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

Columbia University. He's the author of the Other Side of Sadness and The End of Trauma. George, so great to finally chat with you on the Psychology Podcast.

keeping a diary. And that was a fortunate decision because then the last chapter of the book is about the pandemic.

it led me to what I do now. I decided I wanted to switch directions. And I had a chance to go to England at Cambridge and do some further experimental work, and I decided no, I wanted to get closer to what to really my clinical training and to a more applis And then I had an offer from Marty Horowitz, who was one of the original founders of the whole idea of trauma in San Francisco. And it was introduced to Marty through Jerry, through Jerry's singer, and

so I knew Marty through Jerry. So Marty, Marty Horowitz offered me this position out in San Francisco, a very nice position, and he was conducting bereavement work out there, and he was asked if I would basically come out and run this study that he was doing this new study, liked being the kind of organizer of it, and I was very I was a little confused by all that because I was really not interested in bereavement. I didn't

really know much about it. But this is where the work I did with Jerry really came to the fore. Jerry always used to say, where's the data, and that really was emblazoned in my mind, and when I began to look into the Bremer literature, I found myself saying, where is the data for these assumptions? A lot of assumptions about prevent didn't make sense to me, and as far as I could tell, they had no empirical basis.

So when I took the position in San Francisco and began to develop this study, and we had a big team and we had was well funded, so it was really kind of fun to try to work it out. So we just you know, the more I looked at the literature, I thought, there's so much I can do here and test these ideas, test really what the rest of psychology was doing with the methods I knew about, And that started the whole thing, because we designed this longitudinal study. We got a broad sample, you know, pretty

much everybody, anybody who lost a loved one. It wasn't just limited to people seeking help or a clinical sample. And right away we found abundant resilience. We didn't use that word yet, but we you know, and but we saw it, and we you know, we didn't know what quick to make of it, and we were very I think I was a little reluctant about where we would publish this and how it would be be responded to. But we were able to publish his work in some

of the top journals in mainstream psychology. We continue to do that work and eventually, I, you know, shifted over to doing trauma work more broadly. But it really all came from this whole idea that I learned from Jerry Singer. Where's the data that is so cool?

But then once it really once it kind of began to take hold, then it really became a crucial issue in a very i'd say controversial and you know, tension field issue until nineteen eighty when the diagnosis was first the PTSD diagnosis was first formalized, and then it really took on a life of its own. And I think one of the main factors that we sort of got on the wrong foot was that a lot of the research and certainly a lot of the writing about trauma

came from a clinical perspective. So people who worked with trauma patients, researchers who worked with severe trauma and PTSD, there was a lot of interest in understanding and treating PTSD, which makes perfect sense, but that led to a kind of a skewed view. When people work with PTSD, they begin to think that everybody must be traumatized, because that's

what they see. They don't see resilient people. They don't see people who have gone through a potentially traumatic event, and you know, basically, you know, been okay, they don't see those people. So the news from that area was that PTSD is really prevalent and it's this difficult and tractable problem, which eventually that that work paid off and that good treatments were developed for PTSD. But that news

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

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

something really unusual, really difficult. But then as people began to say, well we have clinicians began to say, well, we have patients who clearly have PTSD, but they don't have one of these events, so we need a broader criteria, and the definition of that a criteria began to expand, which was a bit of a Pandora's box because it's now clear now we have this ambiguity about what is and what is not a traumatic event. After you get over that hurdle, then there are three subcategories, and it's

a bit of a menu driven approach. You need one of these, and three of these and two of these, etc. From these different categories, and that leads to a kind of almost impossible number of combinations of possible symptoms, so that one person may get the diagnosis to have these cluster as long as they meet those criteria, and another person may have these cluster, and you can literally have

hundreds of thousands of these different combinations. So it looks like, you know, too many people can have the PTSD diagnosis and have very different profiles. That got even worse with the latest incarnation of the DSM, the basically the Bible of Mental disorders that the American Psychiatric Association puts up the DSM made it created another subcategories. Now there's four,

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

diagnosis and the PTSD diagnosis as many flaws. So we have this diet. We can identify a pattern of chronic psychopathology that's really just a trend in the data, irrespective of the diagnosis. Then we identify a pattern of resilience, which is really we call it a stable trajectory of healthy functioning. We find that the majority of people, typically after a potentially traumatic event, they are able to basically get on with their lives and function pretty well with

alcohol lot of symptoms. They're able to have positive experiences, you know, be close to other people you know, work and concentrate and have joy in their lives pretty soon after the event, except it varies, but sometimes it's a few days afterwards. Sometimes it's a few weeks afterwards. Even though they were pretty shaken at the time, they were able to dust themselves off as a decent metaphorm move on.

