The Surprising Truth About Grief, Loss and Resilience (#270)

Grief and trauma are part of being human.

They confront all of us, often more than once in a lifetime.

Yet, most of us have little idea what to expect.

Even people who've endured a major loss often wonder: Was my grief normal?

Will it feel the same if it happens again?

We tend to imagine grief as overwhelming and endless, and trauma as something that breaks people permanently.

But what if those assumptions are wrong?

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is Three Takeaways.

On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today I'm excited to be joined by Dr.

George Bonanno, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University and one of the world's leading researchers on grief, trauma, and resilience.

His work has transformed how we understand loss, showing that most people are far more resilient than we think, and that bouncing back is not only possible, it's actually normal.

He is the author of The Other Side of Sadness and The End of Trauma.

George, welcome to Three Takeaways, and thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you, Lynn.

It's my pleasure to be here and talk with you.

George, let's start with the core of your work.

You found that most people don't fall apart after loss.

That's surprising.

What did your research reveal about how people actually respond to to grief?

We first did this research with grief, with individuals who've lost a loved one.

In the beginning, it was losing a spouse.

And what we found in those studies, and then repeatedly as we moved on to study trauma more broadly, was that most people, the majority, will struggle for a short while, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and then they will function relatively normally.

They will continue to show what we call a stable trajectory of good mental health, pretty much continue as they had been before.

You've described seeing bereaved people laugh, enjoy themselves, and even feel joy, sometimes just days after a major loss.

Is that common?

Yes, it's extremely common.

Well, we've seen that in the majority of people that we've interviewed.

And we've interviewed a whole range of people.

We see people talking in these interviews and they might be talking about something very very difficult and they're crying.

And then seconds later, maybe 30 seconds later, they still have tears on their face and they're relating a happy story or telling a funny anecdote and they're laughing with a clear sense of joy on their face, which we decode from the facial muscles.

We see this shift to positive.

from negative very commonly.

Most people will show this reaction and most people will show at least one reaction like that while they're talking about the loss.

Why do you think our cultural image of grief is so distorted?

A lot of it comes from the 19th century when we romanticized it.

A lot of it comes from the early literature on grief, which focused primarily on people who couldn't get over their loss.

And that's what we hear about.

That's what we read about.

But, you know, that's a really small sample of what actually happens.

Grief is something that literally everybody in their life goes through, often multiple times.

It's inevitable that other people people in our lives will die.

So it's something that everybody goes through.

If everybody was that debilitated by grief, we wouldn't be here.

The human race wouldn't have survived.

So grief then is not all-encompassing, as many people believe?

It can feel that way.

But what we feel isn't necessarily what's actually happening.

It definitely, I don't want to misspeak here about this, grief can feel terrible for a long period of time for some people, but not not for most people.

For most people, it kind of comes and goes in these different states.

So it kind of hits you and then it sort of drifts away a little bit, and then it comes back, and then it drifts away a little bit, and then it comes back.

There's some research on this that shows that for most people, It's almost looking like a kind of a cardiovascular wave, you know, these peaks that you see on a cardiovascular machine that gradually get smaller and smaller and smaller until they level off again.

And that's probably within the first three three or four weeks.

And then it really kind of levels off and people can experience a more smoother existence.

Most books on grief are written by therapists, but you weren't trained as one and you came in with fresh eyes and a scientific mindset.

How did that shape your research and your findings?

I actually am a trained therapist.

And I was a therapist for a while.

But when I had the opportunity to study grief, initially i was not interested because i didn't know much about it it didn't seem like an area i would be interested in but because i came at it in a sense from left field and i came at it not knowing much about it i was fascinated when i began to look into it because i what i saw was okay here is this phenomenon this difficult experience that literally everybody has to go through at some point in their lives.

And yet the literature that I was looking at, the literature I was finding, seemed like it was woefully out of date.

It was not using any of the modern research techniques that we had at the time.

This was in 1991.

And I had been trained in experimental research and, you know, the most sophisticated research techniques that were around.

And it just seemed to me that this field, this topic that was so critical, so important, something everybody has to go through, hadn't been updated at all and was still holding on to outdated assumptions about what the experience would be.

So then I began to use, immediately use the techniques

that I had at my disposal and the different research approaches that people have now been using.

And immediately we began to find new things.

You also study trauma.

Can you summarize briefly how recovery from trauma is similar to or different from grief?

When we experience a traumatic event, it's almost the polar opposite.

So grief is about turning inward.

It's about essentially trying to make sense of the fact that this person that we are connected to no longer lives in the world.

Everything slows down and we turn inward.

When we experience a potential trauma, it's the opposite in a sense because that's a situation, not where something is lost, but there is a very dangerous thing happened.

A violent or life-threatening event or a sexual violation.

It just happened.

And it's the opposite.

We are, in a sense, more alert.

We experience more arousal.

We're in a kind of a danger mode where we're trying to make sense of the danger and we're thinking about it a lot.

