Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: part of the best of series, where we highlight some
Speaker 1: of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
Speaker 1: the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy. Today we have
Speaker 1: George Bonano on the podcast. Doctor Banana is Professor of Psychology,
Speaker 1: chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, and
Speaker 1: director of the Lost Trauma and Emotion Lab Teachers College,
Speaker 1: Columbia University. He's the author of the Other Side of
Speaker 1: Sadness and The End of Trauma. George, so great to
Speaker 1: finally chat with you on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: It's great. So I'm very happy to be here. I'm
Speaker 2: happy to you invited me.
Speaker 1: Thank you. You know, we have a lot to talk
Speaker 1: about in this topic that you study is extraordinarily germane
Speaker 1: to the moment that we will live in. It's interesting
Speaker 1: because I think that if I read your book correctly,
Speaker 1: you said you started writing it before the pandemic hit,
Speaker 1: so you almost had to kind of add that extra
Speaker 1: chapter at the end about the pandemic. Is that right?
Speaker 1: How did that come about?
Speaker 2: Yes, Well, I was working on the book and I
Speaker 2: planned to be in Europe for a sabbatical and touring
Speaker 2: around Europe and giving lectures and working on the book further.
Speaker 2: So I started the book and I was going to
Speaker 2: do the you know, do the bulk of it. And
Speaker 2: then the pandemic hit and I had the shuffle on
Speaker 2: home right quickly. So I thought, okay, this would probably
Speaker 2: would probably make sense to include this whole experience in
Speaker 2: the books. As it began to become clear that it
Speaker 2: was going to be a long haul, so I began
Speaker 2: keeping a diary. And that was a fortunate decision because
Speaker 2: then the last chapter of the book is about the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's good that you keept a diary. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: before we get into your seminal work on resilience and
Speaker 1: the latest idea is in your new book, let's go
Speaker 1: back 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 it how did it lead to work and
Speaker 1: interest in resilience.
Speaker 2: Well, well that's a very interesting question.
Speaker 1: How do you go from daydreaming?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I didn't do daydreaming work with Jerry. I
Speaker 2: worked on really personality and experimental but there is a connection.
Speaker 2: I worked on personality and experimental psychology with Jerry, and
Speaker 2: my dissertation was actually a very set of studies on
Speaker 2: it's called dichotic listing the different inputs into each air
Speaker 2: and it was very intense experimental. I was in the
Speaker 2: lab a lot, creating stimuli, you know. And by the
Speaker 2: end of that experience, I decided, and this is how
Speaker 2: it led me to what I do now. I decided
Speaker 2: I wanted to switch directions. And I had a chance
Speaker 2: to go to England at Cambridge and do some further
Speaker 2: experimental work, and I decided no, I wanted to get
Speaker 2: closer to what to really my clinical training and to
Speaker 2: a more applis And then I had an offer from
Speaker 2: Marty Horowitz, who was one of the original founders of
Speaker 2: the whole idea of trauma in San Francisco. And it
Speaker 2: was introduced to Marty through Jerry, through Jerry's singer, and
Speaker 2: so I knew Marty through Jerry. So Marty, Marty Horowitz
Speaker 2: offered me this position out in San Francisco, a very
Speaker 2: nice position, and he was conducting bereavement work out there,
Speaker 2: and he was asked if I would basically come out
Speaker 2: and run this study that he was doing this new study,
Speaker 2: liked being the kind of organizer of it, and I
Speaker 2: was very I was a little confused by all that
Speaker 2: because I was really not interested in bereavement. I didn't
Speaker 2: really know much about it. But this is where the
Speaker 2: work I did with Jerry really came to the fore.
Speaker 2: Jerry always used to say, where's the data, and that
Speaker 2: really was emblazoned in my mind, and when I began
Speaker 2: to look into the Bremer literature, I found myself saying,
Speaker 2: where is the data for these assumptions? A lot of
Speaker 2: assumptions about prevent didn't make sense to me, and as
Speaker 2: far as I could tell, they had no empirical basis.
Speaker 2: So when I took the position in San Francisco and
Speaker 2: began to develop this study, and we had a big
Speaker 2: team and we had was well funded, so it was
Speaker 2: really kind of fun to try to work it out.
Speaker 2: So we just you know, the more I looked at
Speaker 2: the literature, I thought, there's so much I can do
Speaker 2: here and test these ideas, test really what the rest
Speaker 2: of psychology was doing with the methods I knew about,
Speaker 2: And that started the whole thing, because we designed this
Speaker 2: longitudinal study. We got a broad sample, you know, pretty
Speaker 2: much everybody, anybody who lost a loved one. It wasn't
Speaker 2: just limited to people seeking help or a clinical sample.
Speaker 2: And right away we found abundant resilience. We didn't use
Speaker 2: that word yet, but we you know, and but we
Speaker 2: saw it, and we you know, we didn't know what
Speaker 2: quick to make of it, and we were very I
Speaker 2: think I was a little reluctant about where we would
Speaker 2: publish this and how it would be be responded to.
Speaker 2: But we were able to publish his work in some
Speaker 2: of the top journals in mainstream psychology. We continue to
Speaker 2: do that work and eventually, I, you know, shifted over
Speaker 2: to doing trauma work more broadly. But it really all
Speaker 2: came from this whole idea that I learned from Jerry Singer.
Speaker 2: Where's the data that is so cool?
Speaker 1: You know, I never heard that story before. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask you that question, and it's it's nice
Speaker 1: to think that Jerry played a helping hand in the
Speaker 1: seminal resilience research. I never even knew that, you know,
Speaker 1: you contribute to it. So I do ask, you know,
Speaker 1: why is the conventional wisdom about trauma so wrong?
Speaker 2: That's a great question. I think it. I think there's
Speaker 2: at least three sources that led us to somewhat astray.
Speaker 2: I mean, there was, you know, trauma has a really
Speaker 2: curious history. There was hardly any mention of trauma in
Speaker 2: historical record until really the nineteenth century, which is very interesting.
Speaker 2: But then once it really once it kind of began
Speaker 2: to take hold, then it really became a crucial issue
Speaker 2: in a very i'd say controversial and you know, tension
Speaker 2: field issue until nineteen eighty when the diagnosis was first
Speaker 2: the PTSD diagnosis was first formalized, and then it really
Speaker 2: took on a life of its own. And I think
Speaker 2: one of the main factors that we sort of got
Speaker 2: on the wrong foot was that a lot of the
Speaker 2: research and certainly a lot of the writing about trauma
Speaker 2: came from a clinical perspective. So people who worked with
Speaker 2: trauma patients, researchers who worked with severe trauma and PTSD,
Speaker 2: there was a lot of interest in understanding and treating PTSD,
Speaker 2: which makes perfect sense, but that led to a kind
Speaker 2: of a skewed view. When people work with PTSD, they
Speaker 2: begin to think that everybody must be traumatized, because that's
Speaker 2: what they see. They don't see resilient people. They don't
Speaker 2: see people who have gone through a potentially traumatic event,
Speaker 2: and you know, basically, you know, been okay, they don't
Speaker 2: see those people. So the news from that area was
Speaker 2: that PTSD is really prevalent and it's this difficult and
Speaker 2: tractable problem, which eventually that that work paid off and
Speaker 2: that good treatments were developed for PTSD. But that news
Speaker 2: sort of trickled out into the general public. Trauma is
Speaker 2: really a PTSD is a common response, very common response.
