Stable Functioning After Loss Is the Norm, Bonanno's Data Show

Freud, in 1917, cast mourning as labor. In George Bonanno’s paraphrase, virtually every bereaved person needed to review “each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido … to the non-existent object.” Theorists who followed Freud pressed the point harder, and by 2004 Bonanno could describe “the near unanimity with which mental health professionals endorsed the grief work perspective.” Against that, he wrote, there was “a surprising lack of empirical support.”

One piece of evidence for how firm the expectation was comes from a survey of self-identified bereavement experts that Bonanno cites (Middleton et al., 1993). Sixty-five percent endorsed the belief that “absent grief” exists, that it usually stems from denial or inhibition, and that it is generally maladaptive in the long run. Seventy-six percent agreed that it eventually surfaces as delayed grief. By those answers, most of the experts surveyed expected a bereaved person who kept going to be rare, or to be hiding something that would surface later.

Bonanno’s paper, “Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events?” (American Psychologist, 2004, 59(1), 20-28), argued that the assumption was built on the wrong sample. Much of what psychology knew about adults facing loss had come from people who sought treatment or showed great distress. Read against that sample, a person who stayed steady looked like an anomaly. Read against everyone who experienced the loss, he argued, steady was the commonest outcome.

The data that came after him supports a direct answer to the question a reader in the middle of a bad year is likely to be asking. The most common response to a loss or potentially traumatic event is stable, healthy functioning. In a 2018 review of 54 studies, Galatzer-Levy, Huang and Bonanno (Clinical Psychology Review, 63, 41-55) found it averaged 65.7% across populations. Recovery after months of symptoms was second, and a minority stayed in chronic difficulty. The rest of this piece covers what those words mean, where the numbers come from, and where they stop applying.

Resilience and recovery are different curves

Bonanno’s most useful move was a definition. Recovery, in his usage, means that normal functioning gives way temporarily to symptoms, such as depression or PTSD symptoms, usually for at least several months, and then returns to pre-event levels. He says full recovery “may be relatively rapid or may take as long as one or two years.” Resilience is a different shape: “the ability to maintain a stable equilibrium.” A resilient person may have several weeks of sporadic preoccupation or restless sleep, but the line stays roughly flat, along with a continued capacity for positive emotion.

Why separate them? Because lumping them together hides the thing being measured. If everyone without a diagnosis is filed as “recovered,” it is easy to assume that the resilient group must have done the same emotional work as the people who struggled and then improved. Bonanno argues that assumption is where the damage comes from. As he reads the meta-analyses, grief therapies for people with ordinary bereavement were “typically ineffective, and perhaps even deleterious” (a conclusion he attributes to Neimeyer, 2000, quoting page 541). In one of the analyses he cites, 38% of people receiving grief treatment were worse off than untreated controls, while the clearest benefits went to people with chronic grief. I have taken both figures from Bonanno’s summary, not from the underlying meta-analyses.

The best single piece of evidence in the 2004 paper is a prospective study of spouses, Bonanno, Wortman and colleagues (2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Because the researchers had interviewed couples about three years before one partner died, they could check the theory that low grief means a shallow attachment. Forty-six percent of the sample had low depression both before the death and through 18 months of bereavement, and relatively few grief symptoms. Interviewers did not rate them as cold or distant, and they did not report marital difficulties. A smaller group had actually improved after the death, whose spouses had been ill and whose marriages had been more conflicted before the death.

The four trajectories, with numbers

Bonanno’s four curves have become the standard vocabulary for this field. Resilience is stable low symptoms. Recovery is high symptoms that decline. Chronic is high symptoms that stay. Delayed is low symptoms that rise later. Galatzer-Levy, Huang and Bonanno (2018) pooled 67 trajectory analyses from 54 studies of stress and potentially traumatic events and reported how often each curve appeared and how large it was on average. These figures are from the abstract; I could not reach the full text.

