This text grew out of the author's life-long interest in biographies and her clinical work with people who have suffered bad accidents. Some individuals become significantly disorganized and distressed after what was a minor event by any objective criterion, while others who experience a vastly more terrible event often show a remarkable resilience. In attempting to make sense of this diversity of responses, Bowman studied coping behaviours earlier in her research career. It became clear that long-standing personality styles and beliefs played a powerful moderating role in the relations between objective adversity and apparent distress responses. Despite this evidence, the idea that terrible life events have significant power in affecting mental health has become increasingly popular within professional mental health disciplines and in popular thinking. In particular, the use of the post traumatic distress disorder as a diagnosis has served as a prototype for this thinking, with gradual extension to an ever-wider array of life experiences. Encounters with hundreds of patients over the years, along with research into the connections between stress, coping and distress led Bowman to an increasing concern about the assumptions mental health professionals were using in their clinical work with people seeking help for event-attributed distress. She began to study the evidence concerning the power of life experiences to account for chronic emotional problems that were attributed to these "stressors", and discovered that clinical practice was based on an exaggerated idea of the power of life events and a correspondingly significant inattention to pre-existing factors. These factors have been extensively examined in experimental and correlational studies within the fields of stress and coping, in personality studies of emotionality, and in social psychology through studies of attributional processes and their effects on behaviour. The evidence was so compelling about the power of individual differences in accounting for prolonged distress outcomes after "toxic" life events that the author found she had to write this book. It represents both a testament to the resilience of those who have been able to surmount horrible experiences, and a different way of thinking about those who find themselves significantly disabled after apparently minor or singular nasty events. This way of rethinking prolonged distress syndromes should help to direct treatment in ways that will be more helpful than the very event-focused treatment models currently used.