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Dr. Robin Stern: Welcome to The Gaslight Effect podcast. I'm Robin Stern, co-founder and associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and author of the bestselling book, The Gaslight Effect. I'm an educator and a psychoanalyst, but first and foremost, I'm a wife, a mother, a sister, aunt, and healer. And just like many of you, I was a victim of gaslighting. Please join me for each episode as I interview fascinating guests and explore the concept of gaslighting. You'll learn what it truly means to be gaslighted, how it feels, how to recognize it, and how to understand it, and ultimately how to get out of it.
Dr. Robin Stern: Before we begin, I want you to know that talking about gaslighting can bring up challenging and painful emotions. Give yourself permission to feel them. Some of you may wanna go more deeply with your emotions. While some of you may hold them more lightly, no matter what you're feeling, know that your emotions are a guide to your inner life. Your emotions are sacred and uniquely you respect and embrace them for they have information to give you. If you want to listen to other episodes of the Gaslight Effect podcast, you can find them@robinstern.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for being here with me.
Dr. Robin Stern: Good morning everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Gaslight Effect podcast. I'm really delighted to be here this morning, commemorating nine 11 with my friend and colleague, Dr. George Bonano from Columbia University at Teacher's College at Columbia. Uh, we were both in New York on nine 11. We both have authored pieces and books relating to grief and loss and the strength of the human spirit. And, uh, we both think a lot about resilience and response to toxic stress and to traumatic and potentially traumatic events. And, um, we're working now on the flexibility mindset and exercises to help build flexibility as a pathway to resilience. Dr. George, will you please say hi to my guests and, and, um, we'll talk about our experiences from nine 11 and our work and how it relates, particularly your work since you are the leading expert.
Dr. George Bonanno: Hi, Robin. Thanks for having me on on your podcast. It's nice to talk with you again, to have a chance to talk with your audience.
Dr. Robin Stern: Thank you. So let's, um, let's go back to nine 11. It's kind of sobering for me and, and somber, of course, to, to be thinking about that day and commemorating the lives, uh, of the people lost that day and the heroes involved and the care that happened following, um, and the strength of people who move through that trauma. Um, and all of that is what nine 11 is about. Um, and I wonder as an introduction before we even talk about what, where we were on that day in New York, George, will you tell us a little bit about your work and how it relates to nine 11?
Dr. George Bonanno: Well, I've been studying basically how people cope with loss and trauma for about 30 years now. And my work has really, from the beginning, been about documenting, identifying, documenting, and trying to understand the large numbers of people who cope with these seriously aversive events and move on with their lives relatively, um, with, in relatively short order. And I don't mean, what we don't see is that people are, are not harmed, but what that people are able to manage these events and move forward without lasting damage. Um, they're not insignificant events, but they're, they cope well, and I, I've called that the resilience trajectory. So I've been doing for, for 40, for 30 years now. Not just added a decade, 30 years, not 40 years, 30 years. Um, we've been trying to understand, you know, to doc document that and try to understand how it is that people are resilient.
Dr. Robin Stern: How did you, what was your interest in that to begin with? Well,
Dr. George Bonanno: I, I didn't really have an interest in, in, in the beginning. It was interesting. Um, I, I had been doing experimental work as a doctoral student at Yale, and I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I was offered the chance to run a large bereavement project in San Francisco the beginning of my career. And I didn't know much about bereavement. Um, and I, and frankly, I wasn't interested in, in bereavement. Um, I'd come outta left field in a sense, and I began to look at the literature. And when I looked at the literature, then I got interested. 'cause the literature seemed to me very outdated. It seemed, um, like what, what the going assumptions were about loss at the time were that, that everybody who suffered, who endures a loss will suffer greatly and for a long period of time and could basically use clinical help.
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, and that seemed out of date to me. It seemed like an old idea. It didn't, the literature didn't seem to be, um, a aware of all the advances in psychology and psychiatry. So I began to do research on that idea, on, on, on loss. And almost from the beginning we saw that we used somewhat different methods. So we brought in lots of people, not just people who were hurting, but anyone who had suffered a major loss. And from the beginning we saw that, that the majority of those people were resilient. In other words, they, even though they hurt when they talked about it, they might cry When they talked to us about it, they were still able to function well and function genuinely well in their lives. They were able to be close to other people, concentrate, et cetera, do their job. Um, and so that's, that's where my interests lie. Wow. That was interesting. That was fascinating. And we continued to see that, and eventually that brought me to study trauma more broadly. And, uh, at the time, I, about 10 years later, I moved to New York, and that was the, the timing was, uh, matched with the nine 11 attacks. I'd lived in New York only two years when nine 11 happened.
