EP 158: The Resilience Paradox | Dr. George Bonanno PhD

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And today I'm having a conversation with Dr. George Bonanno, author of the End of Trauma. And we spoke about what he calls the resilience paradox and the fact that we can identify many factors that correlate to resilience or resilience types, how resilient we are as individuals. However, this doesn't actually predict who will be resilient and who will not in life. We discussed the nature of trauma and how the concept of trauma, while very important and the increases in trauma awareness have been so important over the last decade. And in some ways, broadening the concept of trauma could be less helpful in some ways. And so we spoke about that in a very nuanced way. And he really emphasized developing the traits of resilience and developing a kind of flexible mindset, a flexible psychology which includes optimism, confidence and coping ability, and the ability then to access, even in the face of trauma, post traumatic growth. So give it a listen. Dr. George Bonanno, author of the End of Trauma. So Dr. George Bonanno is an internationally renowned expert on trauma and resilience. He is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and has conducted groundbreaking research on trauma, loss and other kinds of adversity for over three decades. He was honored recently by the association for Psychological Science for a lifetime of of intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society at large, and by the International Positive Psychology association for distinguished lifetime contributions to positive psychology. His books include the Other side of Sadness, what the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, and most recently, the End of Trauma, how the New Science of Resilience Is Changing But We Think about ptsd. George has published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific articles, many appearing in leading journals such as Nature, JMA or jama, American Psychologist and the Annual Review of Psychology. He is also an avid painter and reads widely and loves music and lives in New York City, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Are you a lifelong New Yorker?

I am not a lifelong New Yorker. I moved here about 23 years ago now. But I think I am forever a New Yorker now because I can't imagine living anywhere else.

Okay. Well, it is an amazing place and it seems to have come to life again after the Ravages of that first year of the lockdowns and the pandemic again seems.

Oh, well, yes, things are back. We're back in business and things have definitely come alive again.

That's great. That's great.

So we've been through an incredibly challenging period these last two years with the pandemic. All the illness, the risks, the tragic losses for so many people, the unresolved grief, not even being able to be with their loved ones at death, the lockdowns, all the social, physical distancing, and all the controversies around vaccination and mask wearing. It's just been an incredibly tough and many ways divisive period. And the rest of the world is, you know, there's so much uncertainty today. The obvious, increasingly obvious climate emergency we're in and disruptions all around the world affecting some of the most vulnerable among us already.

War and conflict continuing around the world. Now this war in Ukraine and another refugee crisis, and so incredibly challenging period. I'm just curious what it's like been for you, your family, your academic community.

Well.

And whether, you know, kind of what you've learned in the process.

Well, it was in New York. I've been in New York the whole time. Very few chances to leave the city.

You know, I stayed in New York the whole time. It was quite intense in the beginning. We had, you know, a huge uptick in cases, and unfortunately we had. We were having something around 800 deaths a day in the city. Down the street from where I live was a refrigerator truck, a makeshift morgue, and not far away in Central park, where tents, makeshift hospital tents.

But I think we got through that okay. And, you know, New York is a kind of place that is problem solved. Right. So as soon as sort of became clear this was a really serious episode, people, you know, got down right away. There were lots of, you know, people wore masks. People got vaccinated pretty quickly when that became available and people did hear what. What was needed to be done. My family, I think, you know, we. We were all together. Fortunately, as an academic, you know, we adapted. We. We went to online learning. And I was lucky in that sense. My job was secure. So I think in that sense, it was. It was fine. But, you know, I think one of the things I saw early on in the pandemic, I mean, in the new book I've written, I talked a lot about how people adapt to adversity. How we adapt and we become. We're flexible and we make do. We work out what we need to do at the time. And I'D been in New York through 9 11. Right. And I think I saw the same pattern right away in New York after the pandemic, where initially the alarms were sounded for a massive mental health crisis, a crisis of enormous proportions. And that happened after 9 11, and it didn't come to pass. There were certainly people who were traumatized by 9 11, but many people, most people were basically okay after a short period of time. And the same thing happened with the COVID crisis. There was a lot of alarm about the mental health casualties of the COVID crisis. For the most part, that didn't materialize. What we did see, though, is a lot of chronic stress. And this is, for me, the big lesson in terms of my work is that we do see an event like this, as you described, all the different things going on both in the pandemic and in the world. We have sort of unrelenting levels of stress, not extreme stress. I think for most people, mild to moderate.

But.

But we're not designed to have enduring stress like that. So that takes its toll. We break down a little bit. We have physical breakdown a little bit. And we need to adapt to that as it goes along.

Yeah, it seems like part of that.

Job one for any species is survival. So biologically, we're set up to focus on threats and danger. And so it would seem that our. Our internal threat systems, even neurobiologically, have been on alert pretty continuously for a while now.

