Is Trauma Forever?

Source: Petra Flenburg / Pixabay

This post is Part 1 of a series.

Back in 2012, I read a statistic that floored me. In a book by psychiatrist and researcher Bruce Perry on neglected and abused children, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry mentioned in passing that two thirds of all trauma survivors recover their resilience after traumatic experiences, regardless of the type of intervention (or lack of intervention).

I didn't know what to think. I had learned something very different, and you may have learned it too, which was that traumatic experiences — especially in childhood — could be so damaging that they essentially became life sentences for most trauma survivors.

The trauma healing industry emerges

At that time, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) quiz was becoming popular, and it had us add up the painful events we had experienced in childhood to receive our score. That score suggested strongly that we could predict our likelihood of developing specific conditions, diseases, or syndromes as a direct result of our combined traumatic experiences.

The trauma-healing industry was also heating up at that time, and we were told that moving our eyes while recalling traumatic incidents could heal us (EMDR), or that shaking and shivering could dislodge traumatic residues that had supposedly become stuck in our bodies (Somatic Experiencing).

The Polyvagal Theory told us that traumatic experiences damaged our brains, our vagus nerves, and our nervous systems, while many people were taught how to allegedly move from sympathetic to parasympathetic states through breathing practices or intentional relaxation methods.

By 2014, we would be told that our body kept score of everything that happened to us, almost as if we were blank slates upon which traumatic experiences were indelibly written. And today, we're surrounded by trauma-informed everything and being invited to "hack our nervous systems" to free ourselves from the unwanted effects of traumatic experiences.

Yet as a researcher and survivor of extensive childhood abuse, I've long been struck by this thought: If two thirds of all trauma survivors naturally regain their resilience, regardless of intervention, the research on trauma healing modalities is in serious question.

In fact, the entire trauma healing industry is in question if its research does not account for our natural capacity for resilience and healing.

Because healing from trauma is a natural process

Today, after more than a decade and hundreds of studies that have followed Perry's book, it's understood that the majority of us tend to heal from traumas naturally — 66.6% of people, to be exact (see Perry, 2007 and Bonanno, 2024).

No matter the type, duration, or severity of traumatic incidents, two thirds of people will eventually recover their resilience with no interventions required. No therapy, no medications, no "nervous system regulation," no trauma-informed anything. People recover and heal as a matter of course. We are a resilient species.

So how did we miss the knowledge that we are two times more likely to heal from traumatic experiences than not?

The research lag is a factor

I wrote about the unfortunate research lag that the scientific community creates, and this lag is a main reason for our misunderstandings about resilience and healing after traumatic experiences.

Some studies have estimated that there can be an average lag of seventeen years between what researchers know and what clinicians and the general public can access.

For instance, in the case of the long-disconfirmed lizard brain or "triune brain" model, that lag is still active after nearly three decades ― and not coincidentally, many trauma-healing modalities are based on the incorrect triune brain model.

And though Dr. Perry understood the two-thirds proportion well enough to mention it in passing in his 2012 book, this knowledge is still mostly unknown to therapists, clinicians, and the general public.

There's also an observer bias at work

We know that therapists see people who are struggling. Generally, people who feel well and stable don't seek out therapy or counseling; that seems obvious.

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However, there can be a universalizing effect, in that therapists and counselors are surrounded by people who are in difficulty. If they haven't been trained to seek out their own observer biases, they may mistakenly assume that struggling people are the norm instead of a small and special population who may already be on their way to restoration and resilience.

This observer bias exists in another direction as well, especially on social media and in the popular press, where we are continually invited to see traumatic experiences as life sentences.

Those of us who have experienced what resilience researcher George Bonanno calls "potentially traumatizing events" are invited to seek out symptoms in ourselves, to self-diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ― even though it is rare ― and to assume that we will not become well again unless we can access extensive therapy.

These popular misconceptions ignore the two thirds of us who have regained our resilience after traumatic experiences, and they suggest that everyone is walking around with unrecognized PTSD.

And sadly, much of the trauma-healing industry asserts that trauma survivors require extensive interventions for questionable neurological mechanisms that are often based on the disconfirmed triune brain model.

Natural healing responses after traumatic incidents may also be viewed as pathological

In his book, The End of Trauma, Dr. George Bonanno writes about the natural ups and downs that occur as people regain their resilience after traumatic events. There may be emotional upwellings, a need for isolation or increased socialization, periods of instability, sleep disturbances, and a tendency toward questionable coping mechanisms that he calls "coping ugly" (meaning that they're helping people cope in the moment, even if they're not great in the long term).

In short, healing from traumatic experiences is a process. It isn't always pretty or graceful, it looks different for each of us, and it takes however long it takes. However, there is an arc to this healing that Dr. Bonanno has identified, and a way for people to know if their arc is a sign that they're in the 66.6 percent of people who will eventually regain their resilience, or if they're in the 33.3 percent of people who could use some support.

In Part 2: What healing from trauma looks like.