When I first started teaching — it’s been a few decades now — nobody ever talked about trauma. Quite literally, I do not remember a single faculty meeting or PD day or all-school read or … really … ANYTHING that raised the subject.
If you had asked me back then (the ’80s and ’90s), I would have said: “as far as I can tell, trauma happens to some people somewhere — and that’s terrible. But I don’t know of trauma happening here to our students. It’s just not on the radar.”
In the last twenty years, the world of education has done a 180 degree pivot. We talk about trauma, and trauma-informed education, a lot. We’ve got books and conferences and speakers and data.
Trauma — it seems — is everywhere. Whereas in the ’80s, trauma was a “someone else, somewhere else” problem, today it seems to be a “lots and lots of people, right here” problem.
The transition threatens whiplash. How can we manage it?
A Surprising Perspective
Back in the fall of 2024, Prof. George Bonanno presented his research at our Boston conference. His hour-long keynote included a number of surprising findings, and prompted me to buy his book. At last (!) I’ve had a chance to read it and to understand those surprising findings more deeply.
As I wrote back in December, Bonanno finds that
- Roughly 10% of people who experience trauma have enduring symptoms;
- Less than 10% start without symptoms, but symptoms develop over time and persist;
- Roughly 20% initially experience symptoms, but recover over two years;
- The rest never respond with serious symptoms.
In other words, most people do NOT respond to threatening events with PTSD. And, many who DO initially experience PTSD recover within months.
For these reasons, Bonanno doesn’t speak of “traumatic events” but of “potentially traumatic events.” After all, such events might lead to a trauma response…but most of the time they don’t.
By the way: Bonanno doesn’t arrive at these conclusions by looking at marginally threatening experiences. Two of his data sets come from people who experienced the 9/11 attacks directly — as in, they fled the buildings after the planes hit — and from members of the military who served in combat.
Even in these populations, he finds that people are mostly resilient — both in the short term and over the longer term.
In brief: we can start to manage our whiplash by realizing that PTSD is obviously very bad, but not remotely inevitable. Our students and colleagues and community members are likelier to respond to potentially traumatic events by being stable and resilient.
The Non-Recipe Recipe
This initial insight leads to an important question: exactly WHY are some people more resilient than others? If you and I go through roughly similar “potentially traumatic experiences,” why do I develop PTSD symptoms while you don’t?
To ask the same question another way: is there a formula to follow? A set of steps that leads away from PTSD? A recipe?
Bonanno answers this set of questions with nuance, sympathy, data, wisdom, and humility.
In the first place, he argues that — no — we don’t have a one-size-fits-all series of steps. In fact, he explains in thoughtful detail why no one pathway will work for all people in all circumstances.
In fact, he specifically rejects this approach. Yes: individual research studies show that character trait X or mental habit Y is “associated with a reduction in ultimate PTSD symptoms.” But the list of X, Y, and Z goes on at remarkable length — a few dozen letters at least. (Our poor alphabet taps out at 26.)
Instead, Bonanno’s research says that resilient people have a flexible collection of traits and perspectives that they use in different ways at different times.
The Return of the “Mindset”
Bonanno summarizes this this collection of traits with the phrase “flexibility mindset.” He defines the word “flexibility” quite carefully:
I’ve used the word “resilience” throughout this book to describe a pattern of continued good mental health after potential trauma, or, more precisely, a stable trajectory of healthy functioning across time.
Flexibility is not resilience. Flexibility is the process we use to adapt ourselves to traumatic stress so that we can find our way to resilience. (121)
Bonanno’s flexibility mindset rests on three connected beliefs:
- “Optimism about the future,
- confidence in our ability to cope, and
- a willingness to think about a threat as a challenge.”
No one of these beliefs by itself is enough. And, no one of them is a straightforward first-A-then-B-then-C process. But — combined with nuance and maturity — they result, over time, in better mental health outcomes.
Bonanno, in fact, devotes several chapters to specific stories of people who successfully (or not) use a flexibility mindset to manage the potentially traumatic events in their lives.
A Big Caveat
Whenever I write a book review, I always try to include at least one point where I disagree with the author, or think the book could be better. In this case, that’s a surprisingly easy goal to meet.
Here’s why: I think the book’s TITLE is doubly misleading.
In the first place, Bonanno doesn’t for a minute suggest that we can “end” trauma. He in no way claims that you can follow his simple steps to bring trauma to an early end — either for an individual or a society. Quite the contrary, he argues that the process requires endurance, frequently includes grave setbacks, and might not work for everyone.
In other words, The End of Trauma isn’t about the end of trauma. It’s about rethinking the inevitability of trauma, and reframing strategies to cope with trauma.
In the second place, the book’s subtitle includes an equally misleading phrase: “the new science of resilience.”
Bonanno says over and over that he’s NOT proposing anything radically new. His “flexibility mindset,” after all, suggests that we be optimistic, confident, and inclined to think of threats as challenges. None of those insights — or the word “mindset” — is new.
The novelty in Bonanno’s work lies first in his data, which find the PTSD is a relatively unusual response to potentially traumatic events — not, as we’ve heard so often, an inevitable one.
Bonanno also makes a novel argument when he focuses on broad flexible categories (“optimism, confidence”) rather than specific steps (“first do this, then do that, then try t’other”).
I don’t doubt that The End of Trauma is a more saleable title than Rethinking the Inevitability of Trauma and Proposing a Flexble Path to Work Past It within 2 Years or So. But that title would be more accurate.
TL;DR
Bonanno’s book The End of Trauma isn’t about the end of trauma. It does, however, make a compelling — and ultimately optimistic — argument: we’re mostly resilient; we can bounce back from potentially traumatic events; and we’ve got a challenging-but-flexible framework to guide us as we do so.
