The Power of Human Resilience

Long time readers of this blog have been kept abreast of the latest research into psychological resilience. Link here. The studies, which are proliferating, suggest that most trauma victims resolve their suffering without undergoing therapy. The human organism, or, if you prefer, the human mind is designed to process and to overcome most traumatic experiences. That ranges from horrific instances of sexual abuse to the aftershocks of terrorist attacks.

Naturally, most psycho professionals are not especially thrilled with resilience studies. In the first place, it’s bad for business. In the second place, and especially for those who prefer to use your suffering as an excuse to punish certain people, the possibility that you have not been scarred for life, that your life has not been destroyed, does not play very well in the courtroom. The less you are likely to overcome abuse, the more likely the individual who perpetrates the abuse will receive serious punishment. If you will most likely recover, the crime will appear to be less horrific.

Thus, in an age of microaggressions and trigger warnings, we all tend to assume that looking at someone the wrong way has damaged their psyches to the point that they can never ever function effectively in society. This makes the offending party far closer to a criminal, far more in need of severe punishment. Which may be the point.

Anyway, today psychologist George Bonanno summarizes some of the latest work on human resilience. The news is good. He begins with the traumatic aftershocks of 9/11 and with those who prophesied that New Yorkers, in particular, would suffer lasting traumas. In truth, the citizens of my city did suffer in the immediate, but the great majority reverted to normal functioning in a short period of time.

Several weeks after the attacks, the widely respected epidemiologist Sandro Galea and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that some 7.5% of Manhattan residents met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. That proportion rose to 20% for those in lower Manhattan, close to the World Trade Center, and to around 30% for people most directly affected by the attack—for example, those in the towers when the planes struck.

Many expected the figures would continue to rise. Instead, they dropped precipitously. When Dr. Galea’s team conducted a further study six months later, they found that the incidence of PTSD among Manhattan residents had shrunk to less than 1%, and the rates for those more directly affected had declined as well. The change was so pronounced that the team concluded in a second paper that there had been “a rapid resolution of most of the probable PTSD symptoms” across New York City.

Bonanno draws this conclusion:

Most people who experience highly aversive or life-threatening events do not develop trauma-related disorders, though they may experience intense emotions and short-term effects, including troubled dreams or nightmares and a sense of dread.

In the immediate aftermath of a trauma, people do think about it, even dream about it. They experience heightened anxiety, because they are peparing themselves for a possible recurrence.

These early reactions are perfectly natural, and they can be adaptive. For example, thinking and dreaming about an event, even when we don’t want to, may help us to come to terms with it. Feeling on edge for a while helps us to stay prepared just in case the danger returns.

So, the human mind is perfectly capable of healing itself:

For some, these reactions persist and eventually develop into PTSD, but for most people, they dissipate with time. I’ve spent most of my career mapping different trajectories of reactions to traumas and disasters like 9/11, and what’s most common is a stable trajectory of good mental health beginning soon after the event—in short, resilience.

Bonnano’s research correlates with that of other scientists. The percentage of people who recover from trauma without treatment hovers at around 66%:

We’ve seen this resilient pattern after all kinds of challenging experiences, including military combat, violent injury, disasters and life-threatening medical events. In a 2018 review of 54 studies that tracked these trajectories over time, two colleagues and I found that the common pattern of stable good mental health occurred, on average, in about two-thirds of the people that experienced these events.