Trajectory	Pattern	Analyses (of 67) showing it	Average share of participants (95% CI)
Resilience	Low symptoms, stable	63	65.7% (61.6 to 69.8)
Recovery	High symptoms that decline	49	20.8% (16.2 to 25.8)
Chronic	High symptoms that persist	47	10.6% (8.6 to 12.7)
Delayed onset	Low symptoms that rise	22	8.9% (5.3 to 13.3)

The percentages do not add to 100, and that is expected: they are averages over the analyses in which each curve appeared, and not every study found all four. (That reading of the table is mine, not the authors’.) The review also reports that the differences in prevalence between studies came mostly from who was studied, and not from the outcome measured or the statistical method.

A later review by Bonanno, Chen and Galatzer-Levy (2023, Nature Reviews Psychology) gives a sense of how the resilient share varies by population:

• Deployed soldiers assessed before and after service: 83% resilient in one large study, and 81% even among those with substantial combat exposure.
• Civilians hospitalized after traumatic injuries such as car accidents and assaults: 62% to 73%.
• Older adults in areas hit by Hurricane Ike: 79% low or no PTSD symptoms, with 16% chronic and 5% delayed.
• College students after mass violence: 56% to 61% resilient, even though many had chronically raised anxiety.
• COVID-19 studies in several countries: 57% to 93%, with an average of 66%, identical to the pre-pandemic average. Recovery was less common (13% versus 21%), and a mild persistent-distress pattern was more common (27% versus 15%).

The 2004 paper holds older numbers in the same direction. Bonanno puts chronic depression and distress at 10% to 15% of bereaved people. A month after the September 11 attacks, 7.5% of Manhattan residents met criteria for PTSD in a population survey, and that fell to 1.7% at four months and 0.6% at six (Galea and colleagues, as cited in Bonanno, 2004).

What “resilient” does not mean

The word invites misreading, so it helps to set the limits out plainly.

It is not the absence of pain. Bonanno’s definition allows weeks of disruption. The people in the resilient group were still bereaved. They were people whose ordinary functioning (work, relationships, sleep over the medium run) did not break down.

It also says nothing about character. Bonanno, Chen and Galatzer-Levy (2023) describe what they call the resilience paradox: the correlates of resilience, such as social and economic resources, coping strategies, exercise and positive emotion, are well known, but each has a small effect. Correlations tend to be under 0.30, and when several predictors are combined they explain between 1% and 6% of the variance. The authors report that resilience personality questionnaires do not predict who ends up on a resilient trajectory, and cite one experiment that concluded the trait was probably “an artifact of a self-deceptive answering style.” In plain terms, the field can say roughly what share of a group will stay steady and cannot reliably say which individuals those will be. That is a reason not to read your own curve as a verdict on you.

Limits of the evidence

Several limits sit behind the headline number.

Start with which events were studied. Bonanno (2004) defines the topic as adults in “otherwise normal circumstances” facing an isolated, potentially disruptive event, such as a death or a violent or life-threatening situation. The bulk of the pooled data concerns that kind of event. A breakup, a layoff or a long period of unemployment is a different kind of stress, usually slower and more tangled up with the rest of a life. The 2023 review itself notes that the definition of trauma has expanded across successive editions of the diagnostic manual, a drift it calls “conceptual bracket creep.” The 66% average is a reasonable prior for how people respond to a hit, but I did not find a pooled figure for breakups and would not transfer one.

Then there is what “functioning” was measured as. In most of these studies, resilience means low scores on symptom scales for PTSD, depression or anxiety, tracked over repeated assessments. A different outcome gives a different answer. Infurna and Luthar (2017, Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 38-53) fitted trajectory models to 461 Australian parents who had lost a child. The share counted as resilient was 44% on life satisfaction, 56% on negative affect, 21% on positive affect, 32% on general health and 16% on physical functioning. Only 5% were resilient on all five measures, and 28% on none. Their conclusion was that resilience is not a single thing. A high resilient share on a symptom scale does not mean most people feel fine in every domain.

