Coping with Trauma

Getting Over It by Malcolm Gladwell

The Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno, for instance, followed a large number of men and women who had recently lost a spouse. "In the bereavement area, the assumption has been that when people lose a loved one there is a kind of unitary process that everybody must go through," Bonanno says. "That process has been called grief work. The grief must be processed. It must be examined. It must be fully understood, then finished. It was the same kind of assumption that dominated the trauma world. The idea was that everybody exposed to these kinds of events will have to go through the same kind of process if they are to recover. And if you don't do this, if you have somehow inhibited or buried the experience, the assumption was that you would pay in the long run."

Instead, Bonanno found a wide range of responses. Some people went through a long and painful grieving process; others a period of debilitating depression. But by far the most common response was resilience: the majority of those who had just suffered from one of the most painful experiences of their lives never lapsed into serious depression, experienced a relatively brief period of grief symptoms, and soon returned to normal functioning. These people were not necessarily the hardiest or the healthiest. They just managed, by one means or another, to muddle through.

"Most people just plain cope well," Bonanno says. "The vast majority of people get over traumatic events, and get over them remarkably well. Only a small subset—five to fifteen per cent—struggle in a way that says they need help."

What these patterns of resilience suggest is that human beings are naturally endowed with a kind of psychological immune system, which keeps us in balance and overcomes wild swings to either end of the emotional spectrum. Most of us aren't resilient just in the wake of bad experiences, after all. We're also resilient in the wake of wonderful experiences; the joy of a really good meal, or winning a tennis match, or getting praised by a boss doesn't last that long, either. "One function of emotions is to signal to people quickly which things in their environments are dangerous and should be avoided and which are positive and should be approached," Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has said. "People have very fast emotional reactions to events that serve as signals, informing them what to do. A problem with prolonged emotional reactions to past events is that it might be more difficult for these signals to get through. If people are still in a state of bliss over yesterday's success, today's dangers and hazards might be more difficult to recognize."...

Wilson and his longtime collaborator, Daniel T. Gilbert, argue that a distinctive feature of this resilience is that people don't realize that they possess it. People are bad at forecasting their emotions—at appreciating how well, under most circumstances, they will recover....We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. "When I talk about our research, I say to people, 'I'm not telling you that bad things don't hurt,'" Gilbert says. "Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I'm saying is that the reality doesn't meet the expectation."

"Get over it!" sounds mean, but eventually, you will. This goes for terrorist attacks, too.