Speaker 2: And of course the media played its role. It's a
Speaker 2: good story, right, and so that was the kind of
Speaker 2: a story that made its way into the public. And
Speaker 2: I think so the second factor is the media, and
Speaker 2: I think the third factor is that human beings we
Speaker 2: want a simple story, you know, we don't want a
Speaker 2: complicated story. We want it. You see this now with
Speaker 2: the internet, we want memes and sound bit So these
Speaker 2: three things conspired, I think to the idea that trauma
Speaker 2: leads to PTSD, that these you know, the really undesirable
Speaker 2: even horrific things people go to are going to cause
Speaker 2: PTSD in a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you say in your book that PTSD
Speaker 1: was invented, and you go through the whole history of
Speaker 1: that and you say, quote, the PTSD diagnosis, with its
Speaker 1: various subcategories, is one of the most complicated and heterogeneous
Speaker 1: diagnoses out there. Can you explain to the general audience
Speaker 1: what that means? Yeah, there's a lot of jargon in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the PTSD diagnosis has had originally three sub components. First,
Speaker 2: you have to have the there's an a criterion you
Speaker 2: have to qualify as having a potentially traumatic event or
Speaker 2: traumatic event. And that criterion has been a bit of
Speaker 2: a Pandora's box because it started out fairly prescribed boundaries
Speaker 2: of really something outside the range of normal human experience,
Speaker 2: something really unusual, really difficult. But then as people began
Speaker 2: to say, well we have clinicians began to say, well,
Speaker 2: we have patients who clearly have PTSD, but they don't
Speaker 2: have one of these events, so we need a broader criteria,
Speaker 2: and the definition of that a criteria began to expand,
Speaker 2: which was a bit of a Pandora's box because it's
Speaker 2: now clear now we have this ambiguity about what is
Speaker 2: and what is not a traumatic event. After you get
Speaker 2: over that hurdle, then there are three subcategories, and it's
Speaker 2: a bit of a menu driven approach. You need one
Speaker 2: of these, and three of these and two of these, etc.
Speaker 2: From these different categories, and that leads to a kind
Speaker 2: of almost impossible number of combinations of possible symptoms, so
Speaker 2: that one person may get the diagnosis to have these
Speaker 2: cluster as long as they meet those criteria, and another
Speaker 2: person may have these cluster, and you can literally have
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of these different combinations. So it looks like,
Speaker 2: you know, too many people can have the PTSD diagnosis
Speaker 2: and have very different profiles. That got even worse with
Speaker 2: the latest incarnation of the DSM, the basically the Bible
Speaker 2: of Mental disorders that the American Psychiatric Association puts up
Speaker 2: the DSM made it created another subcategories. Now there's four,
Speaker 2: which increased the number of possible variations. So that's a
Speaker 2: real problem because you have too much heterogeneity simply means
Speaker 2: too many different variations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's for sure. And you found that that resiliency
Speaker 1: is not necessarily the opposite of psychopathology. Yes, right. I
Speaker 1: think that's interesting because some people kind of may view
Speaker 1: them as oppositans of the same pool, and so I'd
Speaker 1: like you to explain that and also explain, you know,
Speaker 1: how resilience can come across in sudden, unexpected ways.
Speaker 2: Well, so the idea that resilience is not necessarily the
Speaker 2: opposite of psychopathology PTSD. In the work that I've done
Speaker 2: for the last twenty five years, we follow people over
Speaker 2: time and we use we use my own data and
Speaker 2: other data we can get our hands on, and we
Speaker 2: look for patterns over time, and we find that there's
Speaker 2: a handful of these typical patterns. One of them is
Speaker 2: chronic psychopathology. But what I like about that is having
Speaker 2: defining as a trajectory is we don't need the PTSD
Speaker 2: diagnosis and the PTSD diagnosis as many flaws. So we
Speaker 2: have this diet. We can identify a pattern of chronic
Speaker 2: psychopathology that's really just a trend in the data, irrespective
Speaker 2: of the diagnosis. Then we identify a pattern of resilience,
Speaker 2: which is really we call it a stable trajectory of
Speaker 2: healthy functioning. We find that the majority of people, typically
Speaker 2: after a potentially traumatic event, they are able to basically
Speaker 2: get on with their lives and function pretty well with
Speaker 2: alcohol lot of symptoms. They're able to have positive experiences,
Speaker 2: you know, be close to other people you know, work
Speaker 2: and concentrate and have joy in their lives pretty soon
Speaker 2: after the event, except it varies, but sometimes it's a
Speaker 2: few days afterwards. Sometimes it's a few weeks afterwards. Even
Speaker 2: though they were pretty shaken at the time, they were
Speaker 2: able to dust themselves off as a decent metaphorm move on.
Speaker 2: But those are not the only two patterns. We also
Speaker 2: find some people who have a lot of trauma symptoms
Speaker 2: early on, and they struggle sometimes for months, and then
Speaker 2: they gradually begin to get better. It might take them
Speaker 2: a year or two. We find that pattern. Then we
Speaker 2: find another pattern where people maybe have a fair amount
Speaker 2: of PPUs D symptoms or other symptoms and they're struggling,
Speaker 2: but then they're not getting better, and they sometimes get
Speaker 2: worse over time. That can be caused by any number
Speaker 2: of things like maybe there's an injury that doesn't get better,
Speaker 2: or maybe they get depressed about the fact that they
Speaker 2: are not getting better, or reasons that we just don't
Speaker 2: know yet. And so those are all different patterns, and
Speaker 2: the only one of those patterns that maps on the
Speaker 2: PTSD is the chronic trajectory. So there's a lot going on,
Speaker 2: and it simplifies it too much to say there's just
Speaker 2: one or the other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And most importantly, you say quote, in almost every analysis,
Speaker 1: the resilience trajectory was the most common pattern observed. That's groundbreaking.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's groundbreaking.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we've been breaking that ground. I mean, I
Speaker 2: like to think it's groundbreaking. I don't know if everybody
Speaker 2: thinks that. But we've been showing this now for about
Speaker 2: twenty thanks Scott. We've been showing this for about twenty
Speaker 2: five years, and it has gotten a lot of traction
Speaker 2: within the profession, and you know, it's really been sort
Speaker 2: of I think at this point it's almost irrefutable. We've
Speaker 2: just shown this so many times. And one of the
Speaker 2: studies we did we reviewed all the studies. I think
Speaker 2: we've reviewed sixty seven different analyzes that showed the same
Speaker 2: thing and all kinds of different events, and the mean
Speaker 2: across those events was about two thirds, So about two
Speaker 2: thirds of the people in all those different studies showed
Speaker 2: this resilience pattern. It is really the norm, the norm,
Speaker 2: the most common pattern.