Yeah, and that's very true. And we're not really, I think it's fair to say this. We're not designed for that kind of situation. We're not designed for continuous threat. Obviously, we find ourselves in those kind of situations. But our threat response, our biological threat response system, is really designed for acute events, for dangers. We deal with those dangers and we, you know, we get beyond them. So the stress response system, it does work. We were able to manage these stressors pretty well when they're continuous, but we begin to show a little bit of breakdown. And I think there have been a lot of physical problems that have manifest during the pandemic. And, you know, it's been. It's really been. The challenge has been to find ways to, you know, to find respite from that, to cope with that. That kind of chronic stress. And I think most people have done that. I don't know if they know how they've done it, but they've done it.

Yeah. I want to talk about resilience in a moment and get your definition of resilience. But since you brought this up about chronic stress. The work I do in the criminal justice system, both with incarcerated persons, but also with public safety professionals, first responders, police, city police, correctional officers, and so forth, they're under continual exposure to chronic stress and various kinds of trauma exposure, whether it's precarious, secondary trauma or primary trauma. And so really what we're trying to do is give them skills to be more resilient, to deal with that. But I'm wondering if you could draw a distinction, if you do, between chronic stress, what you've been describing, and what you would consider to be actual trauma or something that is a traumatizing event that's going to have some lasting effect on us.

Oh, sure, yeah. And I think the word trauma was used a lot during the COVID pandemic. And it's for the most part not been traumatic for most people. And the trauma has very specific meaning. And oddly, much of my work has been considered, I think, fairly radical because I tend to challenge a lot of ideas about trauma. When we come to what a trauma is. I actually use a fairly conservative definition, the definition that was originally proposed in the dsm, the bible of mental disorders. But it's really an event that's outside the range of normal human experience, an acute life event that's usually threatening, violent or life threatening in that regard. And those kind of events really, they set off the alarms. They set off the alarms that I'm really in trouble here, I could get seriously injured here, and I don't quite know what's happening to me. And those events, they really challenge us in a deep, profound way. And they're very elicit a basic animal response. Now, what's interesting about those events, though, Fleet, I consider those events always potentially traumatic. I try not to use the word trauma. I use the word potentially traumatic because no event is traumatic until we experience it that way. And most events, people don't actually experience it that way. What people experience is there is short term distress, maybe we call it acute distress. People sometimes use the word traumatic distress, that word, and I've used that word. It's a little bit misleading. But for most people get very upset when they've been exposed to a violent and life threatening event. And the upset lasts for anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days, sometimes two weeks. What I mean by upset is they're uneasy, they're feeling distressed, they're maybe having nightmares, a few nightmares, they're thinking about it when they don't want to, they can't get it off their mind, and they're feeling on edge, we call that arousal professionally, but they're on edge. And that is actually a very adaptive response for most people. It runs its course, as I said, in a couple days to a few weeks sometimes. And what it does is it keeps the event on our minds and forces us to think about it. And when that happens, we kind of problem solve a little bit. Why did that happen? Was there anything I could do about it? Is there anything I can do in the future to prevent that from happening again? In our ancestral past, when we were more hunter gatherers in our evolutionary past, it would have been wise to be on edge in case danger was still present. And the same is true to some extent in the modern world. Is that danger gone? So those reactions typically, as I said, don't last very long. And that for some people they turn into trauma, ptsd, traumatic stress reactions, enduring traumatic stress reactions. But for most people, they don't. So that's what a potentially traumatic event is. And that's very different than a chronic stressor, which is just basically keeping us on edge, keeping us dealing with things that are unpleasant or demanding for a long period of time.

Where would you fit into that? What are maybe referenced as emotional traumas and some people define traumas. We're in a situation that overwhelms our coping mechanisms and we can't escape from it, at least not immediately. So just childhood traumas, which may be life threatening, but. But you know, it's something that is sometimes called emotional. Child could feel life threatening to a child, even if it's not a physical attack or a physical threat. And so I'm wondering how emotional trauma plays into this idea of incidents where we actually are our life is a threat or we're directly experiencing violence or something like that.

Well, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I'm not quite familiar with the use of that term. But I think that there are a lot of events that experience in life or we can experience in life that are very disturbing and very distressing. And they maybe would fit this idea of emotional trauma. We're thinking of, say, losing a very important job or great financial loss, or getting news of a serious physical illness or a divorce, for example. Those things can be very disturbing, very distressing, that cause us a lot of angst and grief or depression. But those are not potentially traumatic events because they don't activate the same system. We know pretty well how this works. They don't activate this emergency response in our brains. They really are instead get this sense of worry and rumination and a sad depression type response, even maybe anxiety, but it's a very different response. We know enough about these things to know they're a different class of response. And we respond. We cope with them in a different way. To some extent. In a different way.

Yeah. Well, it does seem like trauma has become kind of a umbrella term. I know there was an article in New York Times. If everything is trauma, then what does trauma mean? And kind of references human suffering. And I think that is important to distinguish that there are different types of human suffering and different types of incredibly aversive experiences. But. But there may be actually different things going on in terms of the neurobiological responses and different patterns of healing and coping and so forth. Yeah. I'm just curious. Just in a sense, you live in New York. One of the concerns I heard early on in the pandemic is I was watching on television the news reports of what was going on in the hospitals and the ER units, that these nurses and doctors are under incredible stress and could be dealing with, with some form of trauma or even PTSD down the road. I know in New York City, there were all those pictures of people coming out and applauding the medical workers at shift change and so forth. But I'm curious, is there any data out now about kind of where our medical people are at who've been in the midst of this for two years running now?