Dr. Robin Stern: Before we talk about that day, what, when you were studying resilience and when you were, uh, or when you were studying bereavement, and you said it seemed outdated, how did the study that was out there or the research that was out there, um, compare to your own personal experience with bereavement or what you'd witnessed in family and with friends?
Dr. George Bonanno: Oh, well, that, that's interesting. Yeah, because, um, I, I don't know when it was, let me have, I have to think a minute here. I think it was quite a few years earlier. Yeah, quite a few years earlier, um, I had lost my father as a very young man. And I remembered, uh, very, very acutely, very distinctly, um, that, um, I, I had, uh, wondered what it would be like. My father was, was, had lots of health problems, and he and I had a very complicated relationship. We didn't always get along. At one point we, you know, we had been very, very close. And then another point we were struggling. So it was a relationship on my mind a lot. And I wasn't, I left home at, as a young man, partly because of conflicts with my father when I thought about his death, because I, I'd known that another friend, another friend of mine had lost his father.
Dr. George Bonanno: And I thought, what would that be like to lose a parent? I couldn't imagine it as a, as a, as a, I think that was 19 years old, perhaps 20. Um, and then my father died. And I remember it was quite a profound experience, but I also, um, remember that I moved on and I was able to manage the pain, um, reasonably well, and to sit with it. And, you know, for, I remember the first couple weeks were very difficult. Um, but I continued to work my job and I do o you know, did other things. And, um, I thought, well, this is just life. I don't mean to say, you know, there, there are, I know that there are some people who suffer greatly after a loss, but it felt to me that this is, this is not how grief is portrayed in the literature. Uh, this did not completely, uh, turn my world inside out. This did not re, I did not require professional help. Um, and, um, it was, I felt more of a human experience than the literature made it seem.
Dr. Robin Stern: And was that true for the people you were witnessing around you? Um, did other people rush off to get clinical experience, or did they have more the experience that you did that they were profoundly sad and grief stricken, and then after a time they moved through it,
Dr. George Bonanno: I wasn't really paying so much attention. I was young, so there were fewer people in my immediate sphere that had lost somebody. Um, but, you know, you know, so I think I had some of the same assumptions at the time. I, my father died as, as other people did. Um, but it was when I became a, uh, when I, you know, became educated in psychology, became a mental health professional that I, and I began to see the literature and realize, okay, that we know a lot about how people function, how the mind works, and it doesn't make sense. Now within that broader context, to think that a loss would, would completely, um, overwhelm a person for a long time if that were the case, even at a, from a logical standpoint, if that were the case, how would the human race have got as far as it did? We would be devastated because loss is inevitable at every point in life. Every life we live long enough, we will lose people. So it, it, not, not a lot of it didn't quite make sense to me, um, uh, both practically and in terms of the, the education that had.
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah. And so when you then began to work at Columbia, uh, was that your special area?
Dr. George Bonanno: I came to Columbia, right, as a, as an expert in loss and trauma. Yeah.
Dr. Robin Stern: On then on nine 11, where first of all, were you at the school? Where were you that day?
Dr. George Bonanno: Yeah, I was, um, I was at Columbia. I was in my office, which, um, for, for those who don't know, so Columbia is quite a ways from downtown, from where, where ground zero was, uh, I would guess six miles perhaps. Um, and I remember, um, I mean, like everybody else, I remember that day so well. Um, my wife called me and told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. And like many people, I thought, well, that's a probably a small one engine plane. And there's a, there's a, you know, a couple windows got knocked out and there was some smoke. And I remember, um, I walked out into the hallway not long afterwards, and there were a lot of people talking and, um, they were talking about the plane, and they said it was really serious, and I don't remember all the details, but I went to, um, the tallest building on campus, um, and walked up the, wanted to walk up to the roof because it, it's quite easy to see the, the Twin towers.
