Trauma – Education & Teacher Conferences

Book Review: The End of Trauma, by George Bonanno

Andrew Watson

June-15-2025

Book Review: The End of Trauma, by George Bonanno

When I first started teaching — it’s been a few decades now — nobody ever talked about trauma. Quite literally, I do not remember a single faculty meeting or PD day or all-school read or … really … ANYTHING that raised the subject.

If you had asked me back then (the ’80s and ’90s), I would have said: “as far as I can tell, trauma happens to some people somewhere — and that’s terrible. But I don’t know of trauma happening here to our students. It’s just not on the radar.”

In the last twenty years, the world of education has done a 180 degree pivot. We talk about trauma, and trauma-informed education, a lot. We’ve got books and conferences and speakers and data.

Trauma — it seems — is everywhere. Whereas in the ’80s, trauma was a “someone else, somewhere else” problem, today it seems to be a “lots and lots of people, right here” problem.

The transition threatens whiplash. How can we manage it?

A Surprising Perspective

Back in the fall of 2024, Prof. George Bonanno presented his research at our Boston conference. His hour-long keynote included a number of surprising findings, and prompted me to buy his book. At last (!) I’ve had a chance to read it and to understand those surprising findings more deeply.

As I wrote back in December, Bonanno finds that

Roughly 10% of people who experience trauma have enduring symptoms;
Less than 10% start without symptoms, but symptoms develop over time and persist;
Roughly 20% initially experience symptoms, but recover over two years;
The rest never respond with serious symptoms.

In other words, most people do NOT respond to threatening events with PTSD. And, many who DO initially experience PTSD recover within months.

For these reasons, Bonanno doesn’t speak of “traumatic events” but of “potentially traumatic events.” After all, such events might lead to a trauma response…but most of the time they don’t.

By the way: Bonanno doesn’t arrive at these conclusions by looking at marginally threatening experiences. Two of his data sets come from people who experienced the 9/11 attacks directly — as in, they fled the buildings after the planes hit — and from members of the military who served in combat.

Even in these populations, he finds that people are mostly resilient — both in the short term and over the longer term.

In brief: we can start to manage our whiplash by realizing that PTSD is obviously very bad, but not remotely inevitable. Our students and colleagues and community members are likelier to respond to potentially traumatic events by being stable and resilient.

The Non-Recipe Recipe

This initial insight leads to an important question: exactly WHY are some people more resilient than others? If you and I go through roughly similar “potentially traumatic experiences,” why do I develop PTSD symptoms while you don’t?

To ask the same question another way: is there a formula to follow? A set of steps that leads away from PTSD? A recipe?

Bonanno answers this set of questions with nuance, sympathy, data, wisdom, and humility.

In the first place, he argues that — no — we don’t have a one-size-fits-all series of steps. In fact, he explains in thoughtful detail why no one pathway will work for all people in all circumstances.

In fact, he specifically rejects this approach. Yes: individual research studies show that character trait X or mental habit Y is “associated with a reduction in ultimate PTSD symptoms.” But the list of X, Y, and Z goes on at remarkable length — a few dozen letters at least. (Our poor alphabet taps out at 26.)

Instead, Bonanno’s research says that resilient people have a flexible collection of traits and perspectives that they use in different ways at different times.

The Return of the “Mindset”

Bonanno summarizes this this collection of traits with the phrase “flexibility mindset.” He defines the word “flexibility” quite carefully:

I’ve used the word “resilience” throughout this book to describe a pattern of continued good mental health after potential trauma, or, more precisely, a stable trajectory of healthy functioning across time.

Flexibility is not resilience. Flexibility is the process we use to adapt ourselves to traumatic stress so that we can find our way to resilience. (121)

Bonanno’s flexibility mindset rests on three connected beliefs:

“Optimism about the future,
confidence in our ability to cope, and
a willingness to think about a threat as a challenge.”

No one of these beliefs by itself is enough. And, no one of them is a straightforward first-A-then-B-then-C process. But — combined with nuance and maturity — they result, over time, in better mental health outcomes.

