Speaker 1: Today we have George Bonano on the podcast. Doctor Banana
Speaker 1: is Professor of Psychology, chair of the Department of Counseling
Speaker 1: and Clinical Psychology, and director of the Lost Trauma and
Speaker 1: Emotion Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. He's the author
Speaker 1: of the Other Side of Sadness and The End of Trauma. George,
Speaker 1: so great to finally chat with you on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: It's great. So I'm very very happy to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to you invited me. Thank you. You know,
Speaker 1: we have a lot to talk about in this topic
Speaker 1: that you study is extraordinarily German to the moment that
Speaker 1: we will live in. It's interesting because I think that
Speaker 1: if I read your book correctly, you said you started
Speaker 1: writing it before the pandemic hit, so you almost had
Speaker 1: to kind of add that extra chapter at the end
Speaker 1: about the pandemic. Is that right? How did that come about? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I was working on the book and I planned to
Speaker 1: be in Europe for sabbatical and touring around Europe and
Speaker 1: giving lectures and working on the book further. So I
Speaker 1: started the book and I was going to do the
Speaker 1: you know, do the bulk of it, and then the
Speaker 1: pandemic hit and I had the shuffle on home right quickly.
Speaker 1: So I thought, okay, this would probably would probably make
Speaker 1: sense to include this whole experience in the book. As
Speaker 1: as it began to become clear that it was going
Speaker 1: to be a long haul, so I began keeping a diary.
Speaker 1: And that was a fortunate decision because then the last
Speaker 1: chapter of the book is about the pandemic. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good that you kept a diary. Right. Well, before
Speaker 1: we get into your seminal work on resilience and the
Speaker 1: latest idea is in your new book, let's go back
Speaker 1: a second because we both shared a mentor, Jeromo Singer. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so you know, may he rest in peace. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about that work you did with him a little bit
Speaker 1: and how how did it lead to work and interest
Speaker 1: in resilience. Well, well that's a very interesting question. How
Speaker 1: to go from daydreaming? Yeah, well I didn't do daydreaming
Speaker 1: work with Jerry. I worked on really personality and experimental
Speaker 1: but there is a connection. I worked on personality and
Speaker 1: experimental psychology with Jerry, and my dissertation was actually a
Speaker 1: very set of studies on it's called dichotic listing the
Speaker 1: different inputs into each air and it was very intense
Speaker 1: experimental I was in the lab a lot, creating stimuli,
Speaker 1: you know. And by the end of that experience, I decided,
Speaker 1: and this is how it led me to what I
Speaker 1: do now. I decided I wanted to switch directions. And
Speaker 1: I had a chance to go to England at Cambridge
Speaker 1: and do some further experimental work, and I decided no,
Speaker 1: I wanted to get closer to what to really my
Speaker 1: clinical training into a more applied areas. And then I
Speaker 1: had an offer from Marty Horowitz, who was one of
Speaker 1: the original founders of the whole idea of trauma out
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, and it was introduced to Marty through Jerry,
Speaker 1: through Jerry's singer, and so I knew Marty through Jerry.
Speaker 1: So Marty, Marty Horowitz offered me this position out in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, a very nice position, and he was conducting
Speaker 1: bereavement work out there, and he was asked if I
Speaker 1: would basically come out and run this study that he
Speaker 1: was doing, this new study, I'd be the kind of
Speaker 1: organizer of it, and I was. I was a little
Speaker 1: confused by all that because I was really not interested
Speaker 1: in bereavement. I didn't really know much about it. But
Speaker 1: this is where the work I did with Jerry really
Speaker 1: came to the fore. Jerry always used to say, where's
Speaker 1: the data, and that really was emblazoned in my mind.
Speaker 1: And when I began to look into brem of literature,
Speaker 1: I found myself saying, where is the data for these assumptions?
Speaker 1: A lot of assumptions about prevent didn't make sense to me,
Speaker 1: and as far as I could tell, they had no
Speaker 1: empirical basis. So when I took the position in San
Speaker 1: Francisco and began to develop this study, and we had
Speaker 1: a big team, and we had was well funded, so
Speaker 1: it was really kind of fun to try to work
Speaker 1: it out. So we just you know, the more I
Speaker 1: looked at the literature, I thought, there's so much I
Speaker 1: can do here and test these ideas, test really what
Speaker 1: the rest of psychology was doing with the methods I
Speaker 1: knew about, And that started the whole thing. Because we
Speaker 1: designed this logitudinal study, we got a broad sample, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody, anybody who lost a loved one. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just limited to people seeking help or a clinical sample.
Speaker 1: And right away we found abundant resilience. We didn't use
Speaker 1: that word yet, but we you know, and but we
Speaker 1: saw and we you know, we didn't know what quick
Speaker 1: to make of it, and we were very I think
Speaker 1: I was a little reluctant about where we would publish
Speaker 1: this and how it would be responded to. But we
Speaker 1: were able to publish this work in some of the
Speaker 1: top journals in mainstream psychology. We continue to do that
Speaker 1: work and eventually, I, you know, shifted over to doing
Speaker 1: trauma work more broadly. But it really all came from
Speaker 1: this whole idea that I learned from Jerry Singer. Where's
Speaker 1: the data? That is so cool? You know, I never
Speaker 1: heard that story before. So I'm going to ask you
Speaker 1: that question, and it's it's nice to think that Jerry
Speaker 1: played a helping hand in this seminal resilience research. I
Speaker 1: never even knew that, you know, you contribute to it.
Speaker 1: So I do want to ask, you know, why is
Speaker 1: the conventional wisdom about trauma so wrong? That's a great question,
Speaker 1: I think it. I think there's at least three sources
Speaker 1: that led us to somewhat astray. I mean, there was
Speaker 1: you know, trauma has a really curious history. There was
Speaker 1: hard any mention of trauma in historical record until really
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, which is very interesting. But then once
Speaker 1: it really once it kind of began to take hold,
Speaker 1: then it really became a crucial issue in a very
Speaker 1: i'd say quatroversial and you know, tension field issue until
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty when the diagnosis was first the PTSD diagnosis
Speaker 1: was first formalized, and then it really took on a
Speaker 1: life of its own. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: main factors that we sort of got on the wrong
Speaker 1: foot was that a lot of the research and certainly
Speaker 1: a lot of the writing about trauma came from a
Speaker 1: clinical perspective. So people who worked with trauma patients, researchers
Speaker 1: who worked with severe trauma and PTSD, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of interest in understanding and treating PTSD, which makes
Speaker 1: perfect sense, but that led to a kind of a
Speaker 1: skewed view. When people work with PTSD, they begin to
Speaker 1: think that everybody must be traumatized because that's what they see.
