are, you know, sometimes difficult to own, difficult to accept.
It's, think it's very convenient to say, well, I have this disorder. This is what happened to me. It happened to me or I have this thing. It's not my fault. I, you know, it's genetic or, know, so I've noticed this, that there's been an increasing tendency in the last decade for people to almost cling to diagnosis, which I initially found very odd. I think.
began to realize it probably because one of the main reasons because it's an explanatory model. It's why I have these flaws, which may be comforting in the short term. think in the long run though, it's very maladaptive because then we don't operate. We don't do anything to try to enhance ourselves. We stop trying to grow if we limit ourselves by a disorder. We say I'm traumatized that can't do anything about that. Or I have ADHD or I'm manic depressive.
And none of these disorders were ever meant to be life sentences. They're descriptive. They're meant to describe what somebody's experiencing at the moment. But particularly in the US, we have a tendency to do this, I think. Even intelligence. The intelligence test came from France. Binet, Alfred Binet, started measuring intelligence. And his goal in doing that in the 19th century, mid 19th century, his goal in doing that was to
George Bonanno (32:43.66)
help kids in school by defining where they were at at that moment and where they might be best placed in schools. When that was important to the US at the early 20th century, it immediately became a genetic kind of permanent level of intelligence. People were defined as having a level of intelligence. And we turned it in, we translated it from a temporary state to a defining characteristic of who you are. If you had a low intelligence at this point,
That's it. That's what you've got to work with, which is a completely foreign to literally foreign to the way the idea was first conceived. So we have a tendency that I'm not sure why we have that tendency for other reasons we just talked about, but that seems to be a characteristic we could we could do without, I think.
Tim Doyle (33:30.85)
I don't think there's a cut and dry one where the other answer to this question, but how much of this comes down to the system failing to give us the tools and the proper education and understanding of trauma versus it being up to the individual to look beyond that and take things under their own control.
George Bonanno (33:56.418)
That's an interesting question. Well, from my own experience, I teach a large lecture class of master's level students, about 200 master's students in an auditorium. And at the beginning of each semester, it's a one semester course. It's a lecture course, but I get very animated and walk around on the stage and I have the class ask me questions and I ask them questions. we get a little bit of a discussion going. At the beginning of the semester, every year,
The class comes in each year more and more with these very rigid ideas about trauma. Some of the things we've talked about just now, the idea that everybody's traumatized, that trauma is hard to get rid of, that it's, you know, any of the things that we've just talked about. And it requires a whole semester of my going through all the literature, presenting all the science.
questioning all the assumptions and gradually bringing them to see here's what all of these researchers mountains of research and here's what it shows most people are not traumatized most people are actually resilient to trauma Most people get upset for a very short term and it's adaptive etc all the things we've been talking about and it takes people about a semester which is about what four months or so to kind of undo all the societal assumptions which are very
rife right now. These misunderstandings about trauma are everywhere in the social world now. I don't think it's the system as much as, I think you use that word, the system. It's really, I think, this is going to sound like an old fart. I'm going to sound like an old fart here. I think it's the internet. And I don't think the internet is evil or I don't think it's some malicious thing. There's some malice on the internet. The social media companies, I think,
Tim Doyle (35:43.374)
You
George Bonanno (35:52.652)
powers that be. They are definitely feeding people unhealthy material because it makes them oodles of money. Definitely the algorithmic way social media works makes people oodles of money, whether it's unhealthy or not. But you know, the internet, all trying to, I think we all have to grow up about the internet. We have to learn to what it does to us and how to use it effectively.
But otherwise it feeds us these mythical things. You know, we just did a research study. One of my master's students, Bailey Schock is her name, and she did a fantastic job with this. We did a study on TikTok. TikTok has, a lot of people use TikTok, and TikTok has tried to install constraints about the use of words related to suicide. But people love to talk about trauma on TikTok.
It's just too enticing, but it's also monetized. There's something called trauma dumping, and that's where people tell their trauma stories on TikTok. And then there are sites that gather all these things together in one place, and viewers flock to these sites to listen to people talking about their traumas. And there's advertising involved. Those sites generate a lot of advertising money. So TikTok then banned the use of suicide-related words.
with the exception of people with sort of validated mental health credentials could talk about suicide. So what, because people like to do this so much, they invented, people started using what's called AlgoSpeak, which are words that allow you to talk about suicide and get past the sensors, like unlive or suicide or there are a host of other ones. And so what we did is simply look at transcripts of a bunch of these videos.
and code whether they had used AlgoSpeak or not. Some videos were able to talk about suicide and evade the censors, but talking about suicide. And it turned out when people are using AlgoSpeak, they were generally the least healthy videos you could watch. They had the least sort of positive healing qualities to them or whatever that would mean. They were really more of just sort of sensationalistic trauma stories. And so...