Bonanno, in fact, devotes several chapters to specific stories of people who successfully (or not) use a flexibility mindset to manage the potentially traumatic events in their lives.

A Big Caveat

Whenever I write a book review, I always try to include at least one point where I disagree with the author, or think the book could be better. In this case, that’s a surprisingly easy goal to meet.

Here’s why: I think the book’s TITLE is doubly misleading.

In the first place, Bonanno doesn’t for a minute suggest that we can “end” trauma. He in no way claims that you can follow his simple steps to bring trauma to an early end — either for an individual or a society. Quite the contrary, he argues that the process requires endurance, frequently includes grave setbacks, and might not work for everyone.

In other words, The End of Trauma isn’t about the end of trauma. It’s about rethinking the inevitability of trauma, and reframing strategies to cope with trauma.

In the second place, the book’s subtitle includes an equally misleading phrase: “the new science of resilience.”

Bonanno says over and over that he’s NOT proposing anything radically new. His “flexibility mindset,” after all, suggests that we be optimistic, confident, and inclined to think of threats as challenges. None of those insights — or the word “mindset” — is new.

The novelty in Bonanno’s work lies first in his data, which find the PTSD is a relatively unusual response to potentially traumatic events — not, as we’ve heard so often, an inevitable one.

Bonanno also makes a novel argument when he focuses on broad flexible categories (“optimism, confidence”) rather than specific steps (“first do this, then do that, then try t’other”).

I don’t doubt that The End of Trauma is a more saleable title than Rethinking the Inevitability of Trauma and Proposing a Flexble Path to Work Past It within 2 Years or So. But that title would be more accurate.

TL;DR

Bonanno’s book The End of Trauma isn’t about the end of trauma. It does, however, make a compelling — and ultimately optimistic — argument: we’re mostly resilient; we can bounce back from potentially traumatic events; and we’ve got a challenging-but-flexible framework to guide us as we do so.

Too Good to be True? The Effect of Tetris on PTSD Symptoms

Andrew Watson

May-19-2025

Too Good to be True? The Effect of Tetris on PTSD Symptoms

Teachers and school leaders turn to research — in part — because it can help us solve problems. Of course, the bigger the problem, the more urgent the need for a solution.

For this reason, we’re easily drawn to the more dramatic “research-based” claims. When a big problem has an easy solution — an easy solution with RESEARCH behind it — we’re tempted to adopt that new strategy right away.

In this blog post, I want to suggest — first — that we should slow down. And — second — that we should ask some important questions before we make big changes. After all: if the problem is big and urgent, we could make it worse by enacting an ill-considered solution based on flimsy research claims.

First: Slow Down

Carl Sagan famously said: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Let’s imagine that I tell you: “You can add 20 points to your IQ just by eating raisins every day!” That claim is a biggie. You’ll want LOTS of VERY STRONG evidence to support it. (To be clear: I don’t know of any way to increase IQ at all — much less a raisin-centric diet.)

Dan Willingham made a related point in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? Willingham argues that — over a few hundred years — teachers have tried all sorts of strategies to help students learn. For this reason, it’s difficult to imagine that a simple strategy will have a surprisingly large effect. After all: if a one-step solution works so well, why hasn’t someone tried it — and reported on its benefits?

For this reason, it’s likelier that research will find incremental benefits to a new teaching strategy — and that the new strategy will require more than a simple tweak or two. In other words: we’ve (probably) already figured out the big, easy stuff. Research will help with the small, difficult stuff.

So, let’s consider the claim implied in my title: “playing Tetris can reduce PTSD symptoms.”

That claim pushes up against both Sagan’s and Willingham’s guidance. To me, at least, the idea that Tetris (of all things) helps with trauma — that’s extraordinary all right. And the idea that something as simple as Tetris will have an effect strains credulity. If reducing trauma symptoms is so easy, why haven’t we figured that out yet?

For both of these reasons: slow down.

Second: Questions to Ask

Most researchers take care to speak very precisely about the scope and limitations of their claims. Before we get carried away, we want to be sure we understand exactly what they’re claiming.