But those are not the only two patterns. We also find some people who have a lot of trauma symptoms early on, and they struggle sometimes for months, and then they gradually begin to get better. It might take them a year or two. We find that pattern. Then we find another pattern where people maybe have a fair amount of PPUs D symptoms or other symptoms and they're struggling, but then they're not getting better, and they sometimes get

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

studies we did we reviewed all the studies. I think we've reviewed sixty seven different analyzes that showed the same thing and all kinds of different events, and the mean across those events was about two thirds, So about two thirds of the people in all those different studies showed this resilience pattern. It is really the norm, the norm, the most common pattern.

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dot org. That's sacoaching dot org. I look forward to welcoming you in December now your work predates the work in the field of post traumatic growth. I noticed that you don't talk about the post traumatic growth research too much in your new book. I'm actually just having Richard Tedesky on the podcast on Monday, so it'd be nice for him to follow your episode. Yeah, yeah, And so can you just tell me what you think of the

post traumatic growth literature? Be honest and tell me, you know, like, in a way, aren't you kind of like one of the founders of the field inadvertently, Like I know that you don't explicitly work in that, but I wanted to ask you, like, don't you see yourself as weighing a strong foundation for that work.

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

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

kind of funny we would sit down together. But I just to say it more briefly, I think it's real, but I think we don't know how much, and we don't know what it really is yet because we haven't been able to track it or tap it so well.

I don't think it's necessarily true that some of those people haven't grown. But but I don't know. I don't think we've actually got got at that in a very good way. We haven't. We don't know how to measure that, is what my assumption is. So that's what that's the way, That's how I think of it. That they're they're not they're not necessarily overlap, but at least for some people, they might.

can't obviously bring a someone who's died. You can't bring them. You can't control conditioning, you know. So it's it's it's tough to actually scientifically answer the question would they have been, you know, are they better off in terms of some areas of growth and if they didn't have the situation. So yeah, so the jury still out and the science, you know, let's listen to Jeromal Singer, you know, let's let's look at more data.

very serious. And somehow during that, during dealing with that, I had these kind of series of epiphanies where I realized I'm going to be okay, you know, I can I can use some of the tools I've worked with and some of the tools I've written about the book and just cope with this one piece at a time. And then it was almost almost happy at that point, you know, And I really I realized this is really a kind of growth experience. So in this adversity, it

was definitely a growth experience. And I think that's the kind of thing that that that people really mean when they talk about growth, and and I'm not sure we get at that, but I, you know, I think that's that's real. You know, that kind of thing is real.

the things that happened early on. You know, we can we can measure things right at the time of the event happens. We can sometimes if we have the right kind of data right in our study, we can identify what they were like before, and what what characteristics and traits and behaviors they had, and see if that predicts or correlates with that outcome. And we find we find

a lot of these things. So you know, you often read about the key five traits or you know, the key seven traits, the magic bullets of resilience and magic traits and resilient people. But when we study and try to identify the different things to correlate, we find more than five or seven. We find lots of them, and we other people find lots of these, and we keep finding more. So you have all these things that correlate with a resilient outcome, and you know, and they correlate.

But then when we try to use those things to actually predict, so who's going to be resilient when this next thing happens based on these traits or even when it happens we now measure these things certain traits, who is going to be resilient based on these traits? We find that we can't do it very well. It doesn't predict much. So in the statistical terms, the effects of

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

that's kind of the paradox. We know what correlates with resilience, but we don't We're not very good at predicting resilience based on these things very interesting.

don't know if we've measured that one. But it's even the things you would think like optimism or social support, social support, you know, be able to rely on friends and relatives for emotional support and super that's a real common trait or real common you know, resource to have that's correlated with resilience regularly, but it's never that big, right when you look at the you know, statistical terms, again, the variants explain the amount of the likelihood of being

resilient that we're actually we're actually explaining with that. And I've puzzled over this for years, so maybe we need to add them up. Maybe we need to have a lot of them, you know, and even recently we've been able to do machine learning. You know, when we take

a bunch of these things, seventy eighty variables. We have people's blood, you know, so we can I don't mean to sounds gruesome, but we have you know, we have people's We can from blood, you can measure immune functioning and stress levels and the blood and all kinds of other things. And when we have all those things together, we do a better job. When we have lots of these things, like eighty different factors, you do a better job of predicting resilience. But then we break it down.