George Bonanno (38:14.934)
you know, our desire is to watch these things, to listen to these things, as what we were talking about before, we're wired for threat. And there's a purient kind of interest in it too, a kind of like this, like I think something similar to horror movies or something viscerally exciting, even if it's unhealthy. And we have to learn about that. We as humans have to learn about that and try to titrate that. And I think right now is a great time in history to think about that, even in terms of the current political climate.
One can be very upset, anybody can be very upset of any political persuasion by going online because you can find somebody telling you what some horrible thing somebody in the team that's not you did, right? And so I think it's very important even for people who want to read the news and educate themselves to titrate how much they look at just the internet for this stuff.
Tim Doyle (39:12.6)
So much great stuff to unpack there. I actually had that observation on my own just going through TikTok and not specifically to trauma or suicide, but just problems in general. I almost, I came up with almost like a category for that. I call it woe is me content where it's so easy just to talk about
George Bonanno (39:13.557)
Yeah.
George Bonanno (39:36.155)
yeah.
Tim Doyle (39:39.82)
your problems and your struggles. like you were talking about, people can grow big followings. They can make money off of it. They can get all this engagement on it. And from a brain wiring standpoint, you're like, Ooh, I like that. get a dopamine rush when I'm getting thousands of likes and thousands of comments of people just relating to my problems. And so I'm going to continue to do it. And I find it really fascinating about what you said with your teaching.
where it's like a big part of your job is, okay, I need to un-teach what they've learned and then I can actually teach them the truth on this topic.
George Bonanno (40:16.309)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if I would call it the truth, but I would call it the scientific reality or the empirical reality. But yeah, it is taken that shape of unlearning this sort of assumptive world out in the floating realm.
Tim Doyle (40:38.414)
What are your thoughts on loneliness? Because that's also become a buzzword within our society. And you see all the time you see articles speaking of the internet. I mean, you do you search for loneliness epidemic and you'll get a lot of content on it. What are your thoughts there?
George Bonanno (40:47.51)
Yeah.
George Bonanno (40:51.264)
Yeah. I think loneliness is a real thing. It's a problem, but it's not a, it may be overblown because we're living in virtual worlds now more than we used to. However, it depends very much on the people involved. We've done, I've been involved in four or five, no, maybe three or four. I don't, I may be exaggerating internet studies now, but some internet studies was a lot of really interesting data.
And what we find is that the internet is not all bad or all good. The internet is harmful for some people and less so for other people. And even when we talk about the internet or social media, there are a range of different ways you can interact with the internet. There's entertainment, there is violence, there is pornography, there is social media, there are educational things online.
There's news, know, so there's a whole range of these things. And each one of these things has an educational versus a violent or a period content. So what we found is people who are, say, we looked at one study of sexually abused girls and they looked at more pornography and more violence. And that was really to unhealthy levels, right? But then if we look at other groups, find that social media is associated with say depressed people.
But then there are lots and lots of healthy people who are looking at the internet also and not having any of these problems. So it depends on the amount that people use it and it depends on what they look at. And so, you know, it really varies. And I think there's a lot of good on the internet and there's, and even in terms of loneliness and a number of people have said this, I've seen this in published papers of people talking about the social capital of the internet.
that people will connect with other people in ways that are not possible in person. My son is a good example. My son spends hours and hours on the internet. And of course, as his parent, both my wife and I were very concerned. And he had been was developing these friendships on the internet. And knee-jerk reaction we had was, well, those aren't really friends. It turns out they are. And these internet friends on the internet, these friends on the internet,
George Bonanno (43:11.362)
lead to actual interactions in real life and incredibly powerful supportive interactions. So I think that we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and underestimate the fact that the internet has the power to be, in a way, expansive social world too. And so I think the real question we should be asking, and I don't think there's enough research or enough
people asking this question is what makes the difference? Like when is it bad and when is it adaptive? When is it healthy and when is it unhealthy? What's healthy and what's unhealthy? Those are really the questions.
Tim Doyle (43:54.19)
couldn't agree with you more in the way that I view it as well. And agree with you, it's more dangerous to be cut and dry. Seeing things as black and white is like, okay, this is good. Or this is bad. The way that I see it. And what has really helped for me personally is like, okay, what is my relationship with this look like? Like social media isn't bad. It's the relationship with social media that you have that can be good or bad. And I explained that to people I'm like,
just because McDonald's exists, does that mean just food in general is bad? It's like, it's your relationship with food. And I'm the same way when it comes to podcasting or a lot of different things that is all stemmed from the internet and social media and emailing people. And that's because I'm like, okay, I've developed a good relationship in that sense with these tools. Whereas in the past, it's like, okay,
I am consuming too much bad content and that was a large reason why I wanted to create a podcast. Actually, I was like, this is a medium and this is something that I can do that can allow my relationship with media, the internet, whatever it is evolve in a good way.