Yeah, I don't know if there's any concrete data. There must be, but I haven't seen them on how the medical, frontline medical providers have responded to the pandemic. But we looked into this a little bit at the beginning of the pandemic and wrote a few scholarly papers on this. And I was surprised. Looking at past, say, let's say, global disasters or pandemics or major health emergencies, I was surprised how much PTSD and severe trauma reactions there were among frontline medical professionals. And what I learned is there is a culture there. And I think this is not a controversial idea at all. I think this is what other people have said as well. There is a culture in such environments that the frontline medical providers are not able to voice their own psychological reactions because they're dealing with people who are very frightened. People are scared. People are facing their own death, perhaps, or facing serious debilitation. And people are scared in the emergency department and emergency in those contexts, in emergency rooms. And so there's a sense of, well, you. You can't really talk about what you're going through because you're here to help these other people. And that culture, though, I think has become, it's become apparent to people it's not so healthy because there's less, there's not much communication. So one of my colleagues who's the head research scientist at Columbia at the Bernard Chang at the Columbia Emergency Department, he has talked about this and we wrote a paper together talking about the need for improved communication. One of the things, you know, this chance to vent and talk about what they're feeling and one of the things that's actually happened because of the pandemic is that happens that.

Frontline medical providers found their own sources of communication that weren't. They weren't institutionalized, but they found them anyway. They found like, you know, listservs they could create and talk to each other about it because they felt the dire need. Right. Because the COVID pandemic just was overwhelming. So hopefully, I think there's a kind of an awareness now this is going to have to change in the future, that there's going to have to be more of an understanding that the frontline medical providers also have needs and they also can break down too. It can be just too much. So I think that's something coming.

I don't know what's happened since then, but I think it's a really hard situation for them.

It is. And I think there are positive changes and not nearly enough, but I think there are some trends in that direction. I was on the faculty for a number of years for program training nurses, physicians, social workers, other medical professionals and kind of more contemplative approaches to caregiving which included self care and taking care of themselves. And they would come to this eight day training and retreat at a retreat setting and they would arrive exhausted, exhausted, burnout, depleted, because they were working in institutional environments that were designed to be very efficient for patient care. But really I had almost no focus on the caregivers, on self care for the caregivers and often institutional settings where you were forced to operate in ways that didn't even align with your own values because that was these institutions being optimized for efficiency and so forth. So yeah, I think we have a long way to go in terms of self care for our caregivers.

It's a valuable resource. I mean, it's really. We relied on this so much during the pandemic and it would be, it's really imperative that they, I think self care is a very good word for it, that they have some avenues towards self care.

Yeah, absolutely. So our overarching theme for this summit is how can we develop deep and sustain the individual collective, even systemic resilience that we need to deal with the really daunting problems, facing challenges, facing humanity today with the climate emergency and increasingly severe disruptions that are very likely headed our way all around the world, an incredibly divisive and polarized cultural and political landscape. Still ongoing conflicts and wars, despite our efforts at global cooperation and the war erupting now with this invasion of Ukraine and another refugee crisis.

In Eastern Europe, which is just one after another. I mean, the wars in the Middle east and all the refugee crises and around the world. So it doesn't look like life on Earth is getting any easier anytime soon. And so how do we develop that resilience? That's kind of what this is all about. And then today, our focus on day two of the summit is about relational resilience and healing trauma. Because trauma can, I think, undermine our ability to access that social dimension of our resilience. But before we talk about that, I wonder if we could just see what the word resilience means to you. How would you define resilience, even at the individual level?

I think of resilience as a process, I guess, would be the best word. I've argued fairly, emphatically, both in my recent book, the End of Trauma book, and in my scholarly papers, that there is not a resilient type. I think that's an illusion or myth that there is a kind of a resilient person. There are. I think most people are resilient already. They just don't know it, and they don't know exactly how they're being resilient. But I always think of resilience as an outcome. It's both a process and an outcome. We are resilient to something, so we're not standing as a static thing. I'm a resilient person. Therefore, next thing that happens, I will be okay. It's every time something happens, we have to engage it, and we have to then do something to become resilient. So it's sort of like life doesn't sit still. We're always confronting new and different challenges. So resilience is that outcome. And the process that happens I'm very interested in. And that leads to other aspects of my work. But that's really how I think of it.

Well, that's really interesting. And in my own explorations around this, I've always, you know, okay, is a resilient state a temporary state? And is it a process? Is it just an outcome we can identify or can we talk about trait resilience? Is there anything we can do to become more resilient in anticipation of challenges to come? So it sounds like you're seeing it more as a process that responds in the moment. But then why would one person respond differently than another? I mean, I think we all just. In very simple terms, we all know, like, if we're not sleeping well and we're not eating well and we're engaging in things that are hard on the body, you know, we're going to be more emotionally triggerable, more irritable, we're not going to be our best self. And so I'm just wondering if there is some way that we can think of that we can kind of top off the batteries, add more batteries to the battery pack in terms of being able to be in a responsive, relational mode with the challenges of life, rather than easily getting triggered back into those that fear and survival reactivity and what would be there?