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Speaker 1: welcoming you in December now your work predates the work
Speaker 1: in the field of post traumatic growth. I noticed that
Speaker 1: you don't talk about the post traumatic growth research too
Speaker 1: much in your new book. I'm actually just having Richard
Speaker 1: Tedesky on the podcast on Monday, so it'd be nice
Speaker 1: for him to follow your episode. Yeah, yeah, And so
Speaker 1: can you just tell me what you think of the
Speaker 1: post traumatic growth literature? Be honest and tell me, you know, like,
Speaker 1: in a way, aren't you kind of like one of
Speaker 1: the founders of the field inadvertently, Like I know that
Speaker 1: you don't explicitly work in that, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you, like, don't you see yourself as weighing a
Speaker 1: strong foundation for that work.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm a little ambivalent about the concept,
Speaker 2: and I think in part this is back to show
Speaker 2: me the data. There's a lot of I mean, basically,
Speaker 2: people report growth, but it's hard to know what that
Speaker 2: really is because the people typically reporting growth are the
Speaker 2: people who show the most severe symptoms. And there are
Speaker 2: some studies that measure growth a little bit differently, and
Speaker 2: I do find evidence for it, And to be honest,
Speaker 2: it's hard to believe that there isn't growth from these
Speaker 2: growth from adversity, and you know, I've experienced it personally,
Speaker 2: and I know there's some ways that we can show it.
Speaker 2: But I think the way it's commonly measured, and again
Speaker 2: I get back to data, the way it's commonly measured
Speaker 2: is seriously flawed. Ironically, I was in an airport where
Speaker 2: a flight was delayed, and I sat down next to
Speaker 2: this man in the airport. We started talking, were having
Speaker 2: the greatest time talking, and I asked him who you know?
Speaker 2: At one point we got around introducing ourselves and he
Speaker 2: was Richard Tedski and he was a super nice man, right,
Speaker 2: and so he and at that time I was openly
Speaker 2: critical of the concept, and he knew that it was
Speaker 2: kind of funny we would sit down together. But I
Speaker 2: just to say it more briefly, I think it's real,
Speaker 2: but I think we don't know how much, and we
Speaker 2: don't know what it really is yet because we haven't
Speaker 2: been able to track it or tap it so well.
Speaker 1: Well, on first blush, it looks like your research program
Speaker 1: and findings are very well aligned. Although I suppose I
Speaker 1: should ask what is the difference between resilience and growth?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the key thing. If we can really
Speaker 1: operationalize those two.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I actually wrote a paper once called post
Speaker 2: traumatic growth and Resilience two sides of the same coin
Speaker 2: or different coin. I think that was the title.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I'm asking you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I think that I think that resilience is
Speaker 2: not the way we look at it is not post
Speaker 2: traumatic growth. It's basically people going back to where they
Speaker 2: were in the since before before the event. They're doing
Speaker 2: well before the event. Is we track people before and
Speaker 2: after events. They're doing well before an event, something happens,
Speaker 2: there's a little perturbation, a little disruption for maybe a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks, and then they're back to being okay.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's necessarily true that some of those
Speaker 2: people haven't grown. But but I don't know. I don't
Speaker 2: think we've actually got got at that in a very
Speaker 2: good way. We haven't. We don't know how to measure that,
Speaker 2: is what my assumption is. So that's what that's the way,
Speaker 2: That's how I think of it. That they're they're not
Speaker 2: they're not necessarily overlap, but at least for some people,
Speaker 2: they might.
Speaker 1: Gotcha that this has really helped me understand the differences
Speaker 1: and similarities between your prom and there and the postmatic
Speaker 1: growth program. That's actually a topic of my next book
Speaker 1: is postraumatic growth. So I'm really trying to think this
Speaker 1: through very thoughtfully. It is true that there's a lack
Speaker 1: of studies that have a control group that can actually
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hard to have a control group within
Speaker 1: person for these kinds of post traumatic growth things. You
Speaker 1: can't obviously bring a someone who's died. You can't bring them.
Speaker 1: You can't 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 Jeromal Singer, you know, let's
Speaker 1: let's look at more data.
Speaker 2: I will say, I will say sorry if I can
Speaker 2: add one more thing please. I just went through a
Speaker 2: fairly difficult time with a surprising neurological problem that took
Speaker 2: me off guard, and at one point it was looking
Speaker 2: very serious. And somehow during that, during dealing with that,
Speaker 2: I had these kind of series of epiphanies where I
Speaker 2: realized I'm going to be okay, you know, I can
Speaker 2: I can use some of the tools I've worked with
Speaker 2: and some of the tools I've written about the book
Speaker 2: and just cope with this one piece at a time.
Speaker 2: And then it was almost almost happy at that point,
Speaker 2: you know, And I really I realized this is really
Speaker 2: a kind of growth experience. So in this adversity, it
Speaker 2: was definitely a growth experience. And I think that's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that that that people really mean when
Speaker 2: they talk about growth, and and I'm not sure we
Speaker 2: get at that, but I, you know, I think that's
Speaker 2: that's real. You know, that kind of thing is real.
Speaker 1: Well, I certainly think so. And I think that humans
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways need to overcome adversity in
Speaker 1: order to have meaning in their lives. We don't really
Speaker 1: get terrible meaning from bastatically positive experiences. Maybe we do,
Speaker 1: Maybe we do, but not to the same sort of degree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to the same degree. I don't, thank you, yeah.
Speaker 1: Or flavor. So what is the resilience paradox?
Speaker 2: Okay, the resiliant paradox, which a very I don't know
Speaker 2: if happy is right. We're it excited may not be
Speaker 2: the right error, but that was it was an important
Speaker 2: turn for me. I've been trying to understand this for years.
Speaker 2: So we know, we know we can identify people who
Speaker 2: show these resilient outcomes. They're resilient to these highly diversive events,
Speaker 2: these potentially traumatic events. So we can identify those people.
Speaker 2: We can identify the things that correlate with that outcome,
Speaker 2: the things that happened early on. You know, we can
Speaker 2: we can measure things right at the time of the
Speaker 2: event happens. We can sometimes if we have the right
Speaker 2: kind of data right in our study, we can identify
Speaker 2: what they were like before, and what what characteristics and
Speaker 2: traits and behaviors they had, and see if that predicts
Speaker 2: or correlates with that outcome. And we find we find
Speaker 2: a lot of these things. So you know, you often
Speaker 2: read about the key five traits or you know, the
Speaker 2: key seven traits, the magic bullets of resilience and magic
Speaker 2: traits and resilient people. But when we study and try
Speaker 2: to identify the different things to correlate, we find more
Speaker 2: than five or seven. We find lots of them, and
Speaker 2: we other people find lots of these, and we keep
Speaker 2: finding more. So you have all these things that correlate
Speaker 2: with a resilient outcome, and you know, and they correlate.