George Bonanno (45:08.032)
Makes, that makes good sense. Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Doyle (45:11.79)
Talk to me about the difference between searching for meaning and problem solving when it comes to trauma.
George Bonanno (45:22.892)
Well, searching for meaning is a curious one, a curious turn of phrase. It's generally seen as a very good thing, searching for meaning, but that phrase itself is kind of ambiguous. What we found in our research is that people who do pretty well, who are resilient to highly adverse events or traumatic events, potentially traumatic events, tend not to do a lot of searching for meaning.
They're not trying to explain what happened. It just happened and they're they're just trying to get on with their lives and so and I think Probably there's a time course to it. So searching for meaning initially I'm sorry. What was the other phrase searching for meaning and what was the other phrase you said?
Tim Doyle (46:11.566)
searching for meaning and problem solving.
George Bonanno (46:13.74)
Problem solving, okay. So initially, we want to figure out what's happening to us. And so we talk about it a lot. There's a lot of research that shows people talk about potentially traumatic events, adverse events, a lot in the first week. And then that tapers off. So we continue thinking about it, continually looking to explain it, why did this happen to me? We're gonna end up ruminating on the event, because there often are no explanations.
An example, I had developed a very, very painful nerve problem in my face. It's a nerve coming out of the brain stem that innervates the face. And it was like I'd have these periodic lightning bolts in my face. It's horribly painful. And I never knew it was going to happen. It's extremely rare. It has a name, trigeminal neuralgia. And it happens in one third or one one hundredth of a percent. It's some very, very tiny number. And of course, the simple question to ask is,
Why did this happen to me? I'm a very healthy guy. I live a good life. I eat well. I exercise. I do all these things. I try to reduce stress. Why did this happen to me? And the answer is no answer. There's no explanation for that. So if I continued to ponder that, it would have really, I think, only made matters worse. So searching for meaning, I think, is like something we do initially, and then we kind of, you know, we either realize there is really no meaning in this or...
or the meaning is life is difficult and otherwise I'm gonna just move on. So continuing along that line only I think gets us into trouble. Problem solving also has a time course to it as well, but typically we try to figure out if there is a problem, what is the problem that this presents me and what can I do about it? And sometimes we find ourselves in kind of thorny problems. Say we're having difficulties in a relationship or...
I think of the people in California who lost their homes in this fires. What do we do now? Insurance is going to go up, these houses burn, climate change has happened, and so there's more fires that are likely to happen. What should we do? And that's a problem that we could devote a lot of resources to solving, and a lot of people are devoting time to solving those problems. And that would suggest there's a time-limited
George Bonanno (48:35.02)
quality to it, but if then we continue to worry about it or some mix of finding meaning and problem solving and stretching that out over time, then we could start again to think about it too much and ruminate on it. And some problems can't be solved. You say, okay, I can't do it. There's nothing that can be done here. I'll move away or, you know, or I'll rebuild in a different place or I'll build a house out of, I don't know what concrete or something like that. But so, yeah, I think that's the time plays a big role in those things.
Tim Doyle (49:06.488)
Confidence and coping motivates in a different way from optimism. It can give us that little extra push we need to be more adventurous. When we feel confident that we can handle ourselves, we will likely try a broader range of behaviors. We might even try behaviors we are not sure we are able to do simply because we assume ourselves likely to succeed. I'm a big believer and largely because I experienced it hard times, especially against our will break us out of our shell.
And for a lack of better term, I kind of call it, we develop a fuck it mentality for life where it's just like, I'm going to go after it. that's a common theme that I've found with a lot of the people that I talk with on the podcast is they've had some type of unwilling suffering or challenge that they've been faced with. And that's actually been the thing that's catapulted them to go on to do.
George Bonanno (49:43.746)
Mm-hmm.
Tim Doyle (50:04.93)
the great things that they've done in their life. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Doyle (50:11.778)
Just that whole understanding, I guess, of how these, whether it's trauma or just challenging things in general, can be the thing that really catapulted us forward in life rather than holding us back.
George Bonanno (50:26.626)
Yeah, I I think that's entirely plausible. I think that trauma or really difficult events don't always have to lead in any kind of personal growth. But I think the way they do lead to growth has to do with our realization of our capacity to deal with things, our sense of mastery and how it can open up our sense of possibility.