Here’s a handy approach. All published research begins with a one-paragraph summary of the study. This summary goes by a rather odd name: the “abstract.” So, read the abstract carefully and focus on the researchers’ precise claim.

I do need to warn you: an abstract is often — well — rather abstract. The researchers are condesing hundreds of hours and thousands of words and data-points into a dense paragraph. The abstract will not delight you. But it will tell you what you need to know.

In this study, the reseachers claim that a single session of Tetris reduces the frequency of intrusive memories of traumatic events. Notice several limits here:

They don’t make broad claims about PTSD. Instead, they make claims about one specific symptom — intrusive memories.
They don’t claim to cure PTSD. Instead, they claim to reduce the frequency of intrusive memories.
They don’t claim that the strategy works for everyone. Instead, they claim it worked for nurses in Swedish hospitals who had experienced traumatic events while treating Covid-19 patients.

All this specificity will be very helpful for us. A Tetris salesman might show up at our school brandishing this paper and says “we can cure your students’ PTSD — research says so!” Because we read the abstract carefully, we know this claim just ain’t so.

Check the Field

As I’ve written before, I rely on three websites to see what other researchers are thinking about particular research topics. The first of the three — Scite.ai — shows that no one has yet responded to this specific study. Because this research is both very new and very niche-y, this silence isn’t totally surprising.

My second go-to website is connectedpapers.com. A quick visit there shows that, in fact, other researchers are exploring similar lines of inquiry. They don’t all get the same results; in fact, they don’t all get positive results. But this tetris study isn’t a bizarre outlier. It’s part of a small-but-serious cluster of studies trying this approach.

Finally, Elicit.com helpfully answers direct research questions. When I asked it “Does playing tetris reduce PTSD symptoms over non-trivial periods of time,” it scrounged the research web and thought for about 8 minutes. It then offered this helpful one-sentence summary:

Multiple studies demonstrate that Tetris gameplay combined with memory reactivation significantly decreases PTSD-related intrusive memories, with effects lasting up to six months.

It then listed the studies it had analyzed to arrive at that conclusion, and the various parameters that it found helpful and persuasive.

So, at this point I’m much more confident than I was 20 minutes ago. I know that the researchers are taking slow, careful steps; and that other researchers are taking other careful steps along parallel paths. We’re not alone in this forest.

A Recap, and Two Caveats

The steps so far:

When I see a surprising claim, I SLOW DOWN.
Next, I check the abstract to understand EXACTLY what the researchers are claiming. (Newspaper and blog headlines often misrepresent researchers’ claims quite badly.)
Third, I look for the history behind this study to be sure that the idea has a good foundation.
Finally, I use other web resources to see if this idea is a quirky outlier or part of a meaningful body of research.

I should also highlight two caveats.

First: AI is evolving very quickly. As of today’s date (May 12, 2025), these tools do what I’ve described, and are the best ones I know. By May 13, 2025, they could behave very differently, or have been superceded by better tools.

Second: I have explored this study as an interesting example of a “too good to be true” claim. That is: when I first saw this research, I assumed the claims would prove to be exaggerated or silly. (I am, at least for now, reassured that this is a serious line of inquiry.)

However, I am NOT suggesting that schools use tetris to treat students’ trauma symptoms. I’m not qualified to make any recommendations about treating trauma.

And, to be clear, the researchers aren’t making that suggestion either. They’re still trying to figure out if this simple idea might be helpful (to nurses). We need LOTS more research

Kanstrup, M., Singh, L., Leehr, E. J., Göransson, K. E., Pihlgren, S. A., Iyadurai, L., … & Holmes, E. A. (2024). A guided single session intervention to reduce intrusive memories of work-related trauma: a randomised controlled trial with healthcare workers in the COVID-19 pandemic. BMC medicine, 22(1), 403.

Andrew Watson

January-05-2025

Finding a Framework for Trauma

Although education itself encourages detailed and nuanced understandings of complex ideas, the field of education often rushes to extremes.

According to the loudest voices:

Artificial intelligence will either transform education for the better, or make us all dumber.
Memorization is either an essential foundation for all learning, or “drill and kill.”
A growth mindset will either motivate students to new successes, or delude teachers into this out-dated fad (“yet” schmet).