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

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

it depends on the situation. Every situation is different. We have to kind of we have to we have to embrace every situation and in a sense work it out, and we have to really get into those situations when something happens to work it out for what's happening in this particular situation, and what works in one situation doesn't

work in another situation. And even when we find something that works in the situation we're facing, maybe the next day it won't work as well because the situations changed. So there are two pieces of this flexibility process. The flexibility is how we do it. There are two pieces of this. One is the mindset I call the flexibility mindset, which is comprised of optimism and it's called challenge orientation.

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

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

causes us just about everybody. You know, it's disturbing, it causes nightmares, and you know, we think about it when we don't want to and we're a little bit on edge. That's a very common response, even among resilient people. We have to kind of deal with that. And when we have those reactions, the last thing we want to do is sort of face a head out and think about it. But when we do that, we then a lot of this other process happens, a flexibility sequence. But in order

to do that, we need to face it. We need to sort of get ourselves into the game is I like to put it, And this combination of optimism, confidence and coping and challenge appraisal kind of work together to make us do that. To help us do that, they tell us, you know I can do this, you know I'll be able to do this. It'll be Okay, let me just get in there and do it. And that's how those those processes work. They don't make us resilient, but they kind of get us into it, get us rolling.

And that's a big difference. We still may not be resilient, and we still may not cope. Okay until we do the rest of it.

people more confident. When people become more confident, they also become more optimistic. When people become more confident, they also tend to be more likely to see it as a challenge. And people see it as a challenge, they become more optimistic. When people see it as a challenge, they become more confident to all these things tend to work together, and in the book, I argue that they have the synergistic effect.

And you know, I mean that's that would be be nice to do more research in that, you know, But I'm just you know, those are questions for further work. You know, there's certainly a lot of researchers can be done on all these things.

sort of head on. It doesn't mean, you know, diving into it. It means really just thinking about it a little bit. And this gets us into the flexibility sequence. That the flexibility sequence has three parts. And so I mean the basis of flexibility is that what I call flexibility is this capacity or this this process I should say, of working out what's going on as a stressor you know, this this potential traumas happened to me. It was an ugly event. I'm now thinking about it. It's popping into

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

that doesn't get us anywhere. Instead, if we think about the fact that this happened, there are these ugly things associated with these things we don't want to think about, but they happen to us, and it's it's making us very unhappy in the moment. They're making us. It's finding we're finding it difficult to get on with our lives. So what is it that's happened to me? What is

it that I need to do here? And if we think about that, we begin to see at least some kind of answer, at least for them the immediate moment in this situation. What are these nightmares about or what? You know? What are these images that are bothering so much? And when we see when we think about that, we can then think about what can I do about it?

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

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

third step was where we then evaluate it. That's called the feedback responsiveness step. We just say, okay, I tried, say, you know, distracting myself. Did it work? Is it working? You know, if it is, let's keep doing it. Or you know, if it isn't working, let's maybe modified a little bit or try a different way to distract ourselves. Or maybe we need to you know, try something completely different.

This didn't work. Maybe what I need to do is to talk to my friends about this, or maybe what I need to do is give myself some time alone or I can really think about this, or maybe what I need to do is, you know, and get engaged in a task that's that's more fulfilling for me, or

you know, we go to this process. We might This is I think some level is very simple, a process of working out how to solve the particular problem we're confronted at that moment, and you know, maybe later there's another problem, Like Okay, I'm not I'm distracting myself a little bit. I feel a little bit better, and I'm still frightened about what happened. Maybe I need to learn about it or read about it, or you know, or maybe just you know, spend time with really close friends

who make me feel safe. You know. Whatever we think about and instead of thinking how will I not be traumatized, we're thinking instead about right now, what's the thing that I need to do right now to take to take on just a piece of this. I think it makes it more manageable. It gives us a sense that we can actually do this and as we as we manage little pieces at a time, we do begin to feel like, Okay, I got this, I can handle this, you know, and

it's a you know, the next day it'll be different. Maybe, you know, the situation changes, there might be something else. But you know, that's I think when we break it down these pieces and you know, take it kind of one step at a time, we move forward.