We're getting bits and pieces of it in our mind, what we call intrusions or in nightmares.

And those reactions are very common among most people in the first days and weeks after one of those events.

So it's a question of your brain is also trying to make sense of it, but trying to make sense of the fact that there's this dangerous thing that happened that could happen again.

So gradually our brains sort of work out how likely is it really to happen and what exactly did happen and how can I continue to live my life with this information.

What are some of the biggest myths about trauma and PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome?

Well, I think one of the myths, not unlike grief, is that most people will suffer PTSD when they're exposed to what we think of as a trauma that will take years again for us to work through or permanently damage us.

That's not true at all.

Most people do not experience PTSD.

Most people, in fact, show what we call a resilient trajectory.

They struggle for a little bit, usually a few days or a few weeks with these intrusive thoughts or trauma-like symptoms, and then they're basically functioning normally.

Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, sometimes a little bit less, but they're basically functioning normally and they've left it behind.

There is sometimes delayed reactions to trauma, but those are not, again, not the reactions that we assume whether the person is healthy and then suddenly they're not healthy.

It's usually when they're struggling and they're not getting better.

But those are really the typical reactions that people experience.

You studied New York City after 9-11.

What surprised you?

Well, what we found was that basically people recovered remarkably quickly.

Now, we anticipated that people would be resilient to 9-11 because we'd seen this in other events already, but we weren't 100% sure.

This was a novel event, an unprecedented event.

And we did see a lot of early reactions everywhere, both in New York City and nationally.

In fact, internationally, there was a lot of distress around 9-11, but there were these typical reactions that we see of people having nightmares, intrusive thoughts.

And at the time, that was...

misunderstood as trauma reactions.

But in fact, those were the typical kind of preparatory reactions that people experience, healthy reactions.

And some people were seriously traumatized.

There were a lot of people in those towers or near the towers, and some of those people were seriously traumatized.

But most people, within a few months, were relatively back to their normal level of functioning.

How can we all learn to be more resilient, to recover better?

I tend to think of resilience as an outcome.

So how can we get to that outcome more quickly?

And I think of it in terms of what I call flexibility: that we know from the research that nothing works every time.

That all these different events that we go through, traumas and losses, there are two broad categories, grief and trauma.

But within those categories, there are lots of different variations in what people go through.

And what works in those different situations is going to vary greatly, even within the same type of situation.

So, sometimes we need to distract ourselves.

Sometimes we need to focus on what's happening and understand it.

Sometimes we need to talk to somebody else about it.

Sometimes we need to stay away from other people and just kind of reflect.

And what the research shows is that it's really a matter of figuring out each time something happens, what's the best thing to do in this moment right now to make myself feel better or to deal with whatever problem I'm having right now.

And then a little bit later, we have to go through the same process again.

Okay, now what's the best thing I need to be doing?

And for everybody, it's a process of figuring that out.

We call that flexible adaptation.

We've also called it regulatory flexibility.

It's this process.

It's kind of a trial and error process where we work out what's happening now and what do I need to do.

And that's something that we found in our research that most people can do already, whether they know it or not.

But I think a way to increase the odds of being resilient, it would be to get better at doing that, to learn more about it and get better at doing that.

George, your research is very reassuring.

The fact that most people recover from loss, they recover from trauma, they are not experiencing enormous, overwhelming feelings months and years later.

It's encouraging.

Is there anything else you wish more people knew about loss, trauma, and resilience?

I would love it if people really understood that most people are resilient and that very likely that anytime something happens, anybody listening will be resilient to that event.

Statistically, that's the norm.

So hang in there and do the best you can to figure out what's bothering you at the moment, what's happening at the moment, and what's the best thing you can do from what the tools you have to manage it, and you'll be okay.

George, what are your three takeaways?

One, I would say, is that most people are going to be fine after a loss or potential trauma.

Most people are going to be able to function quite normatively and healthily in the weeks and months afterwards, and that they will continue to do so.

They will not suffer lasting harm.

Two, that the initial reactions we have after one of these events, after a loss of potential trauma, are usually normative and healthy, even though they may not seem that way.

So having nightmares, a few nightmares or having intrusive thoughts or being plagued by images of a person that we've lost in the first days and weeks.

Those are quite normative reactions.

Those are healthy reactions.

Our mind is trying to make sense of these events that we went through and trying to recalibrate and adjust to them.

A third takeaway, I think, would be that there was this idea for a long time that if one is not grieving sufficiently, they'll have a delayed grief reaction.

That's simply not true.

And in the trauma world, there's the idea that you can have gone through an event in the past that you don't even quite remember anymore, but it's sort of lurking inside you as kind of a hidden trauma and that it's sort of causing problems in your life.

Neither of those things have any scientific reality to them.

Thank you, George.

Your research is not only rigorous, it's hopeful.

And in a world where grief and trauma touch so many, that hope matters more than ever.

Thank you.

Thanks for talking with me.

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I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.

Thanks for listening.