Dr. George Bonanno: It was easy to see the twin towers from the roof. And as I was walking up the roof, people were coming down, and I remember one colleague looked at me and just shook his head, you know, with, um, like, you, a gesture of, of, of, this is terrible. So I said, really? Wow. So I went up as fast as I could, and I got to the roof. I don't remember now, I think, let's say 25 stories, not, not that high and up the, I had to take the stairway because the elevators were closed, and I got to the roof. And, um, I literally was stunned by what I saw, and I literally fell to my knees on the roof, um, because there was a world trade center engulfed in smoke. And, you know, there's a picture, I'll never forget this black smoke coming pouring out of the building. And I, I've never seen anything like that, this enormous building billowing in just u copious quantities of smoke filling this sky. And it was clear, something terribly, terribly was wrong.
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah, I, um, I also have a nine 11 story, of course. Uh, I was coming home from an exercise class, um, on, um, Lexington Avenue in the eighties, or I guess I was in the eighties or nineties maybe. And there was a, um, a store, uh, that sold appliances and the television in that store window was on, and people were gathered around it. And it was odd because it was early morning and people are not usually watching television in a group on the street at that hour. So I stopped by and, um, and I saw that same picture, the World Trade Center with s Billowing smoke. And, and I, on Lexington Avenue at that time, there's a bus that goes downtown. I remember seeing one bus just racing, racing, like must have been 70 miles an hour down the street, people screaming. And, um, I called my, uh, my husband at that time, um, was frank, and sadly he passed, um, several years ago.
Dr. Robin Stern: But, uh, he was very actively involved in, um, uh, the university life. And like you heard that there was something going on and, uh, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He thought it was a small plane. He also went up to the top of a building and saw what you, uh, seen, like the one you saw that I had seen on, um, on television. And, um, he said, well, I don't know what's happening, but it doesn't look like it was just a small plane. And then of course, after that, the cascading events through the day and the, um, just really hard to believe. And I think, uh, I've thought a lot, especially since working with you about how we all moved through those few days, those of us who weren't, whose lives weren't in danger, and yet we were impacted. And certainly I had students at Columbia who, uh, were then, um, who were from other countries afraid to leave their home, afraid to leave their dorms. Uh, I, uh, had students, I volunteered at the, um, health Center counseling center, and we waited for students who never came. And then some students did come and talk about, uh, the losses they had, because other Columbia students who had gotten the plumb job, Cantor Fitzgerald, was the plumb job when you graduate Columbia undergraduate and you're going into business. And they were all gone. And, um, so that was pretty devastating. And the faculty and the staff treating those people and just waiting for people.
Dr. George Bonanno: Yeah. Do you know, um, when, when, I think we had a, the day after, uh, so the day of the, the day of the, the planes hit, I went downtown as a volunteer. Uh, and ultimately I was turned away because so many people had already volunteered. I volunteered as a mental health professional, and they'd already had more people than they, than they needed. So I went back uptown and I remember seeing people walking home from downtown, some people in tatters, and you people didn't walk six miles, you know, home, but they were walking. Um, and then we held a public forum, um, what we in the clinical and counseling community could do. And I remember distinctly, this is something I'll never forget. Um, I had suggested perhaps nothing, you know, right now people don't want clinical and counseling psychologists, what they want is just help with the, the disaster that happened.
Dr. George Bonanno: And one of my colleagues said to me, with, with clear anger, George, this is not your research. This is real life. And, uh, ultimately that colleague apologized to me afterwards, um, you know, several days later. Um, but in fact, what I, what I meant was, and what I think is tends to be true, is that people really didn't want counseling and clinical psychology that day. We opened our clinic also 24 hours, uh, the clinical, the, the, our clinic on campus. And very few people came. And then, and I think this is similar to your experience, Robin, that the people that came were people from other countries. And they came largely, they told us, I think the, the modal, the most common, uh, reason was they had nobody to talk to. They wanted to talk to somebody about what had happened. 'cause it was
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah. And so when did you have the opportunity to, uh, to take a look at nine 11? Or when did you have the desire to take a look at nine 11 and people having recovered or moving through and not recovering and not thriving, um, and related to your work?