to some extent as they grow up. And some of the research that we've done we found that most people aren't already somewhat flexible, you know, and that was I was very happy to see that because we're arguing that most people are resilient, and I've been arguing that they do this by being flexible about each you know, each event at each time. We better find that most people are flexible, and that is what we found in a couple of different studies. Some people are extremely flexible, but

most people are at least moderately flexible. So the way we this happens in development is each one of these pieces has a kind of a developmental trajectory. For example, being sensitive to the context the senses the problem. We call that context sensitivity, but it turns out you can you can actually see this just in thinking about development. There's research showing all these things developed slowly in people. But think about context sensitivity or reading the situation like

what's happened? I mean, now, what do I need to do now? And as classic example, with children, as they go in different situations, their caregivers and their teachers teach them how to read the situation. You know for the famous line, and you know most infamous is that what you say to a child, you use your inside voice here. You know, essentially whoever's telling that the child a teacher or a caregiver or somebody else. You're saying, in this situation,

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

so I know about this. And this is the kind of a through the course of development, as as our brains are out, we get more cognitive skills. We really learn to read the intergies of situations very well. And we do this to the point where it's it's an overlearned behavior. You know, it's an overlearned skill. In other words, did we get to do it so well we don't even know we're doing it, which I think is why.

And the same with the other pieces. You know, we learn different coping behaviors and emotion regulation behaviors, and we learn to pay attention to whether they're working or not.

The reason I think it's important to name it in this book is because most people don't even know they do this, you know, And so I think we can use this more effectively in our lives when we know this is actually the process and we can we can also shore up any deficits we might have in any of these things by you know, by thinking about it directly and practicing it, and you know, see if we can improve these things.

way to be able to access things we do. So one of my favorite examples is, you know, you're you try to do something really difficult, like I think the book is example of make a difficult basketball shot, or prepare a really kind of elaborate meal for guests, but you don't for your guests in your home, but you don't quite know if it's going to work out okay. And then it does work out okay, and we might be thinking to ourselves, wow, I wasn't sure I could

you make this recipe? I make this basketball shot, but I put a lot of effort into it. I'm usually pretty good at these things. As I took a chance with this, and they seem to really like it. That is the thoughts going on in our head. But we then concretize these by saying to ourselves you know privately, yes you know, or something along those lines, you know, something simple like that. And in that space of self talk, yes you know, we can also we can go the

other way too, where we could ourselves criticize ourselves. You know, you idiot, you dummy? What made you think you could do that? And that's Those are examples of what's called automatic self talk. We don't we're bare the way we're even doing it. That that condenses a lot of cut things going in our brains. It's a simple phrase. But then intentional self talk is when we actually use self talk to remind ourselves or to help ourselves do something. So there are lots of self talk that we can

use for this flexibility mindset and flexibility sequence. For for example, optimism, a great piece of self talk would be like, it's going to be okay. The future is generally always okay, and this will be okay too, This will pass. These are common things people say to themselves. It will eventually pass. You'll eventually recede into the background. It will be okay. Confidence and coping, you would say, you know, you know you can do these kind of things, so you know

you'll find a way to do these things. A challenge appraisal, you know, we might say to ourselves, so what really is the challenger? What do we need to do? And the same I think that sort of leeds into the flexibility sequence. The self talk for the flexibility sequence might be like, for the context sensitivity is is kind of what I just said. For challenge appraisal, what's happening here? What do I need to do? What is it that's bothering so much? Bothering me so much? And then the

flexibility sequence, I'm sorry. The repertoire part is what am I able to do? What am I good at? What can I what can I use here that I am able to do? And in the last part really is the feedback part. The part week sort of decide how it's working. It's basically simple, is this working? Is this? Does this seem to be? Like? Is the problem still

there today? That I do it? And those you know in the in the book, I listed a chart of these sort of basic self talk for these for the sequence and the flexibility mindset, and then a few other examples, and then you know, I suggest people can make up their own if they're not comfortable with these. And of course there's another kind that Ethan Cross has done a lot of work on what's called distance self talk or

objective self talk. And then in that case you're talking to third person, you use your own name, so you might say you might say, for example, you know, Scott you can do this, or you know, Scott, you've done this before. You know you can do this, you know, things like that, and that's very effective.