Absolutely, absolutely. So what I've come to in my own work, and this is after like 30 years of research, we've seen that most people are resilient, but we haven't, for many years haven't been able to identify why. So, you know, there's a. One of the. I think the myths about resilience is there's 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7, usually those magic numbers, 3, 5, and 7. The magic traits of resilience, the traits everybody should have to be resilient. You see articles in the newspaper and media, Internet websites, and I think that's a myth because when we measure those traits or those behaviors, we can't actually predict who will be resigned very well. And in my own research and in other people's research, there are many, many factors. In the book I found I describe at least 50 different things, 5, 0, 50 different things that have been correlated with resilience that have sort of identified as kind of happening in relation to resilience. And that puzzled me for a long time. And then I began to integrate this with other work we were doing in my research that suggested that what it's about is how we use those traits, how we use those behaviors and resources. And that's where resilience comes in. And that's where I get to the point where for me, it seems that we are not resilient by definition, but we have the tools that we can use. And the process of resilience is what I call flexibility, flexible adaptation. And that's something we can learn, that's something we can foster. It's something we already know how to do to some extent as well. Because as I mentioned, most people are resilient. We've seen this in our research and most people show this least moderate ability to be flexible, to adapt flexibly. What I've done in my work in recent years and again what I talk about in the recent book is that these are skills, in a sense, abilities that many people have, but they're not aware that they use them. Actually, it's something we learn as we grow up. We don't really think about it very much, but by becoming aware of these skills and even fostering them, enhancing them if we can, we become much more able to tackle the situations that come our way. Because everything is different. Every challenge is different, Every challenge is unique. There isn't like one type of challenge and one type of response. So we have to work it out each time. But that skill, working it out, figuring out what we can do for that situation is what makes us resilient. What I call flexible adaptation.

Yeah. So I know in various mindfulness based psychotherapies, acceptance, commitment, therapy, being one act, they talk about psychological flexibility. And in positive psychology there's a lot of talk about psychological flexibility, psychological physics, fluidity and so forth. And so, you know, I'm wondering if maybe that, you know, is what resilience is. It is that, that, that capacity which we can train in, we can, we can train ourselves to develop greater adaptability, psychological flexibility. So could, could that be a working definition of resilience?

Yeah, I mean that for me, I tend to try to separate them a little bit. Brazilian I'm in professor, I'm an academic, so I do these kind of things. Right. But it's resilience is how we measure the outcome. Okay, you've been resilient here and you did it, or a person did it by being flexible, by adapting flexibly. And in the work we've, and I think that's, for me, that is what resilience is. It's being flexible and reaching that resilient outcome. And we've, in my own work, we've identified the different chunks of it, the pieces of it, which really, you know, we're now exploring great deal and maybe developing ways to train people to do this as well.

So it seems like resilience and well being are pretty closely related. And I know neuroscientist Richie Davidson, who's been on our summits many times, done a lot of work around identifying kind of the constituents of well being, things that contribute to well being and Identified the actual neuronal substrates and types of training that can help create. So we can think of well being almost as a trainable skill. And so, you know, if we do, if we are cultivating that psychological flexibility, which I think is one of the components of well being, and we experience ourselves being that way in response to challenges, I think it increases our confidence, a sense of self competency, self efficacy, which again is a contributor to ideas like a demonic well being or psychological well being. And so I'm just wondering, you know, how those things can come together, because I guess you maybe get what I'm getting. I'm really hopeful that we can identify things that we can all do to become more resilient or become more psychologically flexible to deal with the challenges we're facing.

Absolutely fleet. So the way I've understood resilience, this really comes out of my research, but we've seen it now very clearly in relation to resilience is there are two major components. One is what I call a flexibility mindset. It is a way of thinking about events, thinking about our lives that does help us to be resilient. And then the other part is what I call the flexibility sequence, which is kind of the nuts and bolts. The mindset part, since you focused on that in your question. The mindset part is essentially a conviction. I will be able to get through this one way or another. And what we've seen in the research is there are three parts. Optimism. You mentioned these already. Optimism, confidence in our coping ability, and what's called challenge appraisal, the tendency to see threatening situations as challenges. So when we're optimistic, we say, the future will be okay. There is a future and it'll be okay. Coping self efficacy. Coping self efficacy says, I have tools, I know how to cope with things and I'll use them. I'm good at that. And then the challenge appraisal, where we say, okay, I didn't want this to happen, it's unpleasant, it kind of sucks, but.