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, I don't know exactly, but I mean, you know, there was a, there was a period of, I would say at least a couple weeks when I was simply another person in New York trying to come to terms with what had happened. But I would say within a couple weeks, I began to think, I really, what I do is research and I should really try to understand what's happening. And fortunately, the National Science Foundation had made some emergency research funds available specifically, so for this event. So I, I was able to obtain some funding, put together a research team really quickly. And initially we tried to work with the companies that were, that, that had lost so many in the towers. But we, we ran into red tape. Um, we, we got through, you know, many hurdles. And then ultimately we would end up with the legal team, and they would, they would not really want us nosing around for, for various obvious reasons.
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, so we recruited people as best we could. And we, what we did is we got people, I'd say within the first few months, we, we, we put out the word as best we could. We got, uh, access, the companies in the towers did allow us to have e email access to their employees. So we could, uh, we could tell people we were doing research and we wanted to know people's stories. We always do a lot of experimental things, lots of questionnaires, psychophysiology wires on people's heads, you know, but we also want people's stories. Um, and we, we, one of the things we asked people to do in these studies was to tell us in as much detail as they could, everything about that day for them. And we, we targeted people who were in the buildings and got out, or who were right there as the plane struck. And we, we got these 30 minute narratives. We gave people 30 minutes to tell us these stories. And then we repeated this for several years afterwards. A year later, we asked people to again, tell us the same story.
Dr. Robin Stern: So did you do it on the anniversary, like a year later you've had a, another year or two, um, with what's happened? And so now looking back,
Dr. George Bonanno: No. No. So we, we, we, we, we made a point not to ask people on the anniversary. We asked people at 13 months instead of 12 months. And this, the reason for that, from a research point of view is simply that you want to untangle those things, Uhhuh
Dr. Robin Stern: And so what, what were you looking for
Dr. George Bonanno: At that time? You know, I, I now pretty much established the, the, the work on resilience. So we did, one thing we do is we follow people over time and make, and you know, we track them and we, we identify the people who were basically able to continue functioning well for at least several years. So we were doing that. We were also interested in how people perceived the event. Um, for example, one of the things we learned from those studies was that, um, there, we, we, we had people tell us exactly where they were. We had a seven page questionnaire about everything people did. Where were you when the be, when the, where were you just prior to the first plane hitting? Where were you when the plane hit? You know, how did, what was it, what was your experience, et cetera. And what we found was that there are people's objective danger, their objective exposure to this event to some extent predicted how well they would be doing. But more important than that was their subjective experience. How much they felt a danger, how much they felt like this was a, a major threat to them. Their subjective reaction was more important actually, than their objective, actual objective level of danger. And I think that's, that's, um, you know, that idea has been replicated now many times. So we found out that we were trying to find out what, who would be resilient and why. And we only had partial answers in those days 'cause we were just beginning to ask those questions. Uh,
Dr. Robin Stern: I'm curious about the, the process of, you're talking to people, so they filled out these questionnaires, and then was there a time where you debriefed what it was like for people to fill out the questionnaires, like research on your research, but not necessarily that you were measuring the research on the research, but I, I could imagine if I had to fill out a seven page questionnaire about the details of the day, it would bring up a lot.
Dr. George Bonanno: Oh, sure. And yeah, and we, we talk with people, right? You know, all research, as, you know, all research has to go through an ethics board to make sure that we are not, that, that we are treating people well and, and not putting them in danger. And I've been chair of one of those ethics boards for years at Columbia. Um, I, I was head of the committee. Um, so, you know, we would tell people in de in detail afterwards, um, how important the work was and what we are, some of what we were trying to do. We couldn't tell people everything. Um, but we're, the, the main thing we tell people is, and this I think is, is very important for people to hear. We tell people that we know a lot about these events, but we don't know everything not by a, not by a a, a vast margin.