Speaker 2: But then when we try to use those things to
Speaker 2: actually predict, so who's going to be resilient when this
Speaker 2: next thing happens based on these traits or even when
Speaker 2: it happens we now measure these things certain traits, who
Speaker 2: is going to be resilient based on these traits? We
Speaker 2: find that we can't do it very well. It doesn't
Speaker 2: predict much. So in the statistical terms, the effects of
Speaker 2: each one of these these factors is very small. Essentially,
Speaker 2: what we're saying is that if you have one of
Speaker 2: these things, it gives us a little bit of a
Speaker 2: greater chance of being resilience. It moves in the know
Speaker 2: just a little bit of being resilient. And if we
Speaker 2: think of it as a pie chart, which is I'd
Speaker 2: like to do it that way, resilience is a pie
Speaker 2: and the things that the factors that the traits of
Speaker 2: resilient people, whatever you want to call them, are slices
Speaker 2: of the pie. And these are very small slices. So
Speaker 2: that's kind of the paradox. We know what correlates with resilience,
Speaker 2: but we don't We're not very good at predicting resilience
Speaker 2: based on these things very interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean I would argue that the characteristic neuroticism it's
Speaker 1: quite strong, isn't it negatively predicting resilience.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's quite strong. I mean, it correlates
Speaker 2: pretty regularly, but the correlation is probably I don't know
Speaker 2: small neuroticism though, I think I don't know if it's
Speaker 2: a trait. So that's you know, not likely that people
Speaker 2: are not likely to be as resilience as eurotic. I
Speaker 2: don't know if we've measured that one. But it's even
Speaker 2: the things you would think like optimism or social support,
Speaker 2: social support, you know, be able to rely on friends
Speaker 2: and relatives for emotional support and super that's a real
Speaker 2: common trait or real common you know, resource to have
Speaker 2: that's correlated with resilience regularly, but it's never that big,
Speaker 2: right when you look at the you know, statistical terms, again,
Speaker 2: the variants explain the amount of the likelihood of being
Speaker 2: resilient that we're actually we're actually explaining with that. And
Speaker 2: I've puzzled over this for years, so maybe we need
Speaker 2: to add them up. Maybe we need to have a
Speaker 2: lot of them, you know, and even recently we've been
Speaker 2: able to do machine learning. You know, when we take
Speaker 2: a bunch of these things, seventy eighty variables. We have
Speaker 2: people's blood, you know, so we can I don't mean
Speaker 2: to sounds gruesome, but we have you know, we have
Speaker 2: people's We can from blood, you can measure immune functioning
Speaker 2: and stress levels and the blood and all kinds of
Speaker 2: other things. And when we have all those things together,
Speaker 2: we do a better job. When we have lots of
Speaker 2: these things, like eighty different factors, you do a better
Speaker 2: job of predicting resilience. But then we break it down.
Speaker 2: In one of these studies we published in the Journal
Speaker 2: of the American Medical Association, we break it down. We
Speaker 2: find that if we only use the biological factors, we
Speaker 2: lose a lot of our predictive power. If we only
Speaker 2: look at the psychological factors, we lose a lot of
Speaker 2: predictive power, even more predictive power. And even with eighty together,
Speaker 2: we're still not doing really well. We're doing pretty well.
Speaker 2: And it's harder to predict resilience than the other patterns
Speaker 2: because resilience is a large it's a large group of people,
Speaker 2: so there's going to be a lot of different kinds
Speaker 2: of people in that group. So I mean, normally we
Speaker 2: don't have access to all these hidden things in our
Speaker 2: bodies and all these many different variables. So normally we
Speaker 2: only have access to a few of these things. So
Speaker 2: the individual factors still don't tell as much of the story.
Speaker 1: I think that is very very interesting and puzzling. I
Speaker 1: try to understand how that does else 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 kind ofradict
Speaker 1: to what you said if you if you're making the
Speaker 1: case there are at least three things that are important
Speaker 1: to cultivate, aren't you making the argument those three things
Speaker 1: are important? These things?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great point, Scott. It's a great point
Speaker 2: because because it does sound like I'm trying to contradicting myself.
Speaker 2: But the flexibility mindset, there are two pieces my my.
Speaker 2: My answer which I finally began to realize to how
Speaker 2: we're able to be resilient despite this paradox is that
Speaker 2: it depends on the situation. Every situation is different. We
Speaker 2: have to kind of we have to we have to
Speaker 2: embrace every situation and in a sense work it out,
Speaker 2: and we have to really get into those situations when
Speaker 2: something happens to work it out for what's happening in
Speaker 2: this particular situation, and what works in one situation doesn't
Speaker 2: work in another situation. And even when we find something
Speaker 2: that works in the situation we're facing, maybe the next
Speaker 2: day it won't work as well because the situations changed.
Speaker 2: So there are two pieces of this flexibility process. The
Speaker 2: flexibility is how we do it. There are two pieces
Speaker 2: of this. One is the mindset I call the flexibility mindset,
Speaker 2: which is comprised of optimism and it's called challenge orientation.
Speaker 2: It's thinking of difficult situations is challenges rather than threats,
Speaker 2: and we might initially think of them as threats, but
Speaker 2: when we then shift to this thinking to an appraisal
Speaker 2: of them, is you know, this is what do I
Speaker 2: need to do here? What's the problem? And then the
Speaker 2: third piece is being confident in our ability to cope.
Speaker 2: And these are probably not the only way to it's
Speaker 2: find out the only way to have this mindset, but
Speaker 2: it seems to work really well for what we know now.
Speaker 2: And the reason that say optimism, which is one of
Speaker 2: the things that correlates with resilience. The reason that that's
Speaker 2: useful here because it doesn't make us resilient. What it
Speaker 2: does is that it contributes to this mindset which sort
Speaker 2: of gets us going. It gets us into the game.
Speaker 2: The mindset really helps us to, you know, face this
Speaker 2: potential trauma. Because the potential trauma and the things it
Speaker 2: causes us just about everybody. You know, it's disturbing, it
Speaker 2: causes nightmares, and you know, we think about it when
Speaker 2: we don't want to and we're a little bit on edge.
Speaker 2: That's a very common response, even among resilient people. We
Speaker 2: have to kind of deal with that. And when we
Speaker 2: have those reactions, the last thing we want to do
Speaker 2: is sort of face a head out and think about it.
Speaker 2: But when we do that, we then a lot of
Speaker 2: this other process happens, a flexibility sequence. But in order
Speaker 2: to do that, we need to face it. We need
Speaker 2: to sort of get ourselves into the game is I
Speaker 2: like to put it, And this combination of optimism, confidence
Speaker 2: and coping and challenge appraisal kind of work together to
Speaker 2: make us do that. To help us do that, they
Speaker 2: tell us, you know I can do this, you know
Speaker 2: I'll be able to do this. It'll be Okay, let
Speaker 2: me just get in there and do it. And that's
Speaker 2: how those those processes work. They don't make us resilient,
Speaker 2: but they kind of get us into it, get us rolling.
Speaker 2: And that's a big difference. We still may not be resilient,
Speaker 2: and we still may not cope. Okay until we do
Speaker 2: 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, like, statistically,
Speaker 1: have you put these three in a sort of multiplicative
Speaker 1: sort of way within a person?
Speaker 2: Let's get nerdy? I like that. Do you see what
Speaker 2: I'm Yes, Well, we we've we've we've only done it
Speaker 2: certain ways and and and basically what we know about
Speaker 2: these three is that when they're together, they influence each other.
Speaker 2: So optimism gives people, people become more confident. And this
Speaker 2: has been done largely with a technical path analysis. So
Speaker 2: you're already to say, okay, what leads to less depression
Speaker 2: or less PTSD after this event. So optimism then makes
Speaker 2: people more confident. When people become more confident, they also
Speaker 2: become more optimistic. When people become more confident, they also
Speaker 2: tend to be more likely to see it as a challenge.
Speaker 2: And people see it as a challenge, they become more optimistic.
Speaker 2: When people see it as a challenge, they become more
Speaker 2: confident to all these things tend to work together, and
Speaker 2: in the book, I argue that they have the synergistic effect.
Speaker 2: And you know, I mean that's that would be be
Speaker 2: nice to do more research in that, you know, But
Speaker 2: I'm just you know, those are questions for further work.
