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? Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic, Bonanno told me, in December. To call something a traumatic 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 meaningperhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the communitythen it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isnt inherent in the event; it resides in the events psychological construal. Its for this reason, Bonanno told me, that stressful or traumatic events in and of themselves dont have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning, he said. Its only predictive if theres a negative response. In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesnt guarantee that youll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.