Dr. George Bonanno: And we really want them to tell us what their experience is. There was no right or wrong answer. They have their experience, and we want them to tell us in as much detail as they're willing to, what it was like for them, what they went through, how they felt. Um, not so we can categorize them, not so we can diagnose them, so we can understand what they went through and gather more information. And I think people generally find this compelling. Um, I learned early on in the bereavement research, a lot of people came to our studies, um, initially because they told us what they'd read in the books, didn't match their experience, and they wanted to tell the researchers how it was. And we took that as a cue actually, to be a little bit more broad-minded, especially when we ask people to tell us their story. And we've continued to do this to this day, even though I know now 20 more, I have 20 more years of research since nine 11, much more than 20, 20 more years of research. And I know a lot more. But we still tell people that same thing. Tell us what, you know, and we record these interviews. We fi we film them. We often have physiological sensors, and we can go back to these interviews and, and try to understand new things when we get new insights. So there's a lot of information.
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah. And I, I certainly agree with you that stories are so powerful. Um, and I, I know that part of healing, moving through trauma is being able to tell a new story about, um, what your life is a li is like. So with that as a segue, what did you learn from, um, from nine 11? Well,
Dr. George Bonanno: Well, your, your listeners can't see my head bobbing up and down like a, like a little toy bobble doll. But, um, when you said stories are really important and, and how we tell the story is important in healing, that's when I was nodding so, so copiously. And one of the things we learned, actually, one of the more interesting things we learned was we had, when we had people tell their story, then we had people tell their story again a year, 13 months later. And one of the things we found was then was when people struggle, you know, we, uh, we identified who was resilient, who was recovering. We also identified who, you know, who, who took longer to recover. And we identified also people who struggled continuously for the couple years of our study. And what we found was that people who continued to struggle told more or less the same story the first time and the second time.
Dr. George Bonanno: But people who either were resilient or people who recovered between those two assessment points, people who recovered by the second year had told a more benign story. They changed the story a little bit. And the, you know, we know this is, human memory is malleable. It's remarkable actually, that people who continue to struggle even were able to tell the same story. I think probably because they told it over and over and over. And the, the, so the story became somewhat, um, concretized in their brains, but people basically tell a story that they can live with. They developed a story. It's the same thing interestingly, with loss. One of the things that we've discovered with bereavement was that after the death, people tend to be very generous in how they remember the person they lost, even when it's a person that they didn't get along with.
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, that we, so one of the things we did in our bereavement studies is we asked people to, to tell us about their relationship. And we had in one study, we had that, that, uh, information before the loss happened. It was a unique kind of study where we've had followed people over many years, even beginning prior to the loss as part of a larger study. And what we found was that, um, you know, some people were resilient to the bereavement. A lot of people were resilient. Some people struggled more. Some people struggled for a long time. Some people got better, some people got worse. All those different patterns showed about the same incremental improvement in the way they remembered the relationship. So everybody idealized the relationship, the lost relationship, uh, to some extent. And they all did it to just about the same amount. So after the loss, we give people the benefit of the doubt. And subsequently, in other studies, we learned it. What we do is we kind of create a kind of a summarized narrative about the person that we lost that we can live with, that we can carry forward. And it tends to be quite generous. And I think people were doing something similar after nine 11. They were, they were creating a narrative that they could live with.
Dr. Robin Stern: Can you say more about that? What does that mean? Can you live with
Dr. George Bonanno: Well, that's a, that's a great question. Yeah. And I have to think for, think to myself, what do I mean by that? I think they do, we round off some of the rougher edges, you know, we know something was difficult, but we also, um, talk about it. It becomes, in the past, it becomes this a story that happened to another person in a way. You know? And there's, there's, there's a lot of research that supports this idea of our future selves. And our past selves are kind of not really us. The only us we know is the one that we have right now. So we, we, we know the details of the event, but we remember we misremember some of them. Sometimes we make them more extreme if it, if it makes us feel better. You know, I went through that, I went through this horrific thing, and sometimes we round off the edges or we, we accentuate something positive that may have happened.