Speaker 2: You know, there's certainly a lot of researchers can be
Speaker 2: done on all these things.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. And I think that it's a
Speaker 1: it seems like a very reasonable hypothesis. And yeah, like
Speaker 1: those three things, I mean, I want more of them
Speaker 1: in my life. If I could turn up the lever
Speaker 1: manually and I could choose three, that would be in
Speaker 1: my top list for sure. Well, tell me, you know,
Speaker 1: unpack a little more of the flexibility sequence. You started
Speaker 1: to talk about it, but I think there's more of
Speaker 1: the sequence than what you mentioned.
Speaker 2: So we do that, we the mindset gets as going
Speaker 2: as I mentioned, and I just want to repeat that
Speaker 2: if some people are not so optimistic or they're not
Speaker 2: so confident or coping, it doesn't matter so much. I
Speaker 2: think the mindset is what matters. And as long as
Speaker 2: people can generate that mindset, I can do this, you know,
Speaker 2: or I will do this. Let me just figure out
Speaker 2: how to do this or what do I have to
Speaker 2: do here? Right? So, you know I want it's really
Speaker 2: the act of embracing the stressor event, this potential trauma
Speaker 2: sort of head on. It doesn't mean, you know, diving
Speaker 2: into it. It means really just thinking about it a
Speaker 2: little bit. And this gets us into the flexibility sequence.
Speaker 2: That the flexibility sequence has three parts. And so I
Speaker 2: mean the basis of flexibility is that what I call
Speaker 2: flexibility is this capacity or this this process I should say,
Speaker 2: of working out what's going on as a stressor you know,
Speaker 2: this this potential traumas happened to me. It was an
Speaker 2: ugly event. I'm now thinking about it. It's popping into
Speaker 2: my mind. I feel bad about it, you know, I
Speaker 2: feel it's I feel like I'm in a day in danger.
Speaker 2: I feel maybe humiliated you know, I just had a
Speaker 2: nightmare last night. I can't quite work it out. I'm
Speaker 2: an edge, you know. Am I traumatized? I'm traumatized. That's
Speaker 2: a common assumption. So but if that's a that's a
Speaker 2: thinking about it is I'm you know, in that terms,
Speaker 2: I'm traumatized. This is going to be bad in the future,
Speaker 2: that doesn't get us anywhere. Instead, if we think about
Speaker 2: the fact that this happened, there are these ugly things
Speaker 2: associated with these things we don't want to think about,
Speaker 2: but they happen to us, and it's it's making us
Speaker 2: very unhappy in the moment. They're making us. It's finding
Speaker 2: we're finding it difficult to get on with our lives.
Speaker 2: So what is it that's happened to me? What is
Speaker 2: it that I need to do here? And if we
Speaker 2: think about that, we begin to see at least some
Speaker 2: kind of answer, at least for them the immediate moment
Speaker 2: in this situation. What are these nightmares about or what?
Speaker 2: You know? What are these images that are bothering so much?
Speaker 2: And when we see when we think about that, we
Speaker 2: can then think about what can I do about it?
Speaker 2: What is it that I need to do? And we
Speaker 2: might decide, Okay, I need to find a way to
Speaker 2: get this off my mind, or maybe I need to
Speaker 2: talk to people about it, or maybe I need to
Speaker 2: you know, get out of the house and you know,
Speaker 2: go for a walk, or maybe I need to just
Speaker 2: somehow clear my clelear my head. Whatever we think about that,
Speaker 2: whatever might seem appropriate. Then we moved to the second stage,
Speaker 2: which I call repertoire, which we kind of say, okay,
Speaker 2: be I need to distract myself and clear my head
Speaker 2: from this so I don't think about it so much.
Speaker 2: What do we have in our repertoire that we can
Speaker 2: do that. You know, people vary and the skills that
Speaker 2: they have, So what do I have in my repertoire
Speaker 2: that will enable me to sort of meet this challenge?
Speaker 2: And then we try something and that leads to the
Speaker 2: third step was where we then evaluate it. That's called
Speaker 2: the feedback responsiveness step. We just say, okay, I tried, say,
Speaker 2: you know, distracting myself. Did it work? Is it working?
Speaker 2: You know, if it is, let's keep doing it. Or
Speaker 2: you know, if it isn't working, let's maybe modified a
Speaker 2: little bit or try a different way to distract ourselves.
Speaker 2: Or maybe we need to you know, try something completely different.
Speaker 2: This didn't work. Maybe what I need to do is
Speaker 2: to talk to my friends about this, or maybe what
Speaker 2: I need to do is give myself some time alone
Speaker 2: or I can really think about this, or maybe what
Speaker 2: I need to do is, you know, and get engaged
Speaker 2: in a task that's that's more fulfilling for me, or
Speaker 2: you know, we go to this process. We might This
Speaker 2: is I think some level is very simple, a process
Speaker 2: of working out how to solve the particular problem we're
Speaker 2: confronted at that moment, and you know, maybe later there's
Speaker 2: another problem, Like Okay, I'm not I'm distracting myself a
Speaker 2: little bit. I feel a little bit better, and I'm
Speaker 2: still frightened about what happened. Maybe I need to learn
Speaker 2: about it or read about it, or you know, or
Speaker 2: maybe just you know, spend time with really close friends
Speaker 2: who make me feel safe. You know. Whatever we think
Speaker 2: about and instead of thinking how will I not be traumatized,
Speaker 2: we're thinking instead about right now, what's the thing that
Speaker 2: I need to do right now to take to take
Speaker 2: on just a piece of this. I think it makes
Speaker 2: it more manageable. It gives us a sense that we
Speaker 2: can actually do this and as we as we manage
Speaker 2: little pieces at a time, we do begin to feel like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I got this, I can handle this, you know, and
Speaker 2: it's a you know, the next day it'll be different. Maybe,
Speaker 2: you know, the situation changes, there might be something else.
Speaker 2: But you know, that's I think when we break it
Speaker 2: down these pieces and you know, take it kind of
Speaker 2: one step at a time, we move forward.
Speaker 1: Word, what incredibly important research you're doing. Well, so, I mean,
Speaker 1: how do people become flexible in the first place? What
Speaker 1: are the you know, genetic environmental determinants of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I don't know about the genetic because we
Speaker 2: haven't looked at that yet. We have looked at the
Speaker 2: genetics of the trajectories, and there is a genetic piece
Speaker 2: to it, small piece like everything else. But first of all,
Speaker 2: we have to think about, well, how do we become flexible?
Speaker 2: As you just said. In the book, I have a
Speaker 2: chapter on the developmental piece to this, and in fact,
Speaker 2: we learned to be flexible. Everybody learns to be flexible
Speaker 2: to some extent as they grow up. And some of
Speaker 2: the research that we've done we found that most people
Speaker 2: aren't already somewhat flexible, you know, and that was I
Speaker 2: was very happy to see that because we're arguing that
Speaker 2: most people are resilient, and I've been arguing that they
Speaker 2: do this by being flexible about each you know, each
Speaker 2: event at each time. We better find that most people
Speaker 2: are flexible, and that is what we found in a
Speaker 2: couple of different studies. Some people are extremely flexible, but
Speaker 2: most people are at least moderately flexible. So the way
Speaker 2: we this happens in development is each one of these
Speaker 2: pieces has a kind of a developmental trajectory. For example,
Speaker 2: being sensitive to the context the senses the problem. We
Speaker 2: call that context sensitivity, but it turns out you can
Speaker 2: you can actually see this just in thinking about development.
Speaker 2: There's research showing all these things developed slowly in people.