Speaker 1: They don't see resilient people, they don't see people who
Speaker 1: have gone through a potentially traumatic event and you know, basically,
Speaker 1: you know, been okay, they don't see those people. So
Speaker 1: the news from that area was that PTSD is really prevalent,
Speaker 1: and it's this difficult and tractable problem, which eventually that
Speaker 1: that work paid off and that good treatments were developed
Speaker 1: for PTSD. But that news sort of trickled out into
Speaker 1: the general public. Trauma is really a PTSD is a
Speaker 1: common response, very common response. And of course the media
Speaker 1: played its role. It's a good story, right, and so
Speaker 1: that was the kind of a story that made its
Speaker 1: way into the public. And I think so the second
Speaker 1: factor is the media, and I think the third factor
Speaker 1: is that human beings we want a simple story, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't want a complicated story. We want it. You
Speaker 1: see this now with the Internet, we want memes and
Speaker 1: sound bites. So these three things conspired, I think to
Speaker 1: the idea that trauma leads to PTSD, that these you know,
Speaker 1: the really undesirable, even horrific things people go to, are
Speaker 1: going to cause PTSD in a lot of people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you say in your book that PTSD was invented,
Speaker 1: and you go through the whole history of that and
Speaker 1: you say, quote, the PTSD diagnosis, with its various subcategories,
Speaker 1: is one of the most complicated and heterogeneous diagnoses out there.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to the general audience what that means. Yeah. Sure,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of jargon in there. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: PTSD diagnosis has had originally three sub components. First, you
Speaker 1: have to have the there's an a criterion you have
Speaker 1: to qualify as having a potentially traumatic event or traumatic event.
Speaker 1: And that criterion has been a bit of a Pandora's
Speaker 1: box because it started out fairly prescribed boundaries of really
Speaker 1: something outside the range of normal human experience, something really unusual,
Speaker 1: really difficult. But then as people began to say, well
Speaker 1: we have clinicians began to say, well, we have patients
Speaker 1: who clearly have PTSD, but they don't have one of
Speaker 1: these events, so we need a broader criteria, and that
Speaker 1: the definition of that a criteria began to expand, which
Speaker 1: was a bit of a Pandora's box because it's now
Speaker 1: clear now we have this ambiguity about what is and
Speaker 1: what is not a traumatic event. After you get over
Speaker 1: that hurdle, then there are three subcategories, and it's a
Speaker 1: bit of a menu driven approach. You need one of these,
Speaker 1: and three of these and two of these, etc. From
Speaker 1: these different categories, and that leads to a kind of
Speaker 1: almost impossible number of combinations of possible symptoms, so that
Speaker 1: one person may get the diagnosis to have these cluster
Speaker 1: as long as they meet those criteria, and another person
Speaker 1: may have these cluster, and you can really have hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of these different combinations. So it looks like,
Speaker 1: you know, too many people can have the PTSD diagnosis
Speaker 1: and have very different profiles. That got even worse with
Speaker 1: the latest incarnation of the DSM. The basically the Bible
Speaker 1: of Mental disorders that the American Psychiatric Association puts up
Speaker 1: the DSM made it created another sub categories. Now there's four,
Speaker 1: which increased the number of possible variations. So that's a
Speaker 1: that's a real problem because you have too much heterogeneity
Speaker 1: simply means too many different variations. Yeah, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: And you found that that resiliency is not necessarily the
Speaker 1: opposite of psychopathology, Yes, right. I think that's interesting because
Speaker 1: some people kind of may view them as oppositans of
Speaker 1: the same pool. And so I'd like you to explain
Speaker 1: that and also explain, you know, how resilience can come
Speaker 1: across and sudden, unexpected ways. Well, so the idea that
Speaker 1: resilience is not necessarily the opposite of psychopathology PTSD. In
Speaker 1: the work that I've done for the last twenty five years,
Speaker 1: we follow people over time and we use we use
Speaker 1: do my own data and other data we can get
Speaker 1: our hands on, and we look for patterns over time,
Speaker 1: and we find that there's a handful of these typical patterns.
Speaker 1: One of them is chronic psychopathology. What I like about
Speaker 1: that is defining as a trajectory is we don't need
Speaker 1: the PTSD diagnosis and the PTSD diagnoses as many flaws,
Speaker 1: So we have this diet. We can identify a pattern
Speaker 1: of chronic psychopathology that's really just a trend in the data,
Speaker 1: irrespective of the diagnosis. Then we identify a pattern of resilience,
Speaker 1: which is really we call it a stable trajectory of
Speaker 1: healthy functioning. We find that the majority of people, typically
Speaker 1: after a potentially traumatic event, they are able to basically
Speaker 1: get on with their lives and function pretty well with
Speaker 1: alcohol lot of symptoms. They're able to have positive experiences,
Speaker 1: you know, be close to other people, you know, work
Speaker 1: and concentrate and have joy in their lives pretty soon
Speaker 1: after the event. Except it varies, but sometimes it's a
Speaker 1: few days afterwards. Sometimes it's a few weeks afterwards, even
Speaker 1: though they were pretty shaken at the time, they were
Speaker 1: able to dust themselves off as a decent metaphorm move on.
Speaker 1: But those are not the only two patterns. We also
Speaker 1: find some people who have a lot of trauma symptoms
Speaker 1: early on and they struggle sometimes for months, and then
Speaker 1: they gradually begin to get better. It might take them
Speaker 1: a year or two lease find that pattern. Then we
Speaker 1: find another pattern where people maybe have a fair amount
Speaker 1: of PPIs D symptoms or other symptoms and they're struggling,
Speaker 1: but then they're not getting better, and they sometimes get
Speaker 1: worse over time. That can be caused by any number
Speaker 1: of things like maybe there's an injury that doesn't get better,
Speaker 1: or maybe they get depressed about the fact that they
Speaker 1: are not getting better, or reasons that we just don't
Speaker 1: know yet. And so those are all different patterns, and
Speaker 1: the only one of those patterns that maps on the
Speaker 1: PTSD is the chronic trajectory. So there's a lot going on,
Speaker 1: and it simplifies it too much to say there's just
Speaker 1: one or the other. Yeah, and most importantly you say
Speaker 1: quote in almost every analysis, the resilience trajectory was the
Speaker 1: most common pattern observed. That's groundbreaking. I mean, that's groundbreaking, yes,
Speaker 1: and we've been breaking that ground. I mean I like
Speaker 1: to think it's groundbreaking. I don't know if everybody thinks that.
Speaker 1: But we've been showing this now for about twenty Thanks Scott,
Speaker 1: we've been we've been showing this for about twenty five years,
Speaker 1: and it has gotten a lot of traction within the profession,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's really been sort of I think
Speaker 1: at this point it's almost irrefutable. We've just shown this
Speaker 1: so many times. And one of the studies we did,
Speaker 1: we reviewed all the studies. I think we've we've you
Speaker 1: sixty seven different analyzes that showed the same thing and
Speaker 1: all kinds of different events, and the mean across those
Speaker 1: events was about two thirds. So about two thirds of
Speaker 1: the people in all those different studies showed this resilience pattern.
Speaker 1: It is really the norm, the norm, that the most
Speaker 1: common pattern. That's really, yeah, really important to know with that. Now,
Speaker 1: your work predates the work in the field of post
Speaker 1: traumatic growth. I noticed that you don't talk about the
Speaker 1: post traumatic growth research too much in your new book.