Dr. George Bonanno: Somebody that was extremely generous. I remember in the stories even that we, when we interviewed people about their experience getting out of the towers, many people latched onto something extremely positive that another person did. And I think they, they, I don't wanna say they exaggerated it, but they, you know, they, they really accentuated it. Um, whether it be, some people told these wrenching stories about walking down the, you know, the many, many flights of stairs. Some people walk down from the upper levels through these smoke-filled, glass-filled water filled stairways, you know, crowds of people wondering if they're going to die in the stairway. And some of those people encountered firefighters going up. And those firefighters, they know never, they never saw them. Those firefighters perished. They had to have perished. Yet they talked about making eye contact with the firefighters and how the firefighters looked so strong and so, so encouraging going up. Um, you know, and those are wrenching stories to hear, but at the same time, it's a kind of a story of human nature despite this horrific attack, despite the fact that some evil had planned to bring this tower down. At the same time, we have these wonderful, you know, heroes, the firefighters, F d n Y, the police who came to try to, um, to, to try to solve this problem. And, and, but this essentially marched into their own death. So people remember those stories in a very positive way.
Dr. Robin Stern: It's so interesting to, to talk about this with you because, uh, as of course, you know, and you wrote a book called The Other Side of Sadness, and then your newer book, the End of Trauma. So I don't wanna forget to, to talk about your books, and we will at the, at the end, I want you to tell people where to find them. But I, um, aside from having a special area of expertise in gaslighting, I also studied resilience and, and trauma and very difficult experiences. And after nine 11 wrote a book, or for the, actually for the 10th anniversary of nine 11, wrote a book called Project Rebirth. Um, and it was really about, uh, celebrating the strength of the human spirit. So I collected stories and, and watched video footage of people who had been touched by the, um, directly touched or in the towers at the time, or lost somebody in the towers.
Dr. Robin Stern: And what I'm remembering now, maybe this is just a story I'm telling myself now, but I'm remembering that a lot of the stories I heard, or the central piece of a lot of stories were, um, was the people who rallied for the people who were in pain. I remember one woman who lost, um, her, uh, her fiance who she was deeply in love with in the tower as he was a firefighter. And it took her days to even come to terms with the fact that he was gone. And I remember she talked so, um, powerfully about the people who came to her house to sit with her and be there with her, and that they brought food and, and they just kept coming. And, and they, people who supported these struggling people were central figures in the lives of the people I spoke to who told me their stories.
Dr. George Bonanno: Yeah, yeah. I, I, i, that that resonates as well. Yeah, very much so.
Dr. Robin Stern: And so when you were asked to write about your experience and what you learned, what did you write?
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, well, let's see. So in retrospect, I, I've largely been asked to write about, say, lessons from nine 11 more recently, I think the, the, the around the 20th anniversary, which was what, 2021. Um, I wrote a few pieces. That's also the year my book came out The End of Trauma. Um, but one of the interesting things, I, I had coined a phrase called the resilience Blind Spot. Um, and this was something i, I, I did out of my research self, but it applies, and it particularly applies to, to large scale disasters. Things like nine 11 that infect so, uh, affect so many people, they're disturbing, right? Nine 11 was disturbing to everybody. Um, it was disturbing across the country and to some extent across the world, because it was an event that didn't seem possible. And it had happened, and many people died as you know, I'm sure this happened to you.
Dr. George Bonanno: It happened to me that people all over the world began to call to see if you were all right, where were you? Are you okay? Um, and, um, what happens is there's this kind of intense emotion shared with everyone, you know, and those of us in New York, I had nightmares for a little while. I live in the flight path to LaGuardia. And so I, you know, I, I had dreamt of planes crashing and things like that, you know, in my neighborhood. Um, and there's this intense emotional reaction. Nobody quite knows what's going to happen now, and, and yet what has happened and is it over? Right? And I, you know, I remember vividly staying up, um, late several nights in a row with the television on looking for more information. You know, the smell was everywhere. You know, that smell of whacked over the entire city.
Dr. George Bonanno: And, um, there's a sense that, you know, we're all in, have gone through something immense. And, you know, of course, this, it, because of the shape of New York and the, this, the way the boroughs are situated and gr and where ground zero is, there was these radiating, almost like radiating concentric circles like a bullseye. And the closer you were to that center, the more intense the experience, the more intense the impact was, the more intense the, you know, the blockage of roads and the damage. Um, and that kind of shared with so many people results in this, uh, very intense kind of, um, enduring emotion. But one of the things we've learned from looking at emotion is that when we we're in the midst of emotions, particularly negative emotions, but also positive emotions, they feel like they'll go on forever. When we're angry, it feels like we'll always be angry when we're sad, it feels like we will forever be sad.