I will find a way to get through it. So what is it that I have to do? I'm going to focus on the challenge rather than the threat. We've seen in other research studies that those things are synergistic, one leads to the other. So optimism makes us more willing to say, what's the challenge here? Looking at what the challenges makes us more willing to be optimistic. Optimism and coping efficacy also interact and these things kind of feed on each other to give us this overall mindset, this conviction. I'll get through this. It's going to be difficult, but I'll get through this. That piece is really important because it then feeds into how we actually do was interesting. I did a podcast interview with Joe DeSena who runs a thing called the Spartan Race. And it's one of those races where, you know, people go crazy and they take their shirts off and they strip down to minimal kind of clothing and they go out in cold weather and they climb up rope ladders. I do this kind of thing, just full disclosure. And they climb up these rope ladders and then they jump in an ice cold pond and somebody on the other side of it, and then they have to climb up a muddy hill and lug something up a hill deliberately made to be muddy and then do something else and something else. There's a whole bunch of people doing this and they're all helping each other. And what Joe told me when I described this flexibility mindset, when people get to the end of this race, they have this dramatic sense of, well, I didn't know I could do that and I did it. I have a sense of mastery. I can do things I didn't even know I could do. And that does lead to this conviction, you know, I'll get through this. You know, I'll find a way to get through this. We always get through things. I'll find a way to get through things. And most people get through most things, you know, but they forget that. So it's this kind of cultivating mindset. This can definitely be cultivated, you know, by simple exercises or, you know, focusing on it. In my book, I suggested some self talk, you know, literally the kind of things I just mentioned, the future will be okay. What's the challenge? I'll get through it. And, you know, I have tools to work with, you know, and we can do self talk with our own name in it. Even. So you might say, you know, you could say, I would say, george, the future would be okay. It'll be okay, George, you know, and that actually is a very powerful way to get the wheels going in a sense, because when we use our own name, we step outside of ourselves a little bit, like we're watching ourselves. And there have been really good work. The research of Ethan Cross has shown this very nicely.

So that's one part, that first part, which is, I think, not essential, but I think it's very helpful. It really gets us, I like to say it gets us in the game or during Thanksgiving. I was thinking it gets us in the kitchen, right? You know, because there's this thing you Know, you have this giant turkey and all this food, and, you know, there's work to be done, but you have to sort of get yourself in the game, you know, I think it's very important.

Absolutely. So then why, I think you posit the question in your book the End of Trauma, why is it that many of us often fail to realize how resilient we are?

Well, I think there are many reasons. I mean, one is that these factors that we do. I haven't told you about the other part, the flexibility sequence yet, but all these things we learn as we're growing up, we learn to read situations, we learn to adapt to situations, and we have to do this as children. We're told by our caregivers. The classic example is that caregivers tell their children, you have to use your inside voice here, which they're telling children this situation is different. So you learn to read situations and you learn to use different coping mechanisms and you learn to adjust your behavior and you learn to think about how well you can do in a situation. But all that is so overlearned. As we grow up, it becomes somewhat automatic. We're not aware we're even doing it.

The other reason is, I think, when trauma was discovered or not, I'm sorry, discovered. When trauma was formulated for the first time in 1980, PTSD diagnosis was created in 1980, and it was really long overdue. Clearly, trauma does happen. Some people really can't get over traumatic events, potentially traumatic events. So we needed this diagnosis. But this diagnosis led to just a flurry of research, a flurry of attention, all on severe trauma reactions. It was always on the worst case scenarios. Were books written about it. And this trickled down into the general public, this idea that there are these scary, traumatic things and we are wired, our brains are wired, required to detect threat when there's threat in the air. When we hear about threat, even if it's the same threat we heard about yesterday, we pay attention. And so this has also become, in our world of social media, you know, everything is even regular media. The news, it comes all the time, right? So you read the New York Times, I read the New York Times or some British newspapers. You know, they don't just tell you the story in the morning as you pick up the newspaper at your doorstep. You get it constantly, all day long. And there's a competition for what website you're looking at, what news you're reading. And that means that those media outlets are going to give you the stuff that's going to tweak Your attention. They're not going to say, well, Russia is invading the Ukraine, but they'll be okay. That's not a story that we want to read. We might read about how they're trying to cope with it, how they have great spirit, but it's still in the context of the worst thing that's happening. So we get a lot of that constantly. We know that traumatic things happen. And I think it's led to this kind of idea that there's trauma everywhere and that we're not very good at coping when a traumatic. And there's also this essentialist idea that these events are traumatic, not potentially traumatic. They're traumatic. And when you have one of these events, you are going to be traumatized, which is simply not true. But it's led to this, I think, general idea in the public. And we don't. I think it's somewhere along the way we stopped seeing ourselves as so adaptable. Of course, not everybody and not all the time, but I think there's been a pressure in a way to see ourselves as victims of these events rather than as people who can, you know, adapt to them and engage with them and find a way through them.

