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 and fail to recognize how resilient people really are

In the days following 9/11, mental health professionals from all over the country flocked to New York to help 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 most of what we think 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.
 

George A. Bonanno is professor of clinical psychology and director of the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Association for Psychological Science, and International Positive Psychology Association. The author of The Other Side of Sadness, he lives in New York City and Woodstock, New York.