Dr. George Bonanno: We dramatically overestimate how long emotions last. And Dan Gilbert, wonderful Dan Gilbert, wonderful researcher at Harvard, had a, a concept called affective forecasting. We're very bad at affective forecasting. We're very bad at predicting how, how we'll feel in the future and how long our feelings will last. So when there's something like a major disaster, um, the emotion that we feel is, is, uh, uh, in a way amplified by the emotion that others around us feel. But then soon it's amplified in the media, it's amplified, the images go, go viral. You know, now in the, in the, we have now media everywhere all the time. And the, the, the media, you know, unfortunately, or for, for better or for worse, our brains are wired to detect threat. I wired is a loose word, but we're, we're kind of, we're, we're prefixed to detect threat. And when the media puts images out of, of, you know, disastrous things, we look at it, you know, um, we cannot not look at it.
Dr. George Bonanno: When we hear about pain and trauma, we are attentive, right? So for days and days and days after nine 11, the media just played these things over and over and over. And there's a constant story because people pay attention. So it's going to be in the news, it's going to be on television, it's going to be on the internet, it's going to be on social media. And what happens is, we, we very quickly lose sight of the fact that, that we might actually be okay, um, even sooner than we think. And this is what I call the resilience blind, that we, we've become essentially blind to the possibility of resilience. All we can see is the pain, the intensity, and what seems like a long lasting and life changing, um, kind of a, a, a disaster. And, um, the, the, the, the, the empirical reality was quite, quite different from that. There were lots of surveys done right after nine 11 days. After nine 11, which doesn't really make sense in a, in a, in one level. Um, uh, the, the, the George Bush, um, George W. Bush was president then, and he declared, um, the weekend after nine 11. I don't remember exactly. I think that nine 11 happened later in the week. And then the weekend was a national weekend of mourning or something along those lines. Tuesday,
Dr. Robin Stern: Actually, nine 11 was a Tuesday.
Dr. George Bonanno: Okay? So then the weekend was a, was a national week, national period of mourning. And the Rand Corporation, which is an excellent research organization, had surveyed the, the, the, the country and found that most, that, that I, what was it, 45%, 44% had at least one symptom of stress, of traumatic stress. And people closer, people in New York had, it was more like two thirds and people, downtown is more like 75%, et cetera. And that was a very much attention getting number, right? Every people are having these symptoms of traumatic stress, and this makes us frightened as well, right? Because this sounds like, uh, p t ss d this is must be P ts d. We're all traumatized. It's a kind of a, I i I I respect Rand greatly, but I think it's a kind of a nonsensical finding because most of us, a a symptom of traumatic stress is sort of meaningless.
Dr. George Bonanno: 'cause often we have a symptom of somatic stress, traumatic stress. Most psychiatric symptoms are problems. And you have one, one symptom, you have one problem. I didn't sleep the last three or four nights 'cause I've been worried about money, or I've been, I'm, I'm preoccupied with something from work, or I'm worried about my child and all, sometimes people don't sleep so well. I live in New York City where they pick the garbage up at four in the morning and they throw the garbage cans around
Dr. George Bonanno: And the answer was close to one with a, with a range of zero to two. So that meant that without anything happening, then the normal population can have up to two symptoms of P T S D because they're problems. So if I say I have symptoms of P T S D, it sounds like I have some P T S D, but in fact, I could just be living my normal life. So that those numbers were not really accurate. They didn't really tell us anything to say. You know, 44% of the population has a symptom of traumatic stress. Um, that doesn't really tell us much. And in fact, the weekend after nine 11, it's kind of amazing that a hundred percent of the country didn't have a symptom of traumatic stress because it was on everybody's mind. Then the, what the research showed us, and this was, this was not my research, this was the researcher of Sandra GLE and other epidemiologists, very excellent epidemiologists, excellent researchers.