There's something I call the flexibility mindset that kind of gets at that idea. It's, and it's where you, mentioned confidence and coping and optimism. Those are all kinds of components of what a flexibility mindset where we have a sense of, all right, this happened. don't, I didn't want this to happen, but let me, let me just get on with it and deal with it as best I can. And the more that we do that, the more that we get a sense of, I'll deal with things that happen. And I'm, can do more than I thought I could.
And so that means I can try some things I maybe didn't think I could do. Or I'm stronger, I'm more capable of enduring things than I realized. And so I think the opening up to broader horizons or accomplishing things has a lot to do with how it expands our sense of what we're capable
Tim Doyle (51:46.52)
Something that really helped me going back to healing from chronic back pain was meditation or what I like to call talking with my brain and something that naturally just I got into the habit of doing was thinking and talking in third person and seeing myself or just detaching from my identity. Can you talk about the benefit of distanced self-talk?
George Bonanno (51:52.491)
Hmm?
George Bonanno (52:05.41)
Mm-hmm.
George Bonanno (52:15.264)
Yeah, I think that's really great stuff, actually. A lot of this comes into the work of Ethan Cross, who did some of the nice research on distant self-talk. I think self-talk in general is adaptive, it's useful, it's something we do naturally anyway. Often when we do self-talk naturally, it can be negative. When we say to ourselves, you dummy.
Tim Doyle (52:23.277)
Yep.
George Bonanno (52:39.426)
Or we might even use distant self-talk. We might just say, I would say, George, you dummy. my God. And that's usually not very effective unless we do it with some humor, maybe. But self-talk in general, sports psychologists, educational people, lots of different people have learned to capitalize on self-talk, which is essentially condensing our inner dialogue into a few words. know, lots of the dialogue is constantly running in our brains.
as we try to make sense of the world. when we do self-talk, we condense it down into a few words, and it can be positive. And so we can attempt to do this deliberately, like, I can do this, I'll do this, I'll get it done. It's gonna be okay. We can do all those things. And then Ethan, and I don't know if he discovered this, but he certainly did a lot of the great research on it. Ethan Cross showed that distance self-talk is even more helpful because it puts a little bit of a...
of a buffer between us and the event, as if we're watching it. So when distant self-talk would be like, I might say to myself, know, George, you can do this, or, you know, any kind of thing where I'm actually commenting on what's happening rather than being part of it. And it just gives us a little bit more of a sense of, I don't know what, it's less immediately dangerous if it was a little distance.
Yeah, it works very nicely.
Tim Doyle (54:10.004)
played a big role in my life and like you were saying it started with me with the meditation and talking with my brain but then that has gone into so many different areas of my life especially with my work or different projects it's like I sense it as like I'm not the one who's doing it I'm detaching and like Tim is the one who's doing it and I'm kind of like the one who's controlling the video game sticks
George Bonanno (54:36.258)
That's really interesting. I love that. Yeah, I like it
Tim Doyle (54:39.864)
There's another duality and relationship that you don't talk about in your book or within this conversation on trauma, but I think is really fascinating and I think could help people. And that's consumption versus creation. see trauma as being something that can consume you or you just become internally consumed by it. But creative expression and artistic expression can
be that balance to that where it's like, I need to release something. And you talk about that a little in your book with different case studies where it's either one person painting or simply just writing emails and sharing the experience and sharing the story. How do you think creative expression can help people?
George Bonanno (55:31.242)
I think creative expression is fantastic. It's not necessarily for everyone, but I think everybody is capable of some creative expression. It's a matter of sort of letting go and just being willing to make something, in a sense, if you will. So, say I paint and draw, and I appear to have at least some talent. I don't know how much talent.
But I can do some, you know, I can actually do some things that look like conventional paintings and drawings. But I remember when I first got into psychology way, way back when I had, before I even had an undergraduate degree, I didn't go to college until I was 26. So just as that was beginning to happen, I got very interested in Carl Jung and I wanted to do an independent study when I first went to college at 26 in Carl Jung. And I went to the university and people were saying, you well, I don't know, nobody really does that stuff.
You know, maybe you can, there's a Jungian analyst in town. Maybe you can do an independent study. And I did with a man named Ira Sharkey, who was fantastic. It was a life-changing experience. Actually, he was very good. He had trained in Zurich at the Jungian Institute. But one of the things I did in that, we start off as an independent study, but it was so clearly a kind of a therapy. I just continued with him to his agreement for five, for three years. But one of things I did was to...