Yes. And that's really the landscape of my work. And I think the increase in trauma awareness that really began with the identification of post traumatic stress disorder, I think has been very beneficial in many ways and long overdue, as you said. And I train mindfulness teachers and I'm very involved in the criminal justice system, both working with people who find themselves in the system incarcerated, as well as all the professionals that work with in our public safety systems, first responders and so forth, and in training folks in these trauma informed approaches to delivering mindfulness based interventions or teaching mindfulness, people have gotten so hyper aroused about trauma. And you know, I sometimes I think it is kind of the negativity bias that they latch on this. And I have to keep reminding people, yes, we want you to be involved about symptomology of trauma. We want you, when you're delivering mindfulness programs, to be aware of how it might not be working for someone. That stillness or silence could be contraindicated for someone, it might be triggering for someone. But we don't want you to pathologize everybody and treat everybody as incredibly fragile. It's not helpful. And people aren't incredibly. The baseline of humanity is not fragility, it's resilience. Right. But it just seems like when the pendulum swings, we just go way one way. Right. And so we do seem to be in that landscape. And it's hard to kind of talk about because it is really important. I think the trauma awareness that we have, it is really important. There are people that really struggle. And I think we need to be trauma informed, even trauma sensitive, about how we deliver various interventions. And at the same time, I just think it's so important to recognize and empower people's fragility. I mean, people's resilience. And.

You know, I. Even some of the work we do. I have a model I developed in college called mindfulness based wellness and resiliency training for public safety professionals, as well as those who are incarcerated in the system or on probation and parole. And we try to balance.

Having trauma awareness with what I sometimes call anti fragility training and resilience training. And that runs a little counter to the current social trend. There's almost a lifting up of the victim mindset. I want to be careful to say that because people are victimized and people are victimized in terrible ways. But.

What I try to bring my own work and encourage people to is what's actually going to help people? What is the mindset we can have about ourselves and others? And what's the mindset we can help others cultivate that actually will help them?

Right, Yeah, I agree completely. And you know, I think there is a kind of a reaction that I've had this a lot during my career. You know, I've been, as I said, I've been doing this for 30 years. So initially, you know, in my career, there was a lot. There was pretty strong backlash against the idea that people were resilient. That's loss and trauma. But one of the ways I've tried to present that is that, well, you know, I know some people are clearly traumatized. Some people clearly suffer overwhelming grief, and that's undeniable. We know this from years of research, but most people do not. And what's imperative is that we try to find ways to enhance that and also to understand it, because that has also that's the route to helping people who are not able to recover, because we don't know that much about people who are not able to recover. And so one, I think way out of this conundrum is, is to take that approach. You know, there's a lot to learn here about why we're so resilient. And that can be useful for everybody.

Yeah, one of the things. Another big wave of this learning was the groundbreaking aversive childhood experiences study and research. And one of the things that was identified there was the phenomena of post traumatic growth that not only did many people find a way to heal over time, but many people grew as a result of it. They went to higher levels of integration and resilience and so forth. And I think that's often forgotten. And so finding this balance. Now, in your book you mentioned something else called the resilience paradox. Maybe you've been talking about it already and we just haven't named it. But what do you mean by the resilience paradox?

The resilience paradox. I have been speaking about it directly without mentioning that phrase. But the resilience paradox is the fact that we can identify many factors that do correlate with resilience. They statistically correlate. They correlate in terms of common sense as well. Things that we all can agree on are these are pretty healthy things, right? But they don't tell us we can measure those things. We can identify people who have those resources or traits or behaviors. But it doesn't actually predict who will be resilient and who not. What we try to predict, which is also a very important piece of this puzzle. Who is going to be resilient and who not. How do we know? And we can't actually know from simply measuring these different pieces of it. That's the paradox. This goes all the way back to my recently deceased colleague, my dear colleague Walter Rachel, who is famous in the popular world for the as being the guy who did the marshmallow test. But what he did really initially was he identified what's called the personality paradox. It was long thought that you could measure a person's personality and that would predict how they behave. But it turned out it didn't predict very well. So Walter discovered in his research that it turns out that if you follow people through different types of situations, they don't behave the same way in different situations. Situations, the situations are always different, just like potentially traumatic aversive events are always different. So he discovered, and this is back in the 60s, 1960s, that like, say, a person who's extroverted, they will be extroverted in the same type of situation, but not necessarily in other types of situations. So a person may be extroverted at work or, you know, in their, in their social life, but not at home or not at work. And so what he did then discovered what he called these personality profiles, that a person is extroverted or a person is conscientious in certain types of situations, but not others. And that really, I felt was the avenue to understand the resilience paradox. When a certain type of event happens, people who are optimistic or people who use positive emotion or even mindfulness, this may not use it in that same type of situation, unless that. But they use it in another type of situation. And because potentially traumatic events, aversive events are really incredibly different, there are all so many different types of challenges. If you think of only potentially traumatic events, being in a hurricane, being in a terrorist attack, suffering a severe loss, you know, being in a disease pandemic, being in a motor vehicle accident, having a medical, life threatening medical event, all of these things are different kinds of challenges. And then we think of all the other things that are challenging. I mentioned some of these before, you know, a divorce or an injury to your child or a financial loss, all these things are challenging in different ways. Even more mundane things in our life or can be different the way they challenge us. So we have to, then people don't behave the same way in our situations. And that led me to realize that what people use to adapt to those situations is also different. Sometimes you need to show people a lot of emotions so they know what you're talking about. Other times it's best to kind of keep close to your chest and not show your reactions. Sometimes it's really good to think about the event differently. Well, you come up with an explanation. We call this reappraisal. You, you think about it differently. And other times that doesn't work. Other times you just need to distract yourself, get it off your mind. It always depends on the situation. So that's the resilience paradox, is really that fact that we have to use different things. And that's again what leads us to flexibility, adapting to what we're confronting with at the time and use the tools we have.