Dr. George Bonanno: They found that there were a lot of trauma symptoms in New York City in the first month, I think it was first, uh, four to six weeks, but by six months most of that was gone. The, the, the rate of P T S D in New York City was 7% in that first month, which is high for, you know, for, um, it's not normal, but by six months it was back down below 1%, which is probably, I mean, I think probably there's more than 1% P T S D in New York City most of the time, um, just because so many things happen and there's so many people. So basically there was a very intense event that happened. Some people were deeply traumatized. Um, so, you know, I mean, it, these things happen and, you know, it's inevitable that major events will happen and they will harm people. I don't wanna imply that they don't harm people. They do harm some people, but the percentage of people that are seriously harmed is, is never most people, it's never even a lot of people. It's usually, it, it's usually around five or 10%, which is nothing to sniff at. That's a lot of people. And for those people, it's major. It, it can ruin their lives, but most of us, most people are going to move on and be okay. And I think we lose sight of that.
Dr. Robin Stern: You and your research has been surprising to a lot of people, but what, if anything, was surprising to you from what you found?
Dr. George Bonanno: I have to think about that a little bit. Um, I mean, when I first began to identify resilience in the abundance that I did, I was surprised by that. Um, I didn't expect that I, I had a hunch that would be perhaps more resilience than we saw, but I never expected it would be so prevalent. Um, people, um, one, one of the things we found, there are a couple things. One of the things we found was what I call coping ugly. Mm-hmm.
Dr. George Bonanno: So that's something we learned from these events. Um, another thing we learned was that, was that laughter is enormously adaptive, and it's common, so genuine laughter. We, we code genuine laughter and genuine smiling by, by facial expressions. When we make a genuine laugh or smile, we tend to crinkle the, the, um, the muscles around our eyes. So we get that, that crow's feet look. And so you can, you can kind of, that's pretty, he strongly linked to the genuine feeling of joy. And what we found in our videotapes was that even when people are going through enormous amounts of pain and crying and telling us about horrible things, most people will still also have genuine bits of joy in there. They might tell a story that makes them think of something wonderful. They might be remembering somebody they lost and they're in, in pain as they remember that person, but then they remember something wonderful about that person or something funny that person said, or something odd, and they will genuinely smile to the interviewer in a way that that is not, not false, it's not polite, it's genuine bursts of joy and that people do that.
Dr. George Bonanno: So those, those are, those are a couple things that emerged from this research.
Dr. Robin Stern: Well, thank you for sharing that. So I, I am mindful of the time and, um, where can people find you and read your work if they wanna learn more?
Dr. George Bonanno: Um, well, the, the, the books, um, are available wherever books are sold, you know, they're available online. Um, I am, I'm publicly, uh, reachable for better, for worse. So, so my, my name is though, b o n a n n o, George, b o n n b o n a n n o, and Google that. And my email comes up and my, my lab and my, you know, my faculty page at Columbia and, and my books and anything else. Um, a lot of our research is downloadable. Um, but, uh, I, I, you know, a a lot of it's, it's, uh, the scholarly stuff, but it's, it's, people can get, get copies of that, you know?
Dr. Robin Stern: Well, and aside from the scholarly stuff, having read your books, they're full of stories and stories that, that tell your lessons and tell of your own personal experiences. And they're wonderful reads. And I recommend both of them, the other side of sadness and the end of trauma. They're really beautiful books. Thank you for those gifts to the world. And, um, thank you so much for being with me and with our listeners today, um, to commemorate nine 11 to tell your story and, um, to give me space to tell mine as well. And I know there are so many stories out there, and I know that what you've shared today from your experience and your vast knowledge and brilliance in this field and expertise has been meaningful and, and hopefully helpful as a, um, as a way to understand stories that people have for themselves and have of those days. So thank you very much, George Bonano.
Dr. George Bonanno: Thank you, Robert. It was nice to, nice to talk with you.
Dr. Robin Stern: Bye everyone. See you for the next episode. And thank you for being here with us today. Thanks for joining me for today's episode. I hope you found it helpful and meaningful. If you want to listen to other episodes of the Gaslight Effect podcast, you can find them at robinstern.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. And please leave a rating and a review. I also invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. This podcast is produced by Mel Yellen, Ryan Changcoco, Mike Lens, and me. The podcast is supported by Gabby Kaoagas and Solar Karangi, all of my work and my upcoming book is supported by Suzen Pettit Marcus Estevez and Omaginarium, also by Sally McCarton and Jackie Daniels. I'm so grateful to have many people supporting me and especially grateful for all of you, my listeners.
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