She's really good, and she works with people under great duress, and she has been experimenting with trying to you know, talking about them the flexibility sequence primarily, and you know, so helping people step back a little bit and think about this sequence and again, you know, it's really focusing on what's happening in the moment rather than the whole, you know, broad spectrum, which it often looks really bad to people, instead of focusing on the moment what you

can actually do, and before you know it, you've actually gone through a lot the pieces that won't make it so it won't be so bad. So I think, you know, one of the things, one of the insights she had was when you're right in the middle of something really really difficult, it's a little harder to develop or improve any of these skills. And I think of them as skills.

So I think it would be really, really, a very good way to use this this work is to is to do this sort of in our daily life, you know, and to start to begin to think about, you know, what's happening to me right now, why am I so upset? Which is, you know, we're often upset about little things

through the course of our daily life. And I found that remarkably when I started thinking about how to teach people to do this, started using it more in my daily life, you know, or you know, I'm unhappy with something. You know, I'm a I'm a parent, you know, I have financial woes or financial stresses. I'm a chair of a department. I you know, I you know, I do all the other things. I live in New York City.

You know, where you're liably to get you know, on the subway, you're liable to encounter some strange situation all you know, at any moment, and sometimes those things are deeply upsetting and you find yourself feeling really bad and you can then at that point to say, Okay, what's happening? Why, what, what's really bothering me about this? I know this, this guy said something to me or you know, insulted me on the subway or you know, but what what's really

bothering me about that? And what can I do about it? And you know what am I able to? What are the ways I can deal with this? And you know, trying out things? And that's it's very effective because you begin to learn more more, you know, learn better how to use these these skills and also to improve them if you need to. There's a lot of research showing these individual pieces can be improved.

And you know, we can think about it, try it, you know, delve into a little bit more, and I think I think all of these things can definitely improved, probably in anyone I would.

first proposed these things, it wasn't that long ago. I first proposed a flexibility sequence about eight years ago only, and at the time, I thought, well, if this doesn't last, it means that somebody has improved it, and it's still kind of the way to think about it, and it still has mileage, and so getting me places. You know, I'm trying to understand it better. But I'd be happy if this, you know, progressed in a totally different direction, or simplify it, or that more complex whatever it is.

I want to find out. We're going to be studying that in the future, I think.

long time. This goes back to the social psychologists like Dan Gilbert, and a lot of people know Dan Gilbert from Daniel Gilbert from his wonderful work from his wonderful book Stumbling on Happiness, which is just a really excellent book, very readable, and you know he had done all this wonderful work on affective forecasting, which basically show that when we feel bad and we'll feel fear, will we feel anger, it doesn't feel like it will go away in twenty

minutes or an hour. It feels like it will last, you know, for days and weeks. And the same thing when we feel positive things, it just seems like it will last forever. So when a traumatic event happens, are potentially traumatic event is I like to call them. It feels like, oh my god, I'm traumatized now, I'm going

to be this way for a long time. And I've many friends who have told me the same thing, you know, and they've been through something, and they start having nightmares and start having intrusive thoughts and they're anxious that they're traumatized now, and it's just basically not true, at least not in the first week. That's really just a normal reaction. And those reactions can be useful, but it's at that time that we can really do the work of moving on,

getting beyond it. And but that's the resilience blind spot that when we when we were feeling these emotions, we can't even see resilience. And when it happens on a mass scale, say with the COVID virus or nine to eleven, we we we begin to think everybody's going to be

this way. And I wrote about this recently an article in one of the major newspapers I think it was The Wall Streetternal if I can name names, and I basically thought it was on the anniversary of nine to eleven and the twenty annivers and I called it the Lessons Learned from nine to eleven and the lessons we keep relearning, and nine to eleven was a perfect example. This nine to eleven was a horrific event, obviously, and I was in New York at the time, and it