Who was counted, and when, matters too. Studies that recruit after an event tend to miss people with few symptoms, who are less likely to volunteer. The 2023 review reports that the resilient share was 74% in prospective studies, where participants were already enrolled before the event, versus 66% in retrospective ones, so this bias seems to push the estimates down. Of the 67 analyses in the 2018 review, four used clinical or high-symptom samples that could not show a low-symptom group at all. The statistical method has its own weaknesses: trajectory classes come from mixture models, which can over-fit or under-fit, and the authors say the safeguard is replication across samples. Treat the classes as summaries of groups, not as types of people.

Most outcomes are also self-report. Some of the studies Bonanno cites add outside views (interviewer ratings, anonymous ratings by close friends and relatives that line up with low-symptom trajectories), which makes a simple “people are just saying they are fine” reading harder to sustain. It does not rule out missed suffering that a symptom scale does not ask about.

None of this makes the pattern uncertain. It means the pattern describes populations, defined by particular measures, after particular kinds of events.

If you are not on the flat line

The numbers also give a reason to treat feeling terrible as ordinary. Roughly one in five people in the pooled data followed the recovery curve, with symptoms for months and, by Bonanno’s 2004 description, sometimes a year or two before they eased. About one in ten stayed in chronic difficulty. Neither of those is a sign of weakness, and the research does not frame them that way; the resources that predict resilience are small effects that mix with luck, history and circumstances. Bonanno’s own account is that heavily distressed people are the ones for whom grief-focused work and treatment are most likely to help.

One more thing the trajectory shape implies: you cannot read your curve off a bad week. A trajectory is sorted afterwards, from repeated measurements over months. Feeling wrecked in week three is compatible with the recovery curve and, for that matter, with a resilient one that includes a few rough weeks.

What keeps ordinary days ordinary

The studies do not test routines. They measure outcomes and correlates, so the following is my inference from what they do report, not a finding.

The closest evidence is correlational. In the bereaved-parents data, Infurna and Luthar (2017) found that social connectedness, anticipating comfort when distressed, and everyday role functioning were the strongest predictors of resilient adaptation. Everyday role functioning is a researcher’s label for something close to this: still doing the things a day asks of you, such as work, caring for others, and household tasks. Bonanno (2004) points in a similar direction when he cites Bonanno and Keltner (1997) on “continued contact with and support from important people” as one route by which positive emotion helps. In the Virginia Tech sample reviewed in 2023, a small group of students who had elevated symptoms before the shooting improved afterward, and they reported a marked increase in emotional support from family and friends.

Because the evidence is correlational, it cannot say that holding a routine causes a flat trajectory. People who are functioning well may find it easier to keep a routine. With that caveat, here is what the evidence makes reasonable:

• Keep a fixed wake time and the obligations that involve other people. These are the visible form of “everyday role functioning,” and they keep you in contact with the people the data point to. Sleep after a loss is its own problem, covered in a post on grief and insomnia.
• Make the first action small and scheduled. The best trial evidence for that comes from depression treatment, not bereavement: the behavioral activation trials tested scheduling activity instead of waiting for motivation.
• Accept imposed calendars. A job loss comes with some of its own, such as the weekly or biweekly certifications described in this walkthrough of unemployment check-ins. A fixed appointment is an ordinary-day anchor you did not have to invent.
• Do not treat grief processing as compulsory or as forbidden. Bonanno (2004) reports resilient outcomes among people who processed their loss and among repressive copers who avoided it, which fits his statement that there are multiple pathways. The evidence gives no one correct way to grieve.

For wake time specifically, DontSnooze asks for a 30-second video when the alarm fires and sends a random camera-roll photo to friends if you do not record it. That gives an outside check on one anchor of a day. Nothing in these studies tests whether an alarm or any routine changes which trajectory a person follows, and a penalty aimed at friends is a poor fit for someone in acute distress.

The practical test is longer than a bad week. If months in you still cannot manage work or close relationships, you may be in the chronic group, about 10.6% in the pooled data. Bonanno’s summary of the grief-therapy meta-analyses is that their clearest benefits went to people with chronic grief, which makes that the point to seek help and not to wait it out.