Speaker 2: But think about context sensitivity or reading the situation like
Speaker 2: what's happened? I mean, now, what do I need to
Speaker 2: do now? And as classic example, with children, as they
Speaker 2: go in different situations, their caregivers and their teachers teach
Speaker 2: them how to read the situation. You know for the
Speaker 2: famous line, and you know most infamous is that what
Speaker 2: you say to a child, you use your inside voice here.
Speaker 2: You know, essentially whoever's telling that the child a teacher
Speaker 2: or a caregiver or somebody else. You're saying, in this situation,
Speaker 2: you have to be quiet. And so children begin to learn, oh,
Speaker 2: this is a situation when I when I have to
Speaker 2: be quiet and you know, behave. And this is a
Speaker 2: situation where I can just run loose. And this is
Speaker 2: a situation where I have to be polite. In this
Speaker 2: situation where I can stick my finger in my friend's
Speaker 2: peanut butter sandwich because nobody, you know whatever. I'm in
Speaker 2: the cafeteria. And I grew up with lots of brothers,
Speaker 2: so I know about this. And this is the kind
Speaker 2: of a through the course of development, as as our
Speaker 2: brains are out, we get more cognitive skills. We really
Speaker 2: learn to read the intergies of situations very well. And
Speaker 2: we do this to the point where it's it's an
Speaker 2: overlearned behavior. You know, it's an overlearned skill. In other words,
Speaker 2: did we get to do it so well we don't
Speaker 2: even know we're doing it, which I think is why.
Speaker 2: And the same with the other pieces. You know, we
Speaker 2: learn different coping behaviors and emotion regulation behaviors, and we
Speaker 2: learn to pay attention to whether they're working or not.
Speaker 2: The reason I think it's important to name it in
Speaker 2: this book is because most people don't even know they
Speaker 2: do this, you know, And so I think we can
Speaker 2: use this more effectively in our lives when we know
Speaker 2: this is actually the process and we can we can
Speaker 2: also shore up any deficits we might have in any
Speaker 2: of these things by you know, by thinking about it
Speaker 2: directly and practicing it, and you know, see if we
Speaker 2: can improve these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing you talk about that's very helpful is
Speaker 1: the importance of goal directed self talking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so self talk. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of been a lot of work on self talk. We
Speaker 2: all sort of talk to ourselves and sometimes we talked
Speaker 2: to ourselves out loud, and often we do this again
Speaker 2: without being aware of it. But self talk is a
Speaker 2: very it's very effective, and it's it's very a nice
Speaker 2: way to be able to access things we do. So
Speaker 2: one of my favorite examples is, you know, you're you
Speaker 2: try to do something really difficult, like I think the
Speaker 2: book is example of make a difficult basketball shot, or
Speaker 2: prepare a really kind of elaborate meal for guests, but
Speaker 2: you don't for your guests in your home, but you
Speaker 2: don't quite know if it's going to work out okay.
Speaker 2: And then it does work out okay, and we might
Speaker 2: be thinking to ourselves, wow, I wasn't sure I could
Speaker 2: you make this recipe? I make this basketball shot, but
Speaker 2: I put a lot of effort into it. I'm usually
Speaker 2: pretty good at these things. As I took a chance
Speaker 2: with this, and they seem to really like it. That
Speaker 2: is the thoughts going on in our head. But we
Speaker 2: then concretize these by saying to ourselves you know privately,
Speaker 2: yes you know, or something along those lines, you know,
Speaker 2: something simple like that. And in that space of self talk,
Speaker 2: yes you know, we can also we can go the
Speaker 2: other way too, where we could ourselves criticize ourselves. You know,
Speaker 2: you idiot, you dummy? What made you think you could
Speaker 2: do that? And that's Those are examples of what's called
Speaker 2: automatic self talk. We don't we're bare the way we're
Speaker 2: even doing it. That that condenses a lot of cut
Speaker 2: things going in our brains. It's a simple phrase. But
Speaker 2: then intentional self talk is when we actually use self
Speaker 2: talk to remind ourselves or to help ourselves do something.
Speaker 2: So there are lots of self talk that we can
Speaker 2: use for this flexibility mindset and flexibility sequence. For for example, optimism,
Speaker 2: a great piece of self talk would be like, it's
Speaker 2: going to be okay. The future is generally always okay,
Speaker 2: and this will be okay too, This will pass. These
Speaker 2: are common things people say to themselves. It will eventually pass.
Speaker 2: You'll eventually recede into the background. It will be okay.
Speaker 2: Confidence and coping, you would say, you know, you know
Speaker 2: you can do these kind of things, so you know
Speaker 2: you'll find a way to do these things. A challenge appraisal,
Speaker 2: you know, we might say to ourselves, so what really
Speaker 2: is the challenger? What do we need to do? And
Speaker 2: the same I think that sort of leeds into the
Speaker 2: flexibility sequence. The self talk for the flexibility sequence might
Speaker 2: be like, for the context sensitivity is is kind of
Speaker 2: what I just said. For challenge appraisal, what's happening here?
Speaker 2: What do I need to do? What is it that's
Speaker 2: bothering so much? Bothering me so much? And then the
Speaker 2: flexibility sequence, I'm sorry. The repertoire part is what am
Speaker 2: I able to do? What am I good at? What
Speaker 2: can I what can I use here that I am
Speaker 2: able to do? And in the last part really is
Speaker 2: the feedback part. The part week sort of decide how
Speaker 2: it's working. It's basically simple, is this working? Is this?
Speaker 2: Does this seem to be? Like? Is the problem still
Speaker 2: there today? That I do it? And those you know
Speaker 2: in the in the book, I listed a chart of
Speaker 2: these sort of basic self talk for these for the
Speaker 2: sequence and the flexibility mindset, and then a few other examples,
Speaker 2: and then you know, I suggest people can make up
Speaker 2: their own if they're not comfortable with these. And of
Speaker 2: course there's another kind that Ethan Cross has done a
Speaker 2: lot of work on what's called distance self talk or
Speaker 2: objective self talk. And then in that case you're talking
Speaker 2: to third person, you use your own name, so you
Speaker 2: might say you might say, for example, you know, Scott
Speaker 2: you can do this, or you know, Scott, you've done
Speaker 2: this before. You know you can do this, you know,
Speaker 2: things like that, and that's very effective.
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, I think that relates to like Kristin Neff's
Speaker 1: research and self compassion. She often says, treat yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: like you treat a friend and say and be like Scott,
Speaker 1: you know, like I love you. You know you can
Speaker 1: do this, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I think also when you're
Speaker 2: speaking into about yourself and a third person. There's a
Speaker 2: certain kind of how you can applaud yourself much more
Speaker 2: easily in a sense or you know, or or remind
Speaker 2: yourself that you can do things, you have done things,
Speaker 2: and you're good at some things. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, are there any other era
Speaker 1: tips for being able to boost your flexibility mindset? And
Speaker 1: you're the whole sequence that you're talking about other than
Speaker 1: self talk and what you've talked about already.
Speaker 2: Well, I think one of the things we've learned that
Speaker 2: we haven't used this whole thing in any kind of
Speaker 2: training or intervention yet, although some colleagues of mine have
Speaker 2: and mentioned that in a kind of a loose way.
Speaker 2: One of my colleagues, Wendy Lichtenthal, who's in the book
Speaker 2: I talk about her. She's a really, really terribly talented clinician.