Speaker 1: I'm actually just having Richard Tedesky on the podcast on
Speaker 1: Monday so it'd be nice for him to follow your episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And so can you just tell me what
Speaker 1: you think of the post traumatic growth literature? Be honest
Speaker 1: and tell me, you know, like I mean, in a way,
Speaker 1: aren't you kind of like one of the founders of
Speaker 1: the field inadvertently, Like I know that you don't explicitly
Speaker 1: work in that, but I wanted to ask you, like,
Speaker 1: don't you see yourself as laying a strong foundation for
Speaker 1: that work. I don't know. I'm a little ambivalent about
Speaker 1: the concept. And I think in part this is back
Speaker 1: to show me the data. There's a lot of I mean, basically,
Speaker 1: people report growth, but it's hard to know what that
Speaker 1: really is because the people typically reporting growth are the
Speaker 1: people who show the most severe symptoms. And there are
Speaker 1: some studies that measure growth a little bit differently, and
Speaker 1: I do find evidence for it, And to be honest,
Speaker 1: it's hard to believe that there isn't growth from these
Speaker 1: growth from adversity. And you know, I've experienced it personally,
Speaker 1: and I know there are some ways that we can
Speaker 1: show it, but I think the way it's commonly measured,
Speaker 1: and again I get back to data, the way it's
Speaker 1: commonly measured is seriously flawed. Ironically, I was in an
Speaker 1: airport where flight was delayed, and I sat down next
Speaker 1: to this man in the airport. We started talking. We
Speaker 1: having the greatest time talking, and I asked him who
Speaker 1: you know? At one point we got around introducing and
Speaker 1: he was Richard Tedeski, and he was a super nice man, right,
Speaker 1: and so he at that time I was openly critical
Speaker 1: of the concept, and he knew that it was kind
Speaker 1: of funny we would sit down together, you know. I
Speaker 1: just to say it more briefly, I think it's real,
Speaker 1: but I think we don't know how much, and we
Speaker 1: don't know what it really is yet because we haven't
Speaker 1: been able to track it or tap it so well. Well,
Speaker 1: and first blush, it looks like your research program and
Speaker 1: findings are very well aligned. Although I suppose I should
Speaker 1: ask what is the difference between resilience and growth? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the key thing if we can really
Speaker 1: operationalize those two. Yeah. So I actually wrote a paper
Speaker 1: once called postramatic growth and Resilience two sides of the
Speaker 1: same coin or different coins. I think that was the title.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I'm asking you. Yeah, So I think
Speaker 1: that I think that resilience is not the way we
Speaker 1: look at it is not post traumatic growth. It's basically
Speaker 1: people going back to where they were and since before
Speaker 1: before the event. They're doing well before the event. Is
Speaker 1: we track people before and after events. They're doing well.
Speaker 1: Before an event, something happens, there's a little perturbation, a
Speaker 1: little disruption for maybe a couple of weeks, and then
Speaker 1: they're back to being okay. I don't think it's necessarily
Speaker 1: true that some of those people haven't grown, but I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't think we've actually got got at
Speaker 1: that in a very good way. We haven't. We don't
Speaker 1: know how to measure that, is what my associate is.
Speaker 1: So that's what that's the way. That's how I think
Speaker 1: of it. That they're not they're not necessarily overlap, but
Speaker 1: at least for some people they might. Gotcha that this
Speaker 1: has really helped me understand the differences and similarities between
Speaker 1: your program and there and the postematic growth program. That's
Speaker 1: actually the topic of my next book is postraumatic growth.
Speaker 1: So I'm really trying to think this through very thoughtfully.
Speaker 1: It is true that there's a lack of studies that
Speaker 1: have a control group that can actually, I mean it's
Speaker 1: hard to have a control group within person for these
Speaker 1: kinds of post traumatic growth things. You can't obviously bring
Speaker 1: a someone who's died. You can't bring them. You can't
Speaker 1: do that control conditioning, you know. So it's it's it's
Speaker 1: tough to actually scientifically answer the question would they have been,
Speaker 1: you know, are they better off in terms of some
Speaker 1: areas of growth and if they didn't have the situation.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so the jury still out and the science
Speaker 1: you know, let's listen to Jeromale Singer, you know, let's
Speaker 1: let's look at more data. I will say, we'll say
Speaker 1: sorry if I can add one more thing please. I
Speaker 1: just went through a fairly difficult time with a surprising
Speaker 1: neurological problem that took me off guard, and at one
Speaker 1: point it was looking very serious. And somehow during that,
Speaker 1: during dealing with that, I had these kind of series
Speaker 1: of epiphanies where I realized I'm gonna be okay, you know,
Speaker 1: I can I can use some of the tools I've
Speaker 1: worked with and some of the tools I've written about
Speaker 1: the book, can just cope with this one piece at
Speaker 1: a time. And then it was almost almost happy at
Speaker 1: that point, you know, and I really I realized this
Speaker 1: is really a kind of a growth experience. So in
Speaker 1: this adversity was definitely a growth experience. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the kind of thing that that that people really
Speaker 1: mean when they talk about growth and and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure we get at that, but I, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's real. You know that kind of thing
Speaker 1: is real. Well, I certainly think so. And I think
Speaker 1: that humans in a lot of ways need to overcome
Speaker 1: adversity in order to have meaning in their lives. We
Speaker 1: don't really get terrible meaning from statically positive experiences. Maybe
Speaker 1: we do, Maybe we do, but not to the same
Speaker 1: sort of degree. Yeah, not to the same degree. I
Speaker 1: don't think you yeah, or flavor. So what is the
Speaker 1: resilience paradox? Okay, the resultant paradox which a very know
Speaker 1: if happy is the right we're it excited may not
Speaker 1: be the right error, But that was it was an
Speaker 1: important turn for me. I've been trying to understand this
Speaker 1: for years. So we know, we know we can identify
Speaker 1: people who show these resilient outcomes. They're resilient to these
Speaker 1: highly diversive events, these potentially traumatic events. So we can
Speaker 1: identify those people. We can identify the things that correlate
Speaker 1: with that outcome, the things that happened early on, you know,
Speaker 1: we can we can measure things right at the time
Speaker 1: of the event happens. We can sometimes if we have
Speaker 1: the right kind of data or the right kind of study,
Speaker 1: we can identify what they were like before, and what
Speaker 1: what characteristics and traits and behaviors they had and see
Speaker 1: if that predicts or correlates with that outcome. And we
Speaker 1: find we find a lot of these things. So, you know,
Speaker 1: you often read about the key five traits or you know,
Speaker 1: the key seven traits and magic bullets of resilience and
Speaker 1: magic traits and resilient people. But when we study and
Speaker 1: try to identify the different things to correlate, we find
Speaker 1: more than five. We find lots of them, and we
Speaker 1: other people find lots of these, and we keep finding more.
Speaker 1: So you have all these things that correlate with a
Speaker 1: resilient outcome, and you know, and they correlate. But then
Speaker 1: when we try to use those things to actually predict,
Speaker 1: so who's going to be resilient when this next thing
Speaker 1: happens based on these traits or even when it happens,
Speaker 1: we now measure these things certain traits, who is going
Speaker 1: to be resilient? Based on these traits? We find that
Speaker 1: we can't do it very well. It doesn't predict much.
Speaker 1: So in the statistical terms, the effects of each one
Speaker 1: of these these factors is very small. Essentially, what we're
Speaker 1: saying is that if you have one of these things,
Speaker 1: it gives us a little bit of a greater chance
Speaker 1: of being resilience. It moves the needle just a little
Speaker 1: bit of being resilient. And if we think of it
Speaker 1: as a pie chart, which is I'd like to do
Speaker 1: it that way, resilience is a pie and the things
Speaker 1: that the factors that the traits are resilient people whatever
Speaker 1: already we want to call them, are slices of the pie.
Speaker 1: And these are very small slices. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: the paradox. We know what correlates with resilience, but we don't.
Speaker 1: We're not very good at predicting resilience based on these things.