Write down my dreams as much as I could and when you start doing that you remember more and dreams are kind of a strangely creative thing because you realize how your mind is Symbolizing everything but then I would do things like Spontaneously paint things Having no idea what they would be whether it was attractive to look at or not or just make something that seemed like I liked it and bring it to the sessions and those
outpourings had so much meaning when you put them in context. So it kind of helps with artistic expressions and creative products to have an audience because then you get some reaction to it. But you can do this, we can also do this obviously with ourselves alone, just expressing something. And it can be anything that works for anybody, a piece of art, a poem, even just a few words we say to ourselves when out walking, some way of representing something.
George Bonanno (57:54.658)
in a way because a lot of this artistic expression or creative expression kind of happens with less conscious control, right? The more we can let go and just let our minds do something without worrying about it too much. And then, know, subsequent we can look at it and we can see what our minds produce and it tells us a lot. It's also a kind of a nice release that it gives us a kind of a bonus of
kind of a flexibility in how we can think to it. It broadens our sense of the way we can understand ourselves, I think. So yeah, I mean, I don't know how well I justified that or what kind of an advertisement I made for it just now, but I think it's really an important part of, yeah, of experiencing the world.
Tim Doyle (58:41.024)
I think that was great. And just one point to add on top of that, of what you were saying, you kind of get into this unconscious state where it's kind of just happening. I had Steven Kotler on last week, who I know you've talked with him in the past from flow research collective and creativity. Great for flow state.
George Bonanno (58:57.582)
yes, yes, yes, yes.
George Bonanno (59:02.146)
Yes, totally. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, absolutely. It's a really nice link with the flow state. Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Doyle (59:09.976)
How can we go about allowing ourselves to feel our pain while not losing sight of the fact that we can't attach ourselves to it?
George Bonanno (59:20.706)
feel you mean our psychological pain or our physical pain?
Tim Doyle (59:25.548)
I guess both.
George Bonanno (59:27.394)
That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't like physical pain very much. I know, I I have, I spent a number of years meditating, not so much anymore, but I still spent a lot of time reading. I spent a great event reading Buddhist literature, which I really enjoyed and still do. And there was an idea that I remember being really struck by, and then I found out it really does work is to actually
Tim Doyle (59:35.054)
Same here.
George Bonanno (59:56.778)
instead of fearing pain to kind of almost embrace it and literally focus on pain. And when you focus on pain, it has a way, a strange way of diminishing, you know? And what we talked about before is highly relevant about understanding how our bodies work and how our mind-body connection works, educating ourselves around that. Because you quickly realize that pain is created by the brain.
It's not in the body. know, it feels like, you know, there's a cut to your arm or I burn my arms a lot because I go upstate in New York state and make fires all the time in a wood burning stove and it gets very cold up there and I'm always reaching in that wood burning stove and burning my arms on the side of the stove because it gets very hot. But if you if you kind of if you think about it, there are the body will attempt to heal that burn right away.
without you even having to pay attention to it. But there are pain receptors that send signals to the brain to create the experience of pain. It's the same way with body temperature, all kinds of other things, and emotion too. The body's doing it on its own, doesn't need us paying attention. It's wired to do that. But we've evolved awareness of these things because it's effective. So pain is effective because it tells us that we've injured ourselves. And there are two kinds of pain.
There's an immediate pain which has very fast neural connections instantly. So we pull our arm away, say, then there's throbbing pain and slower pain neurons that just remind us that there's still an injury there. And if you think about those things as signals that your body, that it evolves, so they're in your brain to make, to bring it to your awareness, it takes it, it gives it a different flavor. It's not so much like this horrific thing that I'm experiencing. It's what you're experiencing.
is only your brain creating that experience. And that's a really, really, I think helps tolerating and helps understanding why it's happening. Yeah, it really does help, think.
Tim Doyle (01:01:59.01)
George, I think that's a beautiful concluding point. Where can people go to see more of your work who are interested in diving more so into your research and everything that you do?
George Bonanno (01:02:10.722)
Well, I have two books for the general public, The Other Side of Sadness, which came out in 2009 and updated in 2019, which is about grief and bereavement. And then The End of Trauma, which came out in 2021, which is about most of the things we've talked about today. So The Other Side of Sadness and The End of Trauma. I publish a lot of articles because I'm an academic. I have websites. If anyone Googles my name, those websites will come up.
And often those articles are available to download on those websites. I give a lot of public talks, a lot of videos online. And if anybody writes me or sends me an email, I'll do my best to try to respond. I sometimes can't and email gets the best of me these days, but I'll do my best to respond also.
Tim Doyle (01:03:00.886)
Awesome George, great talking with you today.
George Bonanno (01:03:02.86)
Great talking with you, Tim. Thanks.