Speaker 2: She's really good, and she works with people under great duress,
Speaker 2: and she has been experimenting with trying to you know,
Speaker 2: talking about them the flexibility sequence primarily, and you know,
Speaker 2: so helping people step back a little bit and think
Speaker 2: about this sequence and again, you know, it's really focusing
Speaker 2: on what's happening in the moment rather than the whole,
Speaker 2: you know, broad spectrum, which it often looks really bad
Speaker 2: to people, instead of focusing on the moment what you
Speaker 2: can actually do, and before you know it, you've actually
Speaker 2: gone through a lot the pieces that won't make it
Speaker 2: so it won't be so bad. So I think, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things, one of the insights she had
Speaker 2: was when you're right in the middle of something really
Speaker 2: really difficult, it's a little harder to develop or improve
Speaker 2: any of these skills. And I think of them as skills.
Speaker 2: So I think it would be really, really, a very
Speaker 2: good way to use this this work is to is
Speaker 2: to do this sort of in our daily life, you know,
Speaker 2: and to start to begin to think about, you know,
Speaker 2: what's happening to me right now, why am I so upset?
Speaker 2: Which is, you know, we're often upset about little things
Speaker 2: through the course of our daily life. And I found
Speaker 2: that remarkably when I started thinking about how to teach
Speaker 2: people to do this, started using it more in my
Speaker 2: daily life, you know, or you know, I'm unhappy with something.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm a I'm a parent, you know, I
Speaker 2: have financial woes or financial stresses. I'm a chair of
Speaker 2: a department. I you know, I you know, I do
Speaker 2: all the other things. I live in New York City.
Speaker 2: You know, where you're liably to get you know, on
Speaker 2: the subway, you're liable to encounter some strange situation all
Speaker 2: you know, at any moment, and sometimes those things are
Speaker 2: deeply upsetting and you find yourself feeling really bad and
Speaker 2: you can then at that point to say, Okay, what's happening? Why, what,
Speaker 2: what's really bothering me about this? I know this, this
Speaker 2: guy said something to me or you know, insulted me
Speaker 2: on the subway or you know, but what what's really
Speaker 2: bothering me about that? And what can I do about it?
Speaker 2: And you know what am I able to? What are
Speaker 2: the ways I can deal with this? And you know,
Speaker 2: trying out things? And that's it's very effective because you
Speaker 2: begin to learn more more, you know, learn better how
Speaker 2: to use these these skills and also to improve them
Speaker 2: if you need to. There's a lot of research showing
Speaker 2: these individual pieces can be improved.
Speaker 1: That's good news. That's good news. Yeah, in everyone.
Speaker 2: I would think, so, I mean, you know, the I
Speaker 2: think what we've what we've found is that the people
Speaker 2: who are not doing well in their lives typically have
Speaker 2: deficits in one of these areas, not all of them.
Speaker 2: In one of these areas. That was a kind of
Speaker 2: an unexpected finding in our research. So I think if
Speaker 2: we just we try to use these different processes and
Speaker 2: these different abilities in our daily life, we might quickly
Speaker 2: find out where we have the sort of the weak spot,
Speaker 2: and then we can try to work on that part.
Speaker 2: And you know, we can think about it, try it,
Speaker 2: you know, delve into a little bit more, and I
Speaker 2: think I think all of these things can definitely improved,
Speaker 2: probably in anyone I would.
Speaker 1: Say, Okay, again, that's good news. Okay, yeah, did do
Speaker 1: I say something? Oh?
Speaker 2: I don't know me. I mean, that's not anything we've
Speaker 2: ever tested, but I'm confident about that. I think for
Speaker 2: most people it's probably there's win in their reach to improve,
Speaker 2: especially if we know we can identify where we have
Speaker 2: a week spot that we can focus on that.
Speaker 1: How much has your research made contact with the work
Speaker 1: on hope, you know, like Senan Olpez's work on Hope, Not.
Speaker 2: At all as far as I can tell. I mean,
Speaker 2: we you know, we've been very busy, and you know
Speaker 2: there's a lot of room we're always looking to expand
Speaker 2: in different directions, you know. Yeah, And you know, I
Speaker 2: mean where I'm going in the future is really this
Speaker 2: flexibility sequence in the mindset. Try to unpack it more
Speaker 2: and learn how it works. And you know, when we
Speaker 2: first proposed these things, it wasn't that long ago. I
Speaker 2: first proposed a flexibility sequence about eight years ago only,
Speaker 2: and at the time, I thought, well, if this doesn't last,
Speaker 2: it means that somebody has improved it, and it's still
Speaker 2: kind of the way to think about it, and it
Speaker 2: still has mileage, and so getting me places. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm trying to understand it better. But I'd be happy
Speaker 2: if this, you know, progressed in a totally different direction,
Speaker 2: or simplify it, or that more complex whatever it is.
Speaker 2: I want to find out. We're going to be studying
Speaker 2: that in the future, I think.
Speaker 1: A true scientist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where's the data exactly?
Speaker 1: Exactly? So, and then there was a global pandemic that's
Speaker 1: the title of your last chapter. Yeah, so the pandemic
Speaker 1: hit while you were writing the book in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: How did the resilience blind spot? First of all, what
Speaker 1: is the resilience blind spot? I don't think we ever
Speaker 1: defined that. Yeah, and then how did that show itself
Speaker 1: during the pandemic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad you asked the question, Scott. So the
Speaker 2: resilience blind spot is what happens when we're exposed to
Speaker 2: potential trauma, and it particularly becomes a blind spot when
Speaker 2: we have a mass trauma that exposed to a lot
Speaker 2: of people. When we feel and this when we feel
Speaker 2: bad about something, I mean, if you're really upset, it's
Speaker 2: hard not to think that it's going to last a
Speaker 2: long time. This goes back to the social psychologists like
Speaker 2: Dan Gilbert, and a lot of people know Dan Gilbert
Speaker 2: from Daniel Gilbert from his wonderful work from his wonderful
Speaker 2: book Stumbling on Happiness, which is just a really excellent book,
Speaker 2: very readable, and you know he had done all this
Speaker 2: wonderful work on affective forecasting, which basically show that when
Speaker 2: we feel bad and we'll feel fear, will we feel anger,
Speaker 2: it doesn't feel like it will go away in twenty
Speaker 2: minutes or an hour. It feels like it will last,
Speaker 2: you know, for days and weeks. And the same thing
Speaker 2: when we feel positive things, it just seems like it
Speaker 2: will last forever. So when a traumatic event happens, are
Speaker 2: potentially traumatic event is I like to call them. It
Speaker 2: feels like, oh my god, I'm traumatized now, I'm going
Speaker 2: to be this way for a long time. And I've
Speaker 2: many friends who have told me the same thing, you know,
Speaker 2: and they've been through something, and they start having nightmares
Speaker 2: and start having intrusive thoughts and they're anxious that they're
Speaker 2: traumatized now, and it's just basically not true, at least
Speaker 2: not in the first week. That's really just a normal reaction.