And so forth.

This tendency to extremes seems especially powerful at the intersection of education and trauma.

Depending on your source and your decade, trauma is

Either a problem so rare that it doesn’t merit discussion, or
a problem so pervasive and debilitating that we need to redesign education.

How can we find a steady, helpful, realistic path without rushing to extremes?

A Useful Start

If we’re going to think about trauma, we should start with a definition of it.

A thousand-word blog post can’t get into the subtleties, but here’s a useful starting place:

“Trauma is a response to an event or series of events that overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope.”

In that sentence, “overwhelmed” means a serious and ongoing response — not short-term unhappiness (even if intense).

Symptoms of being “overwhelmed” might include dissociation, flashbacks, night terrors, drug addiction, or major depression.

Note: unlike trauma, stress puts pressure on — but does not inherently overwhelm — coping capacity.

Thoughtful people might not agree with the sentences above, but I think most people will agree that they’re an honest attempt to describe a complex mental state.

The First Pendulum

Discussions of trauma — especially the extreme versions — begin with its sources.

When I started teaching, in the 1980s, our school — quite literally — NEVER discussed trauma. (To be fair, I should say: “I don’t remember ever discussing trauma.”)

The implied message: “trauma probably happens somewhere to some people. But it’s so rare, and so unlikely to be a part of our students’ lives, we’re not going to use precious faculty time to focus on it.”

In brief: “the causes of trauma aren’t relevant to teachers.”

Since those days, our profession has rightly recognized that trauma DOES happen. It does happen to our students and in their families and communities. The causes of trauma are absolutely relevant to teachers.

And yet, because our profession tends to extremes, I now hear the flipside of that earlier casual dismissal. Instead of being rare and almost irrelevant, trauma is common and pervasive.

One sign of this trend: a lengthening list of common occurances that cause trauma. Perfectly typical stressors — being cut from a sports team, getting a bad grade — are reframed as traumatic.

I’ve even seen the claim that “things that we don’t get to experience can be traumatic.” While missed chances can be disappointing, even stressful, it’s just hard to see how they fit the definition of trauma.

The list of symptoms has also grown. E.g.: “procrastination is a sign of trauma.”

Now, I don’t doubt that some people who have experienced trauma procrastinate; I also don’t doubt that almost everyone procrastinates. Traumatized people might procrastinate, but not all people who procrastinate have experienced trauma.

To avoid being caught up in this race to the extremes, I think it helps to keep the definition in mind: a response to an event or series of events that overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope.

Such events do happen to our students — but not frequently, and not to all of them.

The Second Pendulum

While we negotiate this first pendulum (“trauma doesn’t happen/is universal”), we also watch a second one swing back and forth.

Old school: “least said, soonest mended. On those infrequent occasions when trauma really happens, we should all just keep going and not make a big deal about it.”

Pendulum swing: “a traumatized student is literally incapable of paying attention or learning. Schooling as we know it should come to a halt.”

This second statement is usually accompanied by neuroscience terminology, starting with “amygdala.”

I was reminded of this pendulum swing at the most recent Learning and the Brain conference in Boston — specifically in a keynote address by George A. Bonanno.

Dr. Bonanno has been studying trauma for decades; in his talk, he focused on the symptoms that follow trauma.

He and his team have been running studies and aggregating data, and he showed graphs representing conclusions based on more than 60 trajectory analyses.

To present his complex findings as simply as possible:

Roughly 10% of people who experience trauma have enduring symptoms;
Less than 10% start without symptoms, but symptoms develop over time and persist;
Roughly 20% initially experience symptoms, but recover over two years;
The rest never repond with serious symptoms.

In other words: in Bonanno’s research, two years after trauma, roughly 80% of people do not experience troubling symptoms.

For this reason, by the way, Bonanno does not speak of “traumatic events” but of “potentially traumatic events.”

That is: an event has the potential to create trauma symptoms in a person. But something like two-thirds of people do not experience trauma in response to that potentially traumatic event. (And another 10% recover from those symptoms in a year or two.)

Towards a Balanced Framework

How then should teachers think about trauma in schools.

