George Bonanno

Introduction

George A. Bonanno is an American clinical psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who spent three decades arguing for a claim that most bereavement theory did not want to hear: resilience is the ordinary outcome of loss, not the exceptional one. Where a century of clinical writing had treated prolonged distress as the natural course and its absence as a warning sign, Bonanno's prospective studies found that a stable trajectory of healthy functioning is what most people show after the death of a spouse, a disaster, an assault or a life-threatening illness. He is also the most cited source for the empirical demolition of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stage model of grief.

His contribution is as much methodological as it is substantive. Bereavement researchers before him almost always began measuring after the loss had happened, which makes it impossible to tell what the person was like before. Bonanno built his programme on data collected before the loss, described the handful of outcome patterns that recur across events and cultures, and then asked what predicts them. The answer turned out to be humbler than anyone expected: in 2021 he named it the resilience paradox. Correlates of resilience are many, each is small, and no combination yet devised can reliably say in advance who will cope well. Bonanno directs the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teachers College and is the author of The Other Side of Sadness (2009; second edition 2019) and The End of Trauma (2021).

Early Life and Education

Bonanno was born in Chicago, Illinois, into a Sicilian-American family. His father was a first-generation immigrant who wanted to travel but never did, because he was devoted to raising a family. The relationship was difficult during Bonanno's teenage years; he left home at seventeen, reconciled with his father not long before the older man died, and was twenty-three when the death occurred. He has said that his research later led him back to that loss in unexpected ways. While working in China he took part in the traditional rite of burning paper offerings for ancestors, and in a shop he found a paper facsimile of gold bricks — the fortune his father had never had. He burned it with his family present and later described the moment as light and comforting, and as evidence that the point was thinking about his father rather than the object.

He took his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, a small Massachusetts college built around student-designed interdisciplinary study, and then his doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University under Jerome L. Singer, a researcher known for his work on daydreaming and imagery. His entry into bereavement research was in some ways accidental: he has said he began when he was offered a position running a bereavement project. He has also recalled that Kübler-Ross was barely mentioned during his graduate training in the 1980s, and that her stages were never part of the academic scientific discourse — they grew in public acceptance on their own, without reference to what bereaved people actually do.

Academic and Professional Career

Bonanno joined Teachers College, Columbia University in the late 1990s and has been there since, as Professor of Clinical Psychology with a joint affiliation in Psychology in Education. He founded and directs the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab, and he has chaired the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology. His fieldwork has taken him well beyond the American samples that dominate the literature: he has studied survivors of the September 11 attacks in New York, the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, bereaved parents and spouses in Nanjing, and populations in Israel.

Recognition has accumulated at the level of the profession rather than the bestseller list. In 2019 he received the Association for Psychological Science's James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, given for a lifetime of intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society, and in the same year the International Positive Psychology Association honoured him for distinguished lifetime contributions to positive psychology. He has also received a lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and has repeatedly appeared on Web of Science's list of the most cited scientists in the world. In February 2011 The New York Times described the current science of bereavement as having been "driven primarily" by Bonanno.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Prospective designs. Bonanno's methodological signature is the pre-loss baseline. The most influential instance used the Changing Lives of Older Couples study, a Detroit-area survey that had interviewed married couples for reasons unrelated to bereavement, so that some respondents could be followed from before a spouse's death to eighteen months after it (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002). Only with such a design can a researcher distinguish a person who was always distressed from a person who was changed by the loss.

Four trajectories. Grief and trauma outcomes, Bonanno argued, are more varied than the diagnostic categories allow, but the variation collapses into a small number of recurring patterns: resilience (relatively stable, healthy functioning), recovery (a temporary dip into threshold or sub-threshold symptoms, followed by a return to baseline), chronic dysfunction (prolonged suffering lasting years), and delayed distress. Two of these were direct challenges to clinical orthodoxy. Delayed grief, tested directly across five years of bereavement, essentially failed to appear — although delayed trauma does seem to be real. And resilience turned out to be the largest single group.

Resilience is the majority outcome. In a probability sample of New Yorkers after the September 11 attacks, 65.1 percent showed the resilience trajectory, and even among the most heavily exposed groups the resilient share never fell below a third (Psychological Science, 2006). A later review with Isaac Galatzer-Levy and Sandy Huang examined 67 separate trajectory analyses covering different events, designs and computational methods; on average about two-thirds of participants showed resilience (Clinical Psychology Review, 2018).

Against stages and grief work. Bonanno's work is the standard scientific citation against the five stages and against the Freudian notion that grief must be "worked through". His objection is partly empirical and partly ethical: the stages were never derived from data, and telling people they must pass through a fixed sequence makes those who do not feel broken. "I never set out to prove Kübler-Ross wrong," he said in 2010, "but I think the idea of stages of grief is actually dangerous." He also revived Helene Deutsch's 1937 question about the absence of grief and answered it the other way round: not grieving is usually a healthy outcome, not a hidden pathology.

Positive emotion and "coping ugly". With Dacher Keltner, Bonanno showed that genuine smiling — coded from the orbicularis oculi muscle around the eye, which contracts involuntarily — during an interview about a loss predicted better long-term adjustment (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1997). Laughter, he argued, draws other people close and rewards them for staying. He coined the phrase coping ugly for the broader point: strategies that look unhealthy in the abstract — self-enhancement, strategic distraction, suppression, even avoidance — can be functional in an extreme context (Psychological Science, 2004; JPSP, 2005).

Regulatory flexibility. With Charles Burton he named the assumption that any given strategy is always adaptive or always maladaptive the fallacy of uniform efficacy, and proposed regulatory flexibility in its place: context sensitivity, a broad repertoire, and responsiveness to feedback (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2013). The idea converges with independent work by Susan Folkman on coping and with later emotion-regulation flexibility models.