Speaker 2: And those reactions can be useful, but it's at that
Speaker 2: time that we can really do the work of moving on,
Speaker 2: getting beyond it. And but that's the resilience blind spot
Speaker 2: that when we when we were feeling these emotions, we
Speaker 2: can't even see resilience. And when it happens on a
Speaker 2: mass scale, say with the COVID virus or nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: we we we begin to think everybody's going to be
Speaker 2: this way. And I wrote about this recently an article
Speaker 2: in one of the major newspapers I think it was
Speaker 2: The Wall Streetternal if I can name names, and I
Speaker 2: basically thought it was on the anniversary of nine to
Speaker 2: eleven and the twenty annivers and I called it the
Speaker 2: Lessons Learned from nine to eleven and the lessons we
Speaker 2: keep relearning, and nine to eleven was a perfect example.
Speaker 2: This nine to eleven was a horrific event, obviously, and
Speaker 2: I was in New York at the time, and it
Speaker 2: was really a distressing event. I was having nightmares, I was,
Speaker 2: you know, on edge like so many other people in
Speaker 2: the city. But the predictions, you know, that research began, studies,
Speaker 2: surveys began to happen, you know, within days of nine eleven,
Speaker 2: and they predicted a very dire outcome. You know, huge
Speaker 2: portions of the population were feeling distressed and anxious. People
Speaker 2: in New York were already showing PTSD symptoms, lots of people,
Speaker 2: and it led to these sort of you know announcements
Speaker 2: that you know, we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis,
Speaker 2: and the Federal Emergency Management am see FEMA A lotted
Speaker 2: well over one hundred million dollars I don't remember the
Speaker 2: exact amount, was well over one hundred million dollars to
Speaker 2: New York, so New York could provide free therapy any
Speaker 2: and all comers. And a few months later, a lot
Speaker 2: of those that distress and those trauma systems disappeared or
Speaker 2: they they were gone. People weren't feeling that anymore, and
Speaker 2: people didn't want the psychotherapy, and you know, the treatment
Speaker 2: for nine to eleven the emergency treatment, and they hadn't
Speaker 2: spent a lot of the money, so initially they spent
Speaker 2: it on advertising, you know, like it was essentially saying,
Speaker 2: come on, you really know you need treatment, but it's
Speaker 2: you're afraid or instigmatized. I don't remember the exact wording
Speaker 2: of these ads, I'm paraphrasing, but it still didn't happen,
Speaker 2: and a lot of therapists were confused, and you know,
Speaker 2: we're trying to find customers, but people were basically kind
Speaker 2: of over it. I still remember I mentioned this recently.
Speaker 2: I forget where I mentioned it, but about a month
Speaker 2: after nine to eleven, I was on the Columbia campus
Speaker 2: with my children, and there were no airplanes in the
Speaker 2: sky because all commercial flights in and out of New
Speaker 2: York were stopped. The only thing we saw were military
Speaker 2: jet fighter planes in the sky, and it was disturbing,
Speaker 2: you know, not to see these airplanes because where I
Speaker 2: live in Manhattan, it's in the flight pass, so either
Speaker 2: the planes are flying up the Hudson to the east,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to the west or you know, up the
Speaker 2: up Brooklyn and the Queens to the east, or right
Speaker 2: over my head in Manhattan, and there were planes in
Speaker 2: the sky. Then about a month later, an airplane and
Speaker 2: commercial airplanes right over the campus, and I looked up
Speaker 2: and I felt this surge of I don't know, relief,
Speaker 2: And I looked around. Everybody in the campus was looking
Speaker 2: up at that plane and showing this great surge of
Speaker 2: relief that I was feeling, because that plane signified we're
Speaker 2: getting back to normal. The blind spot was in a sense,
Speaker 2: tells you, no, that's not going to happen. So when
Speaker 2: the pandemic hit, I was actually in as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: I was in I think I was in Norway at
Speaker 2: the time, about to begin my trip around Europe by
Speaker 2: my train, and I had to come home and I
Speaker 2: returned to New York and I had to quarantine, and
Speaker 2: I was, I was. I have to admit I was
Speaker 2: annoyed by that. I was. I was pissed. I was
Speaker 2: because I had to quarantine, and I you know, I
Speaker 2: felt like, come on, I was in Norway. They're not
Speaker 2: They're only there are fewer people in Norway in the
Speaker 2: entire New York City, right, and and you know, nobody
Speaker 2: was really at that time taking the virus very seriously.
Speaker 2: But then during my coreuarantine, by the time my quarantine
Speaker 2: was over two weeks, the entire city was in quarantine.
Speaker 2: By the end of the month, about three or four
Speaker 2: weeks later, we were up to about eight hundred deaths
Speaker 2: a day in New York. It was just shockingly horrible.
Speaker 2: And around that time, you know, there was a refrigerator
Speaker 2: truck makeshift morgue right down the street from my apartment.
Speaker 2: There were hospital tents and makeshift hospital tents in Central Park,
Speaker 2: and you know, nobody was out in the streets. It
Speaker 2: was you know, I used to ride my bicycle a
Speaker 2: little bit later, right down the middle of Times Square.
Speaker 2: That was just the strangest thing, an empty Times Square.
Speaker 2: And at that time, let's say, i'll say in early April,
Speaker 2: there were all kinds of again the same lesson from
Speaker 2: nine to eleven. There were all kinds of pronouncements that
Speaker 2: we're headed for an enormous mental health crisis that were
Speaker 2: not equipped to handle. And I decided thought, well, that's
Speaker 2: the resilience blind spot. That can't be true. It's bad
Speaker 2: and people are suffering, but this will will We'll get
Speaker 2: used to this and we'll deal with it because we
Speaker 2: always do. And so I wrote a piece for the
Speaker 2: Association for Psychological Science website. They'd asked me to do this,
Speaker 2: just some of the points that they called it an
Speaker 2: expert commentary that was flattered by that, but they, you know,
Speaker 2: being that I studied resilience, they asked me to say,
Speaker 2: what does psychological science tell us about this? And I
Speaker 2: made some of the points of may just discussing with
Speaker 2: you right now, and I again said we're going to
Speaker 2: get through this because we always do, and in fact
Speaker 2: we have. You know, everybody they think is still stressed out.
Speaker 2: It's a long term stressor a lot of people have had,
Speaker 2: including myself. I've had physical problems that are that are
Speaker 2: basically not tied to anything, but they're clearly stress related.
Speaker 2: You know, small pains there, you know, small difficulties that
Speaker 2: my doctor told me, there's so many people coming in
Speaker 2: now for these unexplained physical problems. These are stress related problems.
Speaker 2: And we've been under this kind of stress for a
Speaker 2: long time, but we have dealt with it, we have
Speaker 2: hoped with it one way or another. You and I
Speaker 2: are talking right now. We're on zoom. We're not on zoom,
Speaker 2: we're on a stone cloud, but we're talking and we're
Speaker 2: dealing with it, and we're having a decent conversation. I
Speaker 2: can see your face and you can see my face,
Speaker 2: and we're smiling sometimes, you know, I mean, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's I think that's the lesson. And I think we'll
Speaker 2: learn this again the next time something happens, unless we
Speaker 2: start paying attention that this pattern.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and hopefully the tools in your book will also
Speaker 1: offer people a good toolkit for dealing with any sort
Speaker 1: of future things that arouse future challenges. George, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for your really seminal work in the field.
Speaker 1: I am a great admirer, as you know, of the
Speaker 1: research you do, and I really believe in the importance
Speaker 1: of it now more than ever. So thank you so
Speaker 1: much for chatting with me today and for the word
Speaker 1: thank you.
Speaker 2: I thank you very much for this conversation. It was
Speaker 2: very nice to talk with you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.
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Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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