Speaker 1: Very interesting. I mean, I would argue that the characteristic
Speaker 1: neuroticism is it's quite strong, isn't it negatively predicting resilience?
Speaker 1: I don't think it's quite strong. I mean it correlates
Speaker 1: pretty regularly, but the correlation is probably you know, small neuroticism,
Speaker 1: though I think I don't know if it's a trait,
Speaker 1: So that's you know, not likely that people are not
Speaker 1: likely to be as resilient as neurotic. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we've measured that one. But it's even the things
Speaker 1: you would think like optimism or social support. Social support
Speaker 1: you know, to be able to rely on friends and
Speaker 1: relatives for emotional support and super that's a real common trait,
Speaker 1: a real common you know, resource to have. That's core
Speaker 1: it with resilience regularly, but it's never that big right
Speaker 1: when you look at the you know, statistical terms, again,
Speaker 1: the variants explain the amount of the likelihood of being
Speaker 1: resilient that we're actually we're actually explaining with that. And
Speaker 1: I'm puzzled over this for years. So maybe we need
Speaker 1: to add them up. Maybe we need to have a
Speaker 1: lot of them, you know, and even recently we've been
Speaker 1: able to do machine learning, you know, when we take
Speaker 1: a bunch of these things, seventy eighty variables. We have
Speaker 1: people's blood, you know, so we can I don't mean
Speaker 1: to sound gruesome, but we have you know, we have
Speaker 1: people's We can from blood, you can measure immune functioning
Speaker 1: and stress levels and the blood and all kinds of
Speaker 1: other things. And when we have all those things together,
Speaker 1: we do a better job. When we have lots of
Speaker 1: these things, like eighty different factors, you do a better
Speaker 1: job of predicting resilience. But then we break it down.
Speaker 1: In one of these studies we published in the Journal
Speaker 1: of the American Medical Association, we break it down. We
Speaker 1: find that if we only use the biological factors, we
Speaker 1: lose a lot of our predictive power. If we only
Speaker 1: look at the psychological factors, we lose a lot of
Speaker 1: predictive power, even more predictive power. And even with eighty together,
Speaker 1: we're still not doing really well. We're doing pretty well.
Speaker 1: And it's harder to predict resilience than the other patterns
Speaker 1: because resilience is a large it's a large group of people,
Speaker 1: so there's going to be a lot of different kinds
Speaker 1: of people in that group. So I mean, normally we
Speaker 1: don't have access to all these hidden things in our
Speaker 1: bodies and all these many different variables. So normally we
Speaker 1: only have access to a few of these things. So
Speaker 1: the individual factors still don't tell as much of the story.
Speaker 1: I think that is very very interesting and puzzling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I try to understand how that dovetails with the argument
Speaker 1: about the three aspects of the flexibility mindset optimism, confidence
Speaker 1: and coping and a challenge orientation. Doesn't that contradict what
Speaker 1: you said? If you're making the case there are at
Speaker 1: least three things that are important to cultivate, aren't you
Speaker 1: making the argument those three things are important. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a great point, Scott. It's a great point because because
Speaker 1: it does sound like I'm trying to contradicting myself. But
Speaker 1: the flexibility mindset, there are two pieces my My answer
Speaker 1: which I finally began to realize to how we are
Speaker 1: able to be resilient despite this paradox is that it
Speaker 1: depends on the situation. Every situation is different. We have
Speaker 1: to kind of have to we have to embrace every
Speaker 1: situation and in a sense work it out, and we
Speaker 1: have to really get into those situations when something happens
Speaker 1: to work it out for what's happening in this particular situation.
Speaker 1: What works in one situation doesn't work in another situation.
Speaker 1: And even when we find something that works in the situation,
Speaker 1: we're facing. Maybe the next day it won't work as
Speaker 1: well because the situations changed. So there are two pieces
Speaker 1: of this flexibility process. The flexibility is how we do it.
Speaker 1: The two pieces of this, and one is the mindset
Speaker 1: I call the flexibility mindset, which is comprised of optimism
Speaker 1: and what's called challenge orientation. It's thinking of difficult situations
Speaker 1: is challenges rather than threats. And we might initially think
Speaker 1: of them as threats, but when we then shift to
Speaker 1: this thinking to an appraisal of them, is you know this,
Speaker 1: what do I need to do here? What's the problem?
Speaker 1: And then the third piece is being confident in our
Speaker 1: ability to cope. And these are probably not the only
Speaker 1: way to it's find out the only way to have
Speaker 1: this mindset, but it seems to work really well for
Speaker 1: what we know now. And the reason that say optimism,
Speaker 1: which is one of the things that correlates with resilience,
Speaker 1: the reason that that's useful here is because it doesn't
Speaker 1: make us resilient. What it does is that it contributes
Speaker 1: to this mindset which sort of gets us going. It
Speaker 1: gets us into the game. The mindset really helps us
Speaker 1: to you know, face this potential trauma because the potential
Speaker 1: trauma and the things it causess just about everybody. You know,
Speaker 1: it's disturbing, it causes nightmares, and you know we think
Speaker 1: about it when we don't want to and we're a
Speaker 1: little bit on edge. That's a very common response, even
Speaker 1: among resilient people. We have to kind of deal with that.
Speaker 1: And when we have those reactions, the last thing we
Speaker 1: want to do is sort of face it, head out
Speaker 1: and think about it. But when we do that, we
Speaker 1: then a lot of a lot of this other process happens,
Speaker 1: a flexibility sequence. But in order to do that, we
Speaker 1: need to face it. We need to sort of get
Speaker 1: ourselves into the game. Is that like to put it?
Speaker 1: And this combination will of optimism, confidence and coping and
Speaker 1: challenge appraisal kind of work together to make us do that.
Speaker 1: To help us do that, they tell us, you know,
Speaker 1: I can do this, you know I'll be able to
Speaker 1: do this. It'll be okay. Let me just get in
Speaker 1: there and do it. And that's how those those processes work.
Speaker 1: They don't make us resilient, but they kind of get
Speaker 1: us into it, get us rolling, and that's a big difference.
Speaker 1: We still may not be resilient and we still may
Speaker 1: not cope. Okay, until we do the rest of it.
Speaker 1: I think, I think I see what you're saying. You're
Speaker 1: making the point that it's more the flexibility mindset is
Speaker 1: more than some of its parts, and the energy, the
Speaker 1: synergy of these three are important. Now is that has
Speaker 1: that been empirically tested that hypothesis, like in the sense
Speaker 1: like if you want to get nerdy for a second,
Speaker 1: like statistically, have you put these three in a sort
Speaker 1: of multiplicative sort of way within a person? Let's get
Speaker 1: nerdier like that? Do you see what I'm saying? Yes, Well,
Speaker 1: we we've we've we've only done it certain ways, and
Speaker 1: and and basically what we know about these three is
Speaker 1: that when they're together, they influence each other. So optimism
Speaker 1: gives people people become more confident. And this has been
Speaker 1: done largely with a technique call path analysis. So you
Speaker 1: sory to say, okay, what leads to less depression or
Speaker 1: less PTSD after this event? So optimism then makes people
Speaker 1: more confident. When people become more confident, they also become
Speaker 1: more optimistic. When people become more confident, they also tend
Speaker 1: to be more likely to see it as a challenge.
Speaker 1: And people see it as a challenge. They become more optimistic.
