The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think about Ptsd

With "groundbreaking research on the psychology of resilience" (Adam Grant), a top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is in and fail to recognize how resilient people really are.

After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came.

In The End of Trauma, pioneering psychologist George A. Bonanno argues that we failed to predict the psychological response to 9/11 because most of what we understand about trauma is wrong. For starters, it's not nearly as common as we think. In fact, people are overwhelmingly resilient to adversity. What we often interpret as PTSD are signs of a natural process of learning how to deal with a specific situation. We can cope far more effectively if we understand how this process works. Drawing on four decades of research, Bonanno explains what makes us resilient, why we sometimes aren't, and how we can better handle traumatic stress.

Hopeful and humane, The End of Trauma overturns everything we thought we knew about how people respond to hardship.

ISBN-13: 9781541674363

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 09-07-2021

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

George A. Bonanno is professor of clinical psychology and director of the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. Bonanno pioneered the idea of resilience in the study of loss and trauma, and developed a theory of grief that is now the standard paradigm among clinical psychologists. His research has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CBS, ABC, CNN, and in many places elsewhere. The author of The Other Side of Sadness, he lives with his family in New York.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Introduction Why Was I Doing Okay? 1

Part I Two-Thirds

Chapter 1 The Invention of PTSD 21

Chapter 2 Finding Resilience 41

Part II Stories and Predictions

Chapter 3 More Than Meets the Eye 71

Chapter 4 The Resilience Paradox 95

Part III Getting Ourselves into the Game

Chapter 5 A Mindset for Flexibility 121

Chapter 6 Synergy 143

Part IV Nuts and Bolts

Chapter 7 The Flexibility Sequence 169

Chapter 8 Becoming Flexible 201

Part V Repeat after Me

Chapter 9 Talking to Ourselves 225

Chapter 10 And Then There Was a Global Pandemic 253

Acknowledgments 271

Notes 275

Index 311

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