First: we can avoid the extremes.

Yes, trauma does happen.

No, it isn’t common. (Bad grades aren’t traumatic.)

Yes, schools and teachers should respond appropriately to the trauma that students experience.

No, not everyone responds to trauma the same way. Most people react to potentially traumatic events without trauma symptoms (or recover over time).

Second: within this nuanced perspective, we should acknowledge the importance of responding to trauma appropriately.

That is: events that potentially create trauma might be rare; most people might not respond to them with trauma symptoms.

And: our students who do experience trauma symtoms deserve informed and sympathetic response.

By way of analogy: something like 3% of K-12 students are on the autism spectrum. That’s a relatively small number. And: those students deserve the best education we can provide.

If 3% of our students experience trauma symptoms (I have no idea what the actual percentage is), they too deserve our professional best.

Attempting a Summary

In our profession, we have all too frequently overlooked and downplayed the trauma that some of our students experience. As we try to correct that serious error, we should not commit another error by seeing trauma everywhere, and by assuming it debilitates everyone.

A Final Note:

To keep this post a readable length, I have not discussed ACES scores. Depending on the response this post gets, I may return to that topic in a future post.

Erik Jahner, PhD

August-22-2024

The End of Trauma by George Bonanno

When faced with extreme adversity—like violent incidents or life-threatening situations—we often assume that trauma is inevitable and that PTSD will follow. We then may discuss trauma as a chronic and permanent condition: “I am a traumatized individual.” But how likely is it that we’ll actually develop PTSD? And what makes some people able to withstand such events more effectively than others? How often do we have the capacity to build resilience?

In The End of Trauma, internationally recognized psychologist George A. Bonanno challenges the conventional wisdom on trauma, offering a necessary change in how we discuss trauma, understand, and treat it. Especially in the aftermath of events like 9/11 and now the global pandemic, Bonanno argues that trauma isn’t as prevalent as we often believe, and that most people are surprisingly resilient when faced with life’s toughest challenges. This fresh perspective shifts the focus from inevitable trauma to the remarkable capacity for recovery that most of us possess.

What we too often label as PTSD might be a missed opportunity to respect the natural process of adapting to difficult situations. Bonanno, a leading expert in the field, draws on decades of groundbreaking research, balancing personal stories of resilience with cutting-edge findings from psychology and neuroscience. Through this lens, he explains what helps us bounce back, why some people struggle more than others, and how we can all better manage stress when life gets difficult.

Personally, as a university instructor and researcher in Educational Psychology and Neuroscience, I found this to be one I wish I could add to my students’ ever-expanding reading list. Many students enter psychology with the idea that they will label a struggle as a feature or trait of the individual that needs to be respected as if it is a permanent feature of who they are. And when I work with teachers, they often see trauma as a useful label to dismiss student capacity for learning. Both groups are well-meaning, trying to be compassionate but they miss the compassionate and hopeful point that Bonanno is making here. They are reflecting societies potential misunderstandings. Some degree of struggle is natural, and resilience is learned. Yes, there are still extreme situations, but what is often called PTSD or Trauma is often a stage in adapting. This perspective puts teachers and therapists in the supportive role of helping and scaffolding the learner during this developmentally important process. And it puts you in the driver’s seat of your own struggles.

One of the book’s most innovative contributions is the introduction of the flexibility sequence—a model that outlines the mental steps we take to navigate challenges. Flexibility, as Bonanno reveals, isn’t a fixed trait but a natural function of the human mind, one that needs exercise and practice like all skills. By understanding and harnessing this flexibility, we can better understand the roots of trauma and build greater resilience for the future.

Bonanno’s narrative is not just scientifically rigorous; it’s also deeply engaging, gripping your imagination with artful narrative while honoring the impeccable science of resilience. This makes The End of Trauma not only a valuable read for professionals in the field but also for anyone interested in understanding how they and those they support can overcome extraordinary challenges. It prepares you to build resilience with the potential opportunities that struggle presents. Ultimately, the book provides an optimistic, compassionate, and agentic framework for reexamining our approach to trauma, urging us to appreciate our own mind’s capacity for resilience and to use it to navigate life’s toughest moments. Understand, appreciate, build strategies, and prepare to grow.