Speaker 1: When people see it as a challenge, they become more
Speaker 1: confident to all these things tend to work together, and
Speaker 1: in the book I argue that they have the synergistic effect.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean, that's that would be. It'd
Speaker 1: be nice to do more research in that, you know,
Speaker 1: But I'm just you know, those are questions for further work.
Speaker 1: You know, there's certainly a lot of researchers can be
Speaker 1: done on all these things. Oh yeah, for sure. And
Speaker 1: I think that it's a it seems like a very
Speaker 1: reasonable hypothesis. And yeah, I like that. I like those
Speaker 1: three things. I mean I want more of them in
Speaker 1: my life. If I could turn up the lever manually
Speaker 1: and I could choose three, they would be in my
Speaker 1: top list for sure. Well, tell, you know, unpack a
Speaker 1: little more of the flexibility sequence. You started to talk
Speaker 1: about it, but I think there's more of the sequence
Speaker 1: than what you mentioned. Yes, so do we do that
Speaker 1: we the mindset gets as going as I mentioned. And
Speaker 1: I just want to repeat that if some people are
Speaker 1: not so optimistic or they're not so confident or coping,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter so much. I think the mindset is
Speaker 1: what matters. And as long as people can generate that mindset,
Speaker 1: I can do this. You know, I will do this.
Speaker 1: Let me just figure out how to do this or
Speaker 1: what do I have to do here? Right? So you
Speaker 1: know I want And it's really the act of embracing
Speaker 1: this stressor event, this potential trauma sort of head on.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean, you know, diving into it. It means
Speaker 1: really just thinking about it a little bit. And this
Speaker 1: gets us into the flexibility sequence. That the flexibility sequence
Speaker 1: has three parts. And so I mean the basis of
Speaker 1: flexibility is that what I call flexibility is this capacity
Speaker 1: or this this process I should say, of working out
Speaker 1: what's going on as a stressor you know, I this
Speaker 1: this potential traumas happened to me. It was an ugly
Speaker 1: event and now thinking about it, it's popping into my mind.
Speaker 1: I feel bad about it, you know, I feel it's
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm in a day in danger. I
Speaker 1: feel maybe humiliated. You know, I just had a nightmare
Speaker 1: last night. I can't quite work it out. I'm a edge.
Speaker 1: You know, am I traumatized? I'm traumatized. That's a common assumption.
Speaker 1: So but if that's a that's a thinking about it
Speaker 1: is I'm you know, in that terms, I'm traumatized, this
Speaker 1: is going to be bad in the future. That doesn't
Speaker 1: get us anywhere. Instead, if we think about the fact
Speaker 1: that this happened, there are these ugly things associated with
Speaker 1: these things we don't want to think about, but they
Speaker 1: happen to us, and it's it's making us very unhappy
Speaker 1: in the moment. They're making us. It's finding we're finding
Speaker 1: it difficult to get on with our lives. So what
Speaker 1: is it that's happened to me? What is it that
Speaker 1: that I need to do here? And if we think
Speaker 1: about that, we begin to see at least some kind
Speaker 1: of answer, at least for them the immediate moment in
Speaker 1: this situation. What are these nightmares about or what? You know,
Speaker 1: what are these images that are bothering so much? And
Speaker 1: when we see when we think about that, we can
Speaker 1: then think about what can I do about it? What
Speaker 1: is it that I need to do? And we might decide, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need to find a way to get this off
Speaker 1: my mind, or maybe I need to talk to people
Speaker 1: about it, or maybe I need to, you know, get
Speaker 1: out of the house and you know, go for a walk.
Speaker 1: Or maybe I need to just somehow clear my curlear
Speaker 1: my head. Whatever we think about that, whatever might seem appropriate.
Speaker 1: Then we moved to the second stage, which I called repertoire,
Speaker 1: which we kind of say, okay, belar, I need to
Speaker 1: distract myself and clear my head from this so I
Speaker 1: don't think about it so much. What do we have
Speaker 1: in our repertoire that we can do that? You know,
Speaker 1: and people vary on the skills that they have, So
Speaker 1: what do I have in my repertoire that will enable
Speaker 1: me to sort of meet this challenge? And then we
Speaker 1: try something and that leads to the third step was
Speaker 1: where we then evaluate it. That's called the feedback responsiveness step.
Speaker 1: We just say, okay, I tried, say, you know, distracting myself.
Speaker 1: Did it work? Is it working? You know? If it is,
Speaker 1: let's keep doing it, or you know, if it isn't working,
Speaker 1: let's maybe modified a little bit or try a different
Speaker 1: way to distract ourselves. Or maybe we need to, you know,
Speaker 1: try something completely different. This didn't work. Maybe what I
Speaker 1: need to do is to talk to my friends about this,
Speaker 1: or maybe what I need to do is give myself
Speaker 1: some time alone, or I can really think about this,
Speaker 1: or maybe what I need to do is, you know,
Speaker 1: and get engaged in a task that's that's more fulfilling
Speaker 1: for me, or you know, we go to this process.
Speaker 1: We might this is I think on some level it's
Speaker 1: very simple. It's a process of working out how to
Speaker 1: solve a particular problem we're confronted at that moment, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe later there's another problem, like Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm distracting myself a little bit. I feel a
Speaker 1: little bit better. I'm so frightened about what happened. Maybe
Speaker 1: I need to learn about it or read about it,
Speaker 1: or you know, or maybe just you know, spend time
Speaker 1: with really close friends who make me feel safe. You know.
Speaker 1: Whatever we think about and instead of thinking how will
Speaker 1: I not be traumatized, we're thinking instead about right now,
Speaker 1: what's the thing that I need to do right now
Speaker 1: to take to take on just a piece of this.
Speaker 1: I think it makes it more manageable. It gives us
Speaker 1: a sense that we can actually do this, and as
Speaker 1: we as we manage little pieces at a time, we
Speaker 1: do begin to feel like, Okay, I got this, I
Speaker 1: can handle this, you know, and it's a you know,
Speaker 1: the next day it'll be different. Maybe you know, the
Speaker 1: situation changes, there might be something else. But you know,
Speaker 1: that's I think when we break it down these pieces
Speaker 1: and you know, take it kind of one step at
Speaker 1: a time, we move forward. What incredibly important research you're doing. Well, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, how do people become flexible in the first place?
Speaker 1: What are the you know, genetic environmental determinants of Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know about the genetic because we haven't looked
Speaker 1: at that yet. We have looked at the genetics of
Speaker 1: the trajectories, and there is a genetic piece to it,
Speaker 1: small piece like everything else. But first of all, we
Speaker 1: have to think about, well, how do we become flexible?
Speaker 1: As you just said. In the book, I have a
Speaker 1: chapter on a developmental piece to this, and in fact,
Speaker 1: we learned to be flexible. Everybody learns to be flexible
Speaker 1: to some extent as they grow up. And some of
Speaker 1: the research that we've done we found that most people
Speaker 1: are already somewhat flexible, you know, and that was I
Speaker 1: was very happy to see that because we're arguing that
Speaker 1: most people are resilient, and I've been arguing that they
Speaker 1: do this by being flexible about each you know, each event,
Speaker 1: at each time, we better find that most people are flexible,
Speaker 1: and that is what we found in a couple of
Speaker 1: different studies. Some people are extremely flexible, but most people
Speaker 1: at least moderately flexible. So the way we this happens
Speaker 1: to deve each one of these pieces has a kind
Speaker 1: of a developmental trajectory. For example, being sensitive to the
Speaker 1: context the senses the problem. We call that context sensitivity,
Speaker 1: but it turns out you can you can actually see
Speaker 1: this just in thinking about development. There's research showing all
Speaker 1: these things developed slowly in people. But think about context
Speaker 1: sensitivity or reading the situation, like what's happening now? What
Speaker 1: do I need to do now? And as classic example,
Speaker 1: with children, as they go in different situations, their caregivers
Speaker 1: and their teachers teach them how to read the situation.
