Maria Konnikova

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? __vents are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,_ Bonanno told me, in December. __o call something a __raumatic event_ belies that fact._ He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning__erhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community__hen it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn__ inherent in the event; it resides in the event__ psychological construal. It__ for this reason, Bonanno told me, that __tressful_ or __raumatic_ events in and of themselves don__ have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. __he prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,_ he said. __t__ only predictive if there__ a negative response._ In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn__ guarantee that you__l suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.