was really a distressing event. I was having nightmares, I was, you know, on edge like so many other people in the city. But the predictions, you know, that research began, studies, surveys began to happen, you know, within days of nine eleven, and they predicted a very dire outcome. You know, huge

portions of the population were feeling distressed and anxious. People in New York were already showing PTSD symptoms, lots of people, and it led to these sort of you know announcements that you know, we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis, and the Federal Emergency Management am see FEMA A lotted well over one hundred million dollars I don't remember the exact amount, was well over one hundred million dollars to New York, so New York could provide free therapy any

and all comers. And a few months later, a lot of those that distress and those trauma systems disappeared or they they were gone. People weren't feeling that anymore, and people didn't want the psychotherapy, and you know, the treatment for nine to eleven the emergency treatment, and they hadn't spent a lot of the money, so initially they spent it on advertising, you know, like it was essentially saying, come on, you really know you need treatment, but it's

you're afraid or instigmatized. I don't remember the exact wording of these ads, I'm paraphrasing, but it still didn't happen, and a lot of therapists were confused, and you know, we're trying to find customers, but people were basically kind of over it. I still remember I mentioned this recently.

I forget where I mentioned it, but about a month after nine to eleven, I was on the Columbia campus with my children, and there were no airplanes in the sky because all commercial flights in and out of New

York were stopped. The only thing we saw were military jet fighter planes in the sky, and it was disturbing, you know, not to see these airplanes because where I live in Manhattan, it's in the flight pass, so either the planes are flying up the Hudson to the east, I'm sorry to the west or you know, up the up Brooklyn and the Queens to the east, or right over my head in Manhattan, and there were planes in

the sky. Then about a month later, an airplane and commercial airplanes right over the campus, and I looked up and I felt this surge of I don't know, relief, And I looked around. Everybody in the campus was looking up at that plane and showing this great surge of relief that I was feeling, because that plane signified we're getting back to normal. The blind spot was in a sense,

tells you, no, that's not going to happen. So when the pandemic hit, I was actually in as I mentioned, I was in I think I was in Norway at the time, about to begin my trip around Europe by my train, and I had to come home and I returned to New York and I had to quarantine, and I was, I was. I have to admit I was annoyed by that. I was. I was pissed. I was because I had to quarantine, and I you know, I

felt like, come on, I was in Norway. They're not They're only there are fewer people in Norway in the entire New York City, right, and and you know, nobody was really at that time taking the virus very seriously. But then during my coreuarantine, by the time my quarantine was over two weeks, the entire city was in quarantine. By the end of the month, about three or four weeks later, we were up to about eight hundred deaths a day in New York. It was just shockingly horrible.

And around that time, you know, there was a refrigerator truck makeshift morgue right down the street from my apartment. There were hospital tents and makeshift hospital tents in Central Park, and you know, nobody was out in the streets. It was you know, I used to ride my bicycle a little bit later, right down the middle of Times Square. That was just the strangest thing, an empty Times Square.

And at that time, let's say, i'll say in early April, there were all kinds of again the same lesson from nine to eleven. There were all kinds of pronouncements that we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis that were not equipped to handle. And I decided thought, well, that's the resilience blind spot. That can't be true. It's bad and people are suffering, but this will will We'll get used to this and we'll deal with it because we always do. And so I wrote a piece for the

Association for Psychological Science website. They'd asked me to do this, just some of the points that they called it an expert commentary that was flattered by that, but they, you know, being that I studied resilience, they asked me to say, what does psychological science tell us about this? And I made some of the points of may just discussing with you right now, and I again said we're going to get through this because we always do, and in fact

we have. You know, everybody they think is still stressed out. It's a long term stressor a lot of people have had, including myself. I've had physical problems that are that are basically not tied to anything, but they're clearly stress related. You know, small pains there, you know, small difficulties that my doctor told me, there's so many people coming in now for these unexplained physical problems. These are stress related problems.

And we've been under this kind of stress for a long time, but we have dealt with it, we have hoped with it one way or another. You and I are talking right now. We're on zoom. We're not on zoom, we're on a stone cloud, but we're talking and we're dealing with it, and we're having a decent conversation. I can see your face and you can see my face, and we're smiling sometimes, you know, I mean, you know, yeah,

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