Speaker 1: You know for the famous line, and you know, most
Speaker 1: infamous is that what you say to a child, you
Speaker 1: use your inside voice here. You know, essentially whoever's telling
Speaker 1: that the child, a teacher or a caregiver or somebody else,
Speaker 1: You're saying in this situation, you have to be quiet.
Speaker 1: And so children begin to learn, oh, this is a
Speaker 1: situation when I when I have to be quiet, you know, behave,
Speaker 1: and this is a situation I can just run loose,
Speaker 1: and this is a situation where I have to be
Speaker 1: polite in this situation where I can stick my finger
Speaker 1: in my friend's peanut butter sandwich because nobody, you know whatever,
Speaker 1: I'm in the cafeteria. And I grew up with lots
Speaker 1: of brothers, so I know about this. And this is
Speaker 1: a kind of a through the course of developments, as
Speaker 1: our brains about we get more cognitive skills, we really
Speaker 1: learn to read the intergies of situations very well. And
Speaker 1: we do this to the point where it's it's an
Speaker 1: overlearned behavior, you know, it's an overlearned skill. In other words,
Speaker 1: we get to do it so well we don't even
Speaker 1: know we're doing it, which I think is why. And
Speaker 1: the same with the other pieces. You know, we learn
Speaker 1: different coping behaviors and emotion regulation behaviors, and we learn
Speaker 1: to pay attention to whether they're working or not. The
Speaker 1: reason I think it's important to name it in this
Speaker 1: book is because most people don't even know they do this,
Speaker 1: you know, And so I think we can use this
Speaker 1: more effectively in our lives when we know this is
Speaker 1: actually the process and we can we can also shore
Speaker 1: up any deficits we might have in any of these
Speaker 1: things by you know, by thinking about it directly and
Speaker 1: practicing it, and you know, see if we can improve
Speaker 1: these things. Yeah. One thing you talk about that's very
Speaker 1: helpful is the importance of goal directed self talking. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, so self talk. There's a lot of been
Speaker 1: a lot of work on self talk. We all sort
Speaker 1: of talk to ourselves, and sometimes we talk to ourselves
Speaker 1: out loud, and often we do this again without being
Speaker 1: aware of it. But self talk is a very it's
Speaker 1: very effective, and it's it's very a nice way to
Speaker 1: be able to access things we do. So one of
Speaker 1: my favorite examples is, you know, you're you try to
Speaker 1: do something really difficult. I think in the book example
Speaker 1: of make a difficult basketball shot, or prepare a really
Speaker 1: kind of elaborate meal for guests, but you don't for
Speaker 1: your guests in your home, but you don't quite know
Speaker 1: if it's going to work out okay, And then it
Speaker 1: does reg out okay, and we might be thinking to ourselves, wow,
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure I could you make this recipe? I
Speaker 1: make this basketball shot, but I put a lot of
Speaker 1: effort into it. I'm usually pretty good at these things,
Speaker 1: and I took a chance with this and they seem
Speaker 1: to really like it. That is the thoughts going on
Speaker 1: in our head. We then concretize these by saying to
Speaker 1: ourselves you know privately, yes you know, or something along
Speaker 1: those lines, you know, something simple like that. And in
Speaker 1: that space of self talk, yes you know. We can
Speaker 1: also we can go the other way too, where we
Speaker 1: could ourselves criticize ourselves. You know, you idiot, you dummy,
Speaker 1: what made you think you could do that? And that's
Speaker 1: Those are examples of what's called automatic self talk. We
Speaker 1: don't we're bare the way we're even doing that. That
Speaker 1: condenses a lot of things going on in our brains.
Speaker 1: It's a simple phrase. But then intentional self talk is
Speaker 1: when we actually use self talk to to remind ourselves
Speaker 1: or to help help ourselves do something. So there are
Speaker 1: lots of self talk that we can use for this
Speaker 1: flexibility mindset and flexibility sequence. For for example, optimism, a
Speaker 1: great piece of self talk would be like, it's going
Speaker 1: to be okay. The future is generally always okay, and
Speaker 1: this will be okay too, this will pass. These are
Speaker 1: common things people say to themselves. It will eventually pass,
Speaker 1: You'll eventually recede into the background. It will be okay,
Speaker 1: confidence and coping. You would say, you know, you know
Speaker 1: you can do these kind of things, so you know
Speaker 1: you'll find a way to do these things. The challenge appraisal,
Speaker 1: you know, we might say to ourselves, so what really
Speaker 1: is the challenger? What do I need to do? And
Speaker 1: the same I think that sort of leeds into the
Speaker 1: flexibility sequence. The self talk for the flexibility sequence might
Speaker 1: be like for the context sensitivity is is kind of
Speaker 1: what I just said. For challenge appraisal, what's happening here?
Speaker 1: What do I need to do? What is it that's
Speaker 1: bothering so much? Bothering me so much? And the flexibility sequence,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. The repertoire part is what am I able
Speaker 1: to do? What am I good at? What can I
Speaker 1: what can I use here that I am able to do?
Speaker 1: And in the last part really is the feedback part,
Speaker 1: the part week sort of decide how it's working. It's
Speaker 1: basically simple, is this working? Is this? Does this seem
Speaker 1: to be? Like? Is the problem still there today that
Speaker 1: I do it? And those are you know, in the
Speaker 1: in the book, I listed a chart of these sort
Speaker 1: of basic self talk for these the sequence and the
Speaker 1: flexibility mindset, and then a few other examples, and then
Speaker 1: you know, I suggest people can make up their own
Speaker 1: if they're not comfortable with these. And of course there's
Speaker 1: another kind that Ethan Cross has done a lot of
Speaker 1: work on, what's called distance self talk or objective self talk.
Speaker 1: And then in that case you're talking to third person,
Speaker 1: you use your own name, so you might say you
Speaker 1: might say, for example, you know, Scott, you can do this,
Speaker 1: or you know, Scott, you've done this before. You know
Speaker 1: you can do this, you know, things like that, and
Speaker 1: that's very effective. Actually, yeah, I think that relates to
Speaker 1: like Kristin Neff's research and self compassion. She often says,
Speaker 1: treat yourself, you know, like you treat a friend and
Speaker 1: say and be like Scott, you know, like I love
Speaker 1: you. You You know you can do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. And I think also when you're speaking about
Speaker 1: yourself and the third person, there's a certain kind of
Speaker 1: you can applaud yourself much more easily in a sense,
Speaker 1: or you know, or remind yourself that you can do things,
Speaker 1: you have done things, and you're good at some things,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, For sure, Well, are there any
Speaker 1: other era tips for being able to boost your flexibility mindset?
