His findings include that a natural resilience is the main component of grief and trauma reactions. The first researcher to use pre-loss data, he outlined four trajectories of grief. Bonanno's work has also demonstrated that absence of grief or trauma symptoms is a healthy outcome, rather than something to be feared as has been the thought and practice until his research. Because grief responses can take many forms, including laughter, celebration, and bawdiness, in addition to sadness, Bonanno coined the phrase "coping ugly" to describe the idea that some forms of coping may seem counter intuitive. Bonanno has found that resilience is natural to humans, suggesting that it cannot be "taught" through specialized programs and that there is virtually no existing research with which to design resilience training, nor is there existing research to support major investment in such things as military resilience training programs.