So is psychological flexibility, adaptability, what you've been describing.

Is that something that we can identify through various psychosocial tests and instruments, or is there a neurochemical footprint of it? Or can we identify it in brain scans? Or is there any way are people able? Because some of these other things wouldn't predict. But if we're able to measure this and identify it, is it more predictive?

Well, we can measure and identify. We've done it first experimentally, then we came up with questionnaires, which we norm the questionnaires against experiments. And we spend a lot of time doing this, and it's somewhat crude because we've only been doing it for, we've been doing it about a decade or so. But measuring those things alone will not predict resilience either. What Predicts resilience will be a person using that skill to then adapt to the situation. And that's something we can measure. Flexibility. And we've shown that flexible people are healthier people. Most people are flexible, most people are moderately healthy, et cetera. And the people that are really struggling psychologically tend to have a deficit in one area. One of the pieces of the flexibility sequence that I have, I haven't really told you about that yet, but that's kind of the nuts and bolts. So it's really, again, every event, and I can't stress this enough from what we've seen in the research now, again, 30 years of research, every event is different. Every event requires us to engage with the event at the time and work it out. I think that's really the key to this whole puzzle. We have to engage with what's happening to us and work out what we need to do. And we have the skills and we can get better at those skills. But that's, I think, where, in a way, the key to being resilient lies. Yeah.

And again, that seems to point back to mindset and the importance. Importance of mindset. And, you know, I think quite naturally in our need to do sense making. Right. Sense making about ourselves, about life, about others, we tend to constantly oversimplify things. Right. To try to make sense of things. But we and life are just so much more complex than any of those simple categorizations don't seem to hold up very well. Yeah.

And I think you look at things like mindfulness, which is generally very adaptive. You know, mindfulness as a skill, because it may foster how we get engaged in that process. It calms us, gives us confidence, you know, and we say, all right, I'll get through this. You know, my reactions are extreme right now, but I'll work it out. So it doesn't make us resilient, but it fosters that process, pushes us along that road to resilience. I think, again, that's how it works.

So, you know, given that we're all witnessing this, really another tragic war unfolding in this time in Europe and Ukraine, and I don't mean to discount all the wars that are happening all over the world, what's still going on in Syria and other places, but this has kind of captured the world's attention for now, and we're seeing it in living color unfold and the refugee crises. And one would imagine there's going to be significant trauma, both among civilian population and the soldiers on both sides. And so I'm wondering.

From what we've learned about both trauma and resilience.

What can we be doing to come? I've done some post conflict work. I go with a group, Auschwitz, every year. We've been going for over 20 years. And that retreat started, that healing retreat started in 1996. But many decades after the end of World War II and other places around the world, we've done that work in Rwanda again, that work started probably 10 years after the genocide. So I'm wondering if there's a ways we can be with what's happening now, support people who are in that situation now and maybe come in more quickly with resources that will encourage recovery, especially in light of. And we haven't talked about this, and this is more in the nature of some of the other days of our summit. But you know, there is some.

Research into what we might call collective trauma. There is kind of historical, ancestral trauma. There's even research around the epigenetics of how gene expression could be impacted and that could be passed on. And maybe that works for resilience too, whatever resilience is, I don't know. But you know, it seems like if we don't find ways to bring healing to these situations for everyone involved more quickly, we're just going to see one war after another war after. Because they seem to be cycles that just, you know, the impact. I mean, it's not hard to connect the dots between this current war and, you know, the ravages of World War II and World War I in Europe. And, you know, so I'm wondering if you have any ideas about, from our understanding about resilience and trauma, about what might be some of the skillful means and mindsets to bring to this situation right now. And hopefully in its aftermath, hopefully it ends soon.

Well, I mean, I would love to propose a way to end wars, but I think that's beyond anything I know. I think it's human beings, this is a big thing for us to work out. I think one of the reasons that people have been so fascinated and interested in and worried about the war in Ukraine, between Russia and Ukraine, is that it's unprecedented in many ways. I think it was a blatant act of aggression that I think everybody can agree on, at least in the Western world.

But the Western response is unique, as far as I can understand, unique historically, where the Western world has almost had a unified response of using non combat or non military interventions to try to influence the war. And I think they've been effective so far. Right. So that's something really interesting and everybody's watching this too, because it's interesting. I mean, another piece of it is the Ukrainians have been remarkably flexible. They have, from their leader, Zelensky down, they have adapted and adapted and adapted to what's happening. And they're using novel techniques. They're fighting somewhat urban guerrilla warfare. And the president, Zelensky is on using social media in a very effective way so far, trying to reach the Russian people. All social media has been shut down pretty much in Russia. They're still trying to find ways to reach the Russian people. So all that is, I think, impressive nonetheless. There, of course, has been already lots of tragedy, children killed, lots of people killed. Unethical things have happened where there's a corridor for safe passage out of Ukraine that was then not a corridor, whatever treaty about that or agreement was violated. So lots of difficult things have happened. Lots of people are suffering. When you see the photos in the newspaper or on websites, the people that are leaving are in nice clothes and they have nice things. You know, this is not the life they had. They had a reasonable life. Many people just before this happened, that's been completely upended. So that's difficult in so many ways. Being a refugee is so difficult in so many ways. So I think.