Speaker 1: And you're the whole sequence that you're talking about other
Speaker 1: than self talk and what you've talked about already. Well,
Speaker 1: I think one of the things we've learned that we
Speaker 1: haven't used this whole thing in any kind of train
Speaker 1: your intervention yet, know though some colleagues of mine have
Speaker 1: and mentioned that in a kind of a loose way.
Speaker 1: One of my colleagues, Wendy Lichtenthal, who's in the book
Speaker 1: I talk about her. She's she's a really, really terribly
Speaker 1: talented clinician. She's really good, and she works with people
Speaker 1: under great duress, and she has been experimenting with trying
Speaker 1: to you know, talking about them the flexibility sequence primarily,
Speaker 1: and you know, so helping people step back a little
Speaker 1: bit and think about this sequence. And again, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's really focusing on what was happening in the
Speaker 1: moment rather than the whole you know, broad spectrum, which
Speaker 1: it often looks really bad to people, instead of focusing
Speaker 1: on the moment what you can actually do, And before
Speaker 1: you know it, you've actually gone through a lot of
Speaker 1: the pieces that won't make it. So it won't be
Speaker 1: so bad, so I think, you know, one of the things,
Speaker 1: one of the insights she had was when you're right
Speaker 1: in the middle of something really, really difficult, it's a
Speaker 1: little harder to develop or improve any of these skills.
Speaker 1: And I think of them as skills. So I think
Speaker 1: it would be really, really, a very good way to
Speaker 1: use this this work is to is to do this
Speaker 1: sort of in our daily life, you know, and to
Speaker 1: start to begin to think about, you know, what's happening
Speaker 1: to me right now, why am I so upset? Which is,
Speaker 1: you know, we're often upset about little things in the
Speaker 1: course of our daily life. And I found that remarkably
Speaker 1: when I started thinking about how to teach people to
Speaker 1: do this, started using it more in my daily life,
Speaker 1: you know, or you know, I'm unhappy with something. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a parent. You know, I have financial woes
Speaker 1: or financial stresses. I'm a chair of a department I
Speaker 1: you know, I you know, I do all the other things.
Speaker 1: I live in New York City. You know where you're
Speaker 1: liably to get you know, in a subway, you're liable
Speaker 1: to encounter some strange situation all you know, at any moment,
Speaker 1: and sometimes those things are deeply upsetting and you find
Speaker 1: yourself feeling really bad and you can then at that
Speaker 1: point to say, Okay, what's happening? Why? What, what's really
Speaker 1: bothering me about this? I know this, this guy said
Speaker 1: something to me or you know, insulted me on the
Speaker 1: subway or you know, but what what's really bothering me
Speaker 1: about that? And what can I do about it? You know?
Speaker 1: What am I able to? What are the ways I
Speaker 1: can deal with this? And you know, trying out things?
Speaker 1: And that's it's very effective because you begin to learn
Speaker 1: more more, you know, learn better how to use these
Speaker 1: these skills and also to improve them if you need to.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of research on these individual pieces can
Speaker 1: be improved. That's good news. That's good news. Yeah, in everyone,
Speaker 1: I would think. So, I mean, you know that I
Speaker 1: think we what we've what we've found is that the
Speaker 1: people who are not doing well in their lives typically
Speaker 1: have deficits in one of these areas, not all of
Speaker 1: them in one of these areas. That was a kind
Speaker 1: of have an unexpected finding in our research. So I
Speaker 1: think if we just we try to use these different
Speaker 1: processes and these different abilities in our daily life, we
Speaker 1: might quickly find out where we have the sort of
Speaker 1: the weak spot, and then we can try to work
Speaker 1: on that part, and you know, we can think about it,
Speaker 1: try it, you know, delve into a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And I think I think all these things can definitely
Speaker 1: be improved. Probably in anyone I would say, Okay, again,
Speaker 1: that's good news. Okay, Yeah, did do I say something? Oh?
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I mean, that's not anything
Speaker 1: we've ever tested, but I'm confident about that. I think
Speaker 1: for most people it's probably there within their reach to improve,
Speaker 1: especially if we know we can identify where we have
Speaker 1: a week spot that we can focus on that. How
Speaker 1: much has your research made contact with the work on hope,
Speaker 1: you know, like Senan Olpez's work on Hope, Not at
Speaker 1: all as far as I can tell. I mean, we
Speaker 1: you know, we've been very busy, and you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of room. We're always looking to expand in
Speaker 1: different directions, you know. Yeah, and you know, I mean
Speaker 1: where I'm going in the future is really this flexibility
Speaker 1: sequence in the mindset. Try to unpack it more and
Speaker 1: learn how it works. And you know, when we first
Speaker 1: proposed these things, it wasn't that long ago. I first
Speaker 1: proposed a flexibility sequence about eight years ago only and
Speaker 1: at the time I thought, well, if this doesn't last,
Speaker 1: it means that somebody's improved it. And it's still kind
Speaker 1: of the way to think about it, and it still
Speaker 1: has mile edge of still getting me places, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to understand it better. But I'd be happy if this,
Speaker 1: you know, progressed in a totally different direction, or simplify it,
Speaker 1: or that more complex whatever it is. I want to
Speaker 1: find out. We're going to be studying that in the future,
Speaker 1: I think a true scientist. Yeah, where's the data? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: and then there was a global pandemic that's the title
Speaker 1: of your last chapter. Yeah, so the pandemic while you
Speaker 1: were writing the book in twenty nineteen. How did the
Speaker 1: resilience blind spot? First of all, what is the resilience
Speaker 1: blind spot? I don't think we ever defined that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then how did that show itself during the pandemic? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you asked the question, Scott. So, the resilience
Speaker 1: blind spot is what happens when we're exposed to potential trauma,
Speaker 1: and it particularly becomes a blind spot when we have
Speaker 1: a mass trauma that exposed to a lot of people.
Speaker 1: When we feel and this, when we feel bad about something,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're really upset, it's hard not to
Speaker 1: think that it's going to last a long time. This
Speaker 1: goes back to the social psychologists like Dan Gilbert, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people know Dan Gilbert from Daniel Gilbert
Speaker 1: from his wonderful work, from his wonderful book Stumbling on Happiness,
Speaker 1: which is just a really excellent book, very readable, and
Speaker 1: you know he had done all this wonderful work on
Speaker 1: affective forecasting. We basically show that when we feel bad,
Speaker 1: when we feel fear, when we feel anger, it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like it will go away in twenty minutes or
Speaker 1: an hour. It feels like it will last, you know,
Speaker 1: for days and weeks. And the same thing when we
Speaker 1: feel positive things, it just seems like it will last forever.