The resilience paradox. In his 2021 synthesis for the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, Bonanno argued that because the resilience trajectory contains most people it is also the most heterogeneous, so the predictors are necessarily many and weak. Neither personality scales nor machine-learning methods had cracked prediction. His proposed way out is the flexibility mindset and flexibility sequence — but he conceded the paradox is not solved.

Policy. Bonanno has argued consistently that universal psychological debriefing after disasters does more harm than good, and that there is little evidence to justify large investment in military resilience-training programmes. After September 11, FEMA made more than $150 million available for crisis counselling in New York; he has said that hardly anybody wanted it.

Major Publications

  • Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books. (Second edition, 2019.)
  • Bonanno, G. A. (2021). The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD. Basic Books.
  • Bonanno, G. A., & Kaltman, S. (1999). Toward an integrative perspective on bereavement. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 760–776.
  • Bonanno, G. A., & Kaltman, S. (2001). The varieties of grief experience. Clinical Psychology Review, 21, 705–734.
  • Bonanno, G. A., & Keltner, D. (1997). Facial expressions of emotion and the course of conjugal bereavement. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106, 126–137.
  • Bonanno, G. A., Wortman, C. B., Lehman, D. R., Tweed, R. G., Haring, M., Sonnega, J., Carr, D., & Nesse, R. M. (2002). Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1150–1164.
  • Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59, 20–28.
  • Bonanno, G. A., Moskowitz, J. T., Papa, A., & Folkman, S. (2005). Resilience to loss in bereaved spouses, bereaved parents, and bereaved gay men. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 827–843.
  • Bonanno, G. A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A., & Vlahov, D. (2006). Psychological resilience after disaster: New York City in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack. Psychological Science, 17, 181–186.
  • Bonanno, G. A., Brewin, C. R., Kaniasty, K., & La Greca, A. M. (2010). Weighing the costs of disaster: Consequences, risks, and resilience in individuals, families, and communities. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 11(1), 1–49.
  • Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591–612.
  • Galatzer-Levy, I. R., Huang, S. H., & Bonanno, G. A. (2018). Trajectories of resilience and dysfunction following potential trauma: A review and statistical evaluation. Clinical Psychology Review, 63, 41–55.
  • Bonanno, G. A. (2021). The resilience paradox. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1942642.

Impact and Legacy

Bonanno moved the centre of gravity of bereavement science. Resilience is now a standard construct with a standard measurement approach, the stage model is taught as a historical curiosity rather than a finding, and the default expectation after a mass trauma is no longer an epidemic of PTSD. His influence is visible in the spread of trajectory methods — latent class growth analysis and its relatives — across traumatic stress research, and in the fact that a discipline built around pathology now routinely publishes on what goes right.

The reception was never unanimous, and the substance of the objections is worth stating. When the 2004 American Psychologist article appeared, Brett Litz replied that resilience research leaned too heavily on the absence of symptoms as its definition of health, and that the construct needed to be measured in broader functional terms; P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph, Glenn Roisman and Salvatore Maddi added their own commentaries in the same issue. Bonanno replied in print and conceded part of the point — Litz's push was, he wrote, "not entirely unjustified" — while noting that he had explicitly defined resilience as more than the absence of psychopathology. Skepticism persisted: as late as 2021 he cited Litz and colleagues as continuing to question whether resilience is really as prevalent as he claims. James W. Pennebaker's findings on written emotional disclosure also sit awkwardly with Bonanno's argument that pressing people to talk after trauma can cause harm, and the two literatures have never been fully reconciled.

The definitional problem is one Bonanno himself has raised. In a 2014 interdisciplinary exchange with Steven Southwick, Ann Masten, Catherine Panter-Brick and Rachel Yehuda, he said that "the word resilience is almost useless as a single word" and only makes sense when qualified — his own distinction between minimal-impact resilience and emergent resilience, and his acknowledgement that the correlates of each are different, concedes that the headline two-thirds figure depends on which definition is used and on how the trajectory is computed. The 2018 review of 67 analyses was partly an answer to that worry, and its conclusion — that the majority share survives changes in method — is a strong one, but it does not settle what resilience is.

His popular writing has drawn a different set of criticisms. Reviewing The End of Trauma in The Wall Street Journal, Carol Tavris called it an important course correction while arguing that Bonanno fails to distinguish events that are truly traumatic from ordinary difficult life problems, and that the practical advice extracted from the flexibility mindset is "frothy, self-helpy and vague". Other reviewers noted that the book's title oversells it — it is not about ending trauma at all — and that the components of the flexibility mindset (optimism, confidence, seeing threat as challenge) are not themselves new; the novelty is in the data, not the framework. Readers and clinicians who work with chronic patients have objected that the book's cases are mostly single-incident traumas, that complex and repeated trauma and the physical health consequences of PTSD get little space, and that a message about resilience can easily be heard as blame by someone who did not bounce back.

Bonanno has an answer available to the last objection, and it is not a defensive one. He has never argued that chronic dysfunction is unreal; he helped write the diagnostic criteria for complicated grief in 1997, and in 2018 he criticised the DSM's twelve-month threshold for persistent complex bereavement disorder as too late — "if you are suffering for one year, by that point the psychopathology is a downward spiral" — welcoming the ICD-11's six-month threshold as more useful. His policy argument concerns mandatory, universal intervention offered to everyone regardless of functioning, not withholding care from people who need it. What remains genuinely open is the practical payoff: the resilience paradox means that after three decades of identifying correlates, psychology still cannot tell an individual in advance whether they will be resilient, and Bonanno's own proposed solution is a process rather than a prediction.

Learn More

References

  • Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

Menu
Loading