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Trauma is focus of Butler’s work
Lisa Butler says she came to UB specifically because of the School of Social Work’s focus on trauma. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“It’s always intriguing—how people respond, and why they respond, and what they can do to recover from these profoundly life-altering events.”
In modern times, trauma has captured the public’s attention through events such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the 1980s and 1990s hysteria surrounding child abuse allegations and, more recently, the devastating earthquake in Haiti.
“There’s a way in which the whole topic has become so much more present in the common vocabulary, the common thinking, and for good reason—it’s important,” says Lisa Butler, a nationally recognized trauma researcher in the School of Social Work. “It’s meaningful. And it’s always intriguing—how people respond, and why they respond, and what they can do to recover from these profoundly life-altering events."
UB hired Butler in January 2009 to expand the university’s expertise in extreme events, one of eight areas of academic strength the institution is looking to build as part of its UB 2020 long-range strategic plan.
Since earning her PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 1993, Butler, an associate professor with a sunny but serious disposition, has studied topics ranging from the impact of emotional support for women with metastatic or recurrent breast cancer to the effects of hypnosis on reducing the distress and duration of invasive medical procedures for children. She is the type of scholar who has the ability to examine topics on a micro-level without losing sight of the bigger picture—how the results of any one study fit into a field of inquiry as a whole. In the past decade, she has served as a reviewer for 22 professional journals, including the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse and the Journal of Psychological Trauma.
The School of Social Work’s focus on trauma was part of what appealed to Butler about UB. She came to Buffalo via Stanford, where she built a successful career as a senior researcher in the medical school. Though her work in California was rewarding, she was ready to move on to a faculty position that would allow her to continue her research while devoting more time to teaching and mentoring young scholars.
“I applied because I saw a listing for a UB 2020 extreme events position,” Butler says. “It was a job that specifically valued trauma research, and those jobs are hard to come by. …My research seemed very compatible with a lot of values here, and I guess people here felt that way, too."
Butler’s interest in trauma stems from early in her career. One subject she approached with intense fascination as a doctoral student was experiential discontinuities—how humans respond to anomalous experiences, and why. That line of inquiry led her to trauma. She became interested, she says, in how people process and come to terms with events that “violate expectations about your place in the world, or the safety of the world, or how people treat you, or how you feel about yourself.”
A thread that runs through much of Butler’s research is the topic of dissociation. She is interested not only in pathological dissociation, but also in what she calls “normative dissociation”—daydreaming, fantasizing, becoming intensely absorbed in one activity, or otherwise dissociating in everyday life. Butler has argued that learning about normative dissociation can inform our understanding of pathological dissociation, the type associated with trauma victims. She also has written numerous papers exploring hypnosis, one type of dissociation, as a therapeutic tool.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, Butler worked with psychiatrist David Spiegel, a world-renowned expert in trauma and dissociation. Since then, she has built an impressive research career of her own.
As co-investigator and project director on a multi-year study Spiegel initiated examining how support groups affect breast cancer patients faced with the threat of death, Butler found that women in these therapy groups experienced less pain than counterparts who lacked such a resource. Just as intriguing was what the study failed to find. Earlier research Spiegel had conducted had shown support group members living longer. The work Butler and her colleagues completed found no difference in survival times between therapy participants and patients not in a group, though support group members experienced many important psychosocial benefits.
In another recent project, Butler explored a different trauma—the Sept. 11 attacks. Through a national study, she and fellow researchers examined post-traumatic resilience and growth following the events of 2001.
They found that people who developed less-negative world views and had access to stronger social networks were more likely to recover or “bounce back” quickly after the terrorist attacks. Other predictors of resiliency included less media exposure—people who watched repeated images of calamity tended to become more distressed—and a willingness to express sadness or pain, rather than suppress such feelings.
For other people, Butler and her colleagues found, the trauma of 9/11 was very difficult. Even among this population, however, the study’s results carried good news. Some participants reported that despite initial setbacks, they experienced positive life changes, such as improved relationships, increased spirituality or an increased perception of their own strength as a result.
The findings reflect a truth that Butler and others have discovered over and over again in studies of trauma: Even the worst experiences can, in some ways, be a source of strength.
“People have been struggling with personal trauma since the beginning of time,” Butler says. “The two world wars of the 20th century, plus countless other conflicts around the world, as well as terrorism and natural disasters including the tsunami, are only some of the examples. …It’s particularly important in social work to recognize that the vast majority of people get through these experiences relatively well, and I think there are a great many things we can do to enhance people’s strengths and ability to cope well.
“In my view,” she says, “looking at resilience and growth following something as shattering as 9/11 is, in a way, positive psychology meeting trauma psychology. It’s a way of finding something good in what happened.”
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