Speaker 1: So when a traumatic event happens, are potentially a traumatic
Speaker 1: event is I like to call them, it feels like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I'm traumatized. Now I'm going to be
Speaker 1: this way for a long time. And I've many friends
Speaker 1: who have told me the same thing, you know, when
Speaker 1: they've been through something and they start having nightmares and
Speaker 1: start having intrusive thoughts and they're anxious that they're traumatized now,
Speaker 1: and it's just basically not true, at least not in
Speaker 1: the first week. That's really just a normal reaction, and
Speaker 1: those reactions can be useful, but it's at that time
Speaker 1: that we can really do the work of moving on
Speaker 1: and getting beyond it. But that's the resilience blind spot,
Speaker 1: that when we are feeling these emotions, we can't even
Speaker 1: see resilience. And when it happens in a matter scale,
Speaker 1: say with the COVID virus or nine eleven, we begin
Speaker 1: to think everybody's going to be this way. And I
Speaker 1: wrote about this recently an article in one of the
Speaker 1: major newspapers I think it was The Wall Streetternal, if
Speaker 1: I can name names, and I basically thought it was
Speaker 1: on the anniversary of nine to eleven and the twenty anniversar,
Speaker 1: and I called it the lessons learned from nine to
Speaker 1: eleven and the lessons we keep re learning, And nine
Speaker 1: to eleven was a perfect example. Nine to eleven was
Speaker 1: a horrific event. Obviously, I was in New York at
Speaker 1: the time, and it was really a distressing event. I
Speaker 1: was having nightmares, I was, you know, on edge like
Speaker 1: so many other people in the city. But the predictions,
Speaker 1: you know, that research began, studies, surveys began to happen,
Speaker 1: you know, within days of nine to eleven, and they
Speaker 1: predicted a very dire outcome. You know, huge portions of
Speaker 1: the population were feeling distressed and anxious. People in New
Speaker 1: York were already showing pts decent them, lots of people.
Speaker 1: And it led to these sort of you know, announcements
Speaker 1: that you know, we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis,
Speaker 1: and the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA A lotted well
Speaker 1: over one hundred million dollars I don't remember the exact amount,
Speaker 1: was well over one hundred million dollars to New York,
Speaker 1: so New York could provide free therapy to any and
Speaker 1: all comers. And you know, a few months later, a
Speaker 1: lot of those that distress and those trauma systems disappeared
Speaker 1: or they they were gone. People weren't feeling that anymore,
Speaker 1: and people didn't want the psychotherapy and you know, the
Speaker 1: treatment for nine to eleven, the emergency treatment, and they
Speaker 1: hadn't spent a lot of the money, so initially they
Speaker 1: spent it on advertising, you know, like it was essentially saying,
Speaker 1: come on, you really know you need treatment, but it's
Speaker 1: you're afraid or instigmatized. I don't remember the exact wording
Speaker 1: of these ads, I'm paraphrasing, but it still didn't happen,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the therapists were confused, and you know,
Speaker 1: we're trying to find customers and the people were basically
Speaker 1: kind of over it. I still remember I mentioned this recently.
Speaker 1: I forget where I mentioned it, but about a month
Speaker 1: after nine to eleven, I was on the Columbia campus
Speaker 1: with my children and there were no airplanes in the
Speaker 1: sky because all commercial flights of the in and out
Speaker 1: of New York were stopped. The only thing we saw
Speaker 1: were military jet fighter planes in the sky, and it
Speaker 1: was disturbing, you know, not to see these airplanes because
Speaker 1: where I lived in Manhattan, it's in the flight pass.
Speaker 1: So either the planes are flying up the Hudson to
Speaker 1: the east I'm sorry, to the west, or you know,
Speaker 1: up the of Brooklyn and the Queens to the east,
Speaker 1: or right over my head in Manhattan and there were
Speaker 1: planes in the sky. Then about a month later, an airplane,
Speaker 1: a commercial airplane from right over the campus and I
Speaker 1: looked up and I felt this surge of I don't know, relief,
Speaker 1: And I looked around. Everybody in the campus was looking
Speaker 1: up at that plane and showing this great surge of
Speaker 1: relief that I was feeling, because that plane signified we're
Speaker 1: getting back to normal. So the blind spot was in
Speaker 1: a sense, tells you, no, that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1: So when the pandemic hit, I was actually in as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, I was in I think I was in
Speaker 1: Norway at the time, about to begin my trip around
Speaker 1: Europe by by train, and I had to come home
Speaker 1: and I returned to New York and I had to quarantine,
Speaker 1: and I was, I was. I have to admit I
Speaker 1: was annoyed by that. I was. I was pissed. I
Speaker 1: was because I had to quarantine, and I you know,
Speaker 1: I felt like, come on, I was in Norway. They're
Speaker 1: not They're only there are fewer people in Norway in
Speaker 1: the entire New York City, right, And and you know,
Speaker 1: nobody was really at that time taking the virus very seriously.
Speaker 1: But then during my quarantine, by the time my quarantine
Speaker 1: was over two weeks, the entire city was in quarantine.
Speaker 1: At the end of the month, about three or four
Speaker 1: weeks later, we were up to about eight hundred. That's
Speaker 1: the day in New York. It was just shockingly horrible.
Speaker 1: And around that time, you know, there was a refrigerator
Speaker 1: truck makeshift morgue right down the street from my apartment.
Speaker 1: There were hospital tents and makeshift hospital tents in Central Park,
Speaker 1: and you know, nobody was out in the streets. It
Speaker 1: was you know, I used to ride my bicycle a
Speaker 1: little bit later, right down the middle of Times Square.
Speaker 1: That was just the strangest thing, an empty Times Square.
Speaker 1: And at that time, let's say, i'll say in early April,
Speaker 1: there were all kinds of again, the same lesson from
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, there were all kinds of pronouncements that
Speaker 1: we're headed for an enormous mental health health crisis that
Speaker 1: were not equipped to handle. And I decide thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's the resilience blind spot. That can't be true. It's
Speaker 1: bad and people are suffering, but this will will, We'll
Speaker 1: get used to this, and we'll deal with it because
Speaker 1: we always do. And so I wrote a piece for
Speaker 1: the Association for Psychological Science website. They'd asked me to
Speaker 1: do this, just some of the points that they called
Speaker 1: an expert commentary that was flattered by that. But they,
Speaker 1: you know, being that I studied resilience, they asked me
Speaker 1: to say, what does psychological science tell us about this?
Speaker 1: And I made some of the points of may just
Speaker 1: discussing with you right now, and I again said, we're
Speaker 1: going to get through this, because we always do, and
Speaker 1: in fact, we have, you know, everybody, they think the
Speaker 1: little is still stressed out. It's a long term stressor
Speaker 1: a lot of people have had, including myself. I've had
Speaker 1: physical problems that are that are basically not tied to anything,
Speaker 1: but they're clearly stress related. You know, small pains, there's
Speaker 1: you know, small difficulties that my doctor told me. There's
Speaker 1: so many people coming in now for these unexplained physical problems.
Speaker 1: These are stress related problems. And we've been under this
Speaker 1: kind of stress for a long time. But we have
Speaker 1: dealt with it. We have hoped with it one way
Speaker 1: or another. You and I are talking right now. We're
Speaker 1: on zoom. We're not on zoom or a snoun cloud,
Speaker 1: but we're talking and we're dealing with it, and we're
Speaker 1: having a decent conversation. I can see your face and
Speaker 1: you can see my face, and we're smiling sometimes, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're you know, you know that's I think
Speaker 1: that's the lesson, and I think we'll learn this again
Speaker 1: the next time something happens unless we start paying attention
Speaker 1: that this pattern. Absolutely and hopefully the tools in your
Speaker 1: book will also offer people a good toolkit for dealing
Speaker 1: with any sort of future things that arouse future challenges. George,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for your really seminal work in
Speaker 1: the field. I am a great admirer, as you know,
Speaker 1: of the research you do, and I really believe in
Speaker 1: the importance of it now more than ever. So thank
Speaker 1: you so much for chatting with me today and for
Speaker 1: the work God. Thank you. I thank you very much
Speaker 1: for this conversation. It was very nice to talk with you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology podcas.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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