Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [53]
Less than a year after the civil war ended, George Bonanno at Columbia University interviewed seventy-eight Bosnia-Herzegovina citizens in Sarajevo. Each person in the study rated himself or herself when it came to psychological problems, interpersonal skills, health problems, and moodiness. Then each person was rated by his or her peers. A small group of people rated themselves significantly higher than others did. And these were the people found by mental health professionals to be better adjusted.
After 9/11, Bonanno found a similar pattern among survivors who were in or near the World Trade Center during the attacks. Those with high senses of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Their confidence was like a vaccine against life’s vicissitudes.
Several studies have found that people with higher IQs tend to fare better after a trauma. Resilient people may be smarter, in other words. Why would that be? Perhaps intelligence helps people think creatively, which might in turn lead to a greater sense of purpose and control. Or maybe the confidence that comes with a high IQ is what leads to the resilience to begin with.
The more important point is that everyone, regardless of IQ, can manufacture self-esteem through training and experience. That is what soldiers and police officers will tell you; that confidence comes from doing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the brain functions much better when it is familiar with a problem. We feel more in control because we are more in control. But in certain situations, like the one in which Shacham found himself as a rookie cop, sitting next to a violent criminal who had called his bluff, neither experience nor training could rescue him. He drew upon something else, something more fundamental.
Special Forces Soldiers Are Not Normal
The U.S. military has spent millions of dollars trying to figure out how to profile people like Shacham—people who will stay lucid in life-or-death situations and then remain resilient afterward. Charles Morgan III is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the director of the human performance laboratory at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. He has spent the past fifteen years studying differences in how people react to extreme stress. He started out studying Vietnam and Gulf War veterans. The ones with posttraumatic stress disorder behaved a lot differently from the ones without, as you might expect. The vets with posttraumatic stress disorder were jumpier. They also dissociated more, reporting that colors appeared brighter or things moved in slow motion, even in normal life. It was as if their brains, having once entered crisis mode, remained perpetually stuck there. They even had higher levels of certain stress hormones in their blood than other people.
In the 1990s, the consensus among most scientists was that these people had been damaged by their experiences. Their brains, their blood, and their personalities had been altered by trauma. But a handful of researchers were not satisfied with that theory. “We were making assumptions,” says Morgan. “We really didn’t know.” Which came first, these scientists wondered: the trauma? Or the person susceptible to being traumatized?
To find out, Morgan needed to study people before they were exposed to the trauma. At the Military Survival School at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he found a laboratory for stress. After a period of classroom training, soldiers at the school are released into the woods to try to avoid capture. They have no food, water, or weapons. Instructors hunt