It'S how that can be alleviated. What we can do to help is not clearly often the research. When people are interviewed in disasters, the first thing they say is, yes, send food, send military supplies, send whatever we could use to actually deal with the pragmatic things. But then there is the aftermath, which people will have to deal with. And people, unfortunately, as you said, been dealing with this for a long time. We are doing some research in Greece, among the refugees in Greece right now to see about flexibility. And, you know, our whole how people are doing it. Are they able to adapt to this very difficult situation they're in? And I think that the war in Ukraine right now is not going to end overnight. Russia has a lot of military power. They will likely occupy Ukraine, and it will probably go on for some time in a way that I think will both frustrate the Russians and frustrate Russia militarily, the Russian government, and also extractive toll from the Ukrainians as they try to manage that. So I think there are lots of people that have already fled, and those people could. I don't know what kind of help we can offer those people right now. I think it's a lot of support from the Western world has been very important for them. So I think psychologically, I leap to the idea of flexibility, But I don't know how much that can be in the midst of a crisis. Those ideas can circulate, but it's a little bit difficult to enact new ideas at the time if something's happening.

I think a lot of the traditional ideas about trauma and trauma care have not worked so well in these kind of situations, and people are not interested. So it's a little hard to see right now.

Yeah, I think when people are at survival, it's very hard to introduce new ideas. And maybe the. Sometimes the more effective question is, what have you. What have you used in the past that's worked for you? You know, I mean, how have you gotten through situations in the past?

We're kind of towards the end of our time. I just want to ask one more question. This is kind of a. Maybe kind of a difficult question, but we've been talking a lot about, you know, psychological flexibility and adaptability, and we are incredibly adaptable as human beings. And, you know, sometimes I've personally felt like we're almost too adaptable Sometimes we can adapt to situations that are unhealthy, and it can lead to people adapting to situations of oppression, injustice, and so forth, and maybe internalizing shame and oppression in ways. And that undermines our identity of who we are and can lead to even kind of learned help and really undermine.

All these qualities we've been talking about of flexibility. So is there a place where adaptability becomes no longer.

What's the right word? It's no longer transformative or in the direction of healthy functioning, and it actually becomes. That adaptability becomes undermining?

Well, yes and no. So it's a great point you raise. And one of my colleagues, John Jost, is a political psychologist who has written a lot about what he calls system justification. And people begin to justify a really bad situation for them and accept it in a way that's not very healthy. But I think if we think about what it really means flexible adaptation means. It means you're constantly. And this is a point I stress a great deal, we're constantly adapting as things change. So when a system becomes. If we adapt to a situation but it's not a healthy situation to be in, we really at that point need to continue to be flexible and say, okay, now we've reached a kind of a stasis here, but this is not a healthy stasis, so what can I do? I can leave. I can try to do something else. I can upend it. And that's a difficult time, I think. Right. Because there's a lot of pressure. A lot of forces will be pushing towards, you know, leaving things as they are. So I think it's really a kind of a part of the ongoing adaptation, but I think it's difficult. You know, people would need to be reminded that this is not a healthy situation. And I think we human. We humans do that. You know, we protest and we sound the alarm. But by the same token, I think it's hard because we can only do so much at one time. We do get exhausted. We do, you know, after months of stress, we do begin to wear out. We just need essentially to leave things as they are for a while. That's helpful in many ways. So it's a tricky situation when people adapt to what's not healthy. I think it's a really great question, and I don't have a perfect answer for that, but I think it's within our power. But it's work.

Yeah. Well, it seems to be unfolding right in front of our eyes because in a situation like what's happening in Ukraine, some people might. Might want to just adapt and say, okay, the Russians are going to be in control again, so I'll just find my way with that. And that's a new reality. I'll find out how to adapt within that. But it looks like in general, the Ukrainians are. Country are fighting back and saying, no, we're not going to adapt to that. We're not going to allow that. And so we're kind of seeing that unfold between our eyes, in front of our eyes. And it seems so important. There's so many issues of justice and injustice in our world and so forth, and we all, when it comes down to our individual level, and we all need to keep getting through each day.

And at the same time taking some ownership for how we're doing that. Are we contributing to a healthier world or are we kind of withdrawing from the fight in ways that maybe are not so helpful? So maybe that's one of the great human challenges.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for this, George. Thank you so much for your work. And I think these are such important questions for us all to keep exploring. What is trauma? What's the nature of trauma? How do we work with it? What is resilience? What's the relationship between the two and how to really work with these things in ways that do empower more people towards more healthy outcomes in their lives and for all of us collectively. So thank you so much for your work and really encourage people to. To check out your your book the End of Trauma, which is obviously a provocative title and but I think is a journey and a read well worth it. So again, just thank you for being.

Part of this and thank you, Fleet. Thanks for having me and thanks for a wonderful conversation.

Be well.

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