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversities by Nadine Burke Harris

Rebecca Gotlieb

October-17-2019

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversities by Nadine Burke Harris

Nadine Burke Harris explains that she wrote The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversities to help parent and caregivers provide their children with the best opportunity in life, even when they face difficulties. This book is a critical, and eye-opening read for those invested in supporting the health and education of young people. As Harris chronicles her own career as a researcher, pediatric clinician, and founder and CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco, she leads the reader through her process of discovering that childhood adversities cause profound and lasting changes in the body and that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are widespread and transmitted from one generation to the next. Using her own successes at the Center for Youth Wellness as an example and with suggestions for future efforts, she advocates for a public health response that includes prevention of adverse childhood experiences and quick and sensitive screenings for ACEs in conjunction with a medical and mental health response for treating the psychological and physical effects of trauma. While we need to learn more about how to recover from adversities, six factors we know to be helpful are sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness.

Early in her career, Harris researched the biochemical basis of stress in tadpoles, finding that exposure to stress-related corticosterone early in development inhibited growth and decreased health. Later, when she was served as a pediatrician in a community facing poverty, discrimination, and other hardships, she noticed a similar pattern in her young patients. She explains that the stress response can be beneficial, even lifesaving, in instances that call for acute stress. However, when the stress response is activated intensely for a prolonged period, it damages health. A study conducted in 1985 showed that the more exposure adults had before they were 18 to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse and violence, physical ,or emotional neglect, substance abuse or mental illness, divorce, or criminal behavior, the worse their immune system, heart health, and cancer risk. ACEs have neurological, hormonal, and immunological consequences. People who have experienced six or more of these ACEs have a life expectancy that is 20 years shorter than people who have experienced none. Among kids, exposure to four or more of the ACEs is associated with 32 times increased likelihood of being diagnosed with a learning or behavioral problem. Indeed, ACEs are at the root of many issues in public education.

Harris carefully and deliberately explains that toxic stress can be experienced by anyone. Communities of color and communities facing poverty are more likely to be in a constant state of arousal resulting in more trauma symptoms. What biological research shows, however, is that everyone is equally susceptible to the health effects of trauma when adversity strikes, and everyone is equally in need of help when that happens.

What does Harris propose can be done to prevent and mitigate the ill effects of ACEs? When children have safe, stable, and nurturing caregivers, even if the children are exposed to stressful or dangerous communities, these caregivers can act as an epigenetic force buffering against cellular aging and other adverse effects of trauma. A focus on prevention through caring adults is much more effective than treating the effects of trauma after it has occurred. Nonetheless, treatment is important. While talking about ACEs may feel taboo, universally screening all patients for the number of ACEs they have suffered should be standard practice. Mental health services should be available as part of the primary care clinicians’ practice to make receiving these services easy. Exercise and nutrition can help improve brain functioning and the immune system. Sleep and mindfulness promote the healing of a dysregulate stress response.

Today 39 states and the District of Columbia collect data about ACEs. These data have revealed that more than half of the population has at least one ACE and at least thirteen percent have four or more. Harris notes that many have experienced positive effects of adversity—e.g., developing greater empathy or the ability to persevere. While she accepts that this is true, and has even experienced that in her own life, she reminds the reader that we should not make character judgments of people who react poorly in the face of adversity. Given the prevalence of ACEs, Harris makes a compelling case for continuing to pursue more advanced ways to treat the health sequela of them. This powerful book concludes with the ACE questionnaire, so that readers can determine their own ACE score or that of the children for whom they care.

Harris, N. B. (2018). The deepest well: Healing the long-term effects of childhood adversity. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Tag: Trauma

Book Review: The End of Trauma, by George Bonanno

A Surprising Perspective

The Non-Recipe Recipe

The Return of the “Mindset”

A Big Caveat

TL;DR

Too Good to be True? The Effect of Tetris on PTSD Symptoms

First: Slow Down

Second: Questions to Ask

More Questions: Trust the Process

Check the Field