Preventing PTSD after shootings, fires, etc.
How to get to living with life never being the same again
Years ago, a patient of mine, I will call Susan, was seeing me to deal with the horrendous trauma of having her single child viciously tortured and murdered.
Nothing we talked about seemed to be helping and then one day she came in not exactly smiling, but calmer.
I asked her what had happened.
She replied, “I think I have figured out what I need to do which is how to live with life never being the same again.”
I asked her what she meant and she said, “My life will never be the same again with my child gone, but it doesn’t mean I can’t find a reason or purpose to go on and to one day smile and maybe even find some happiness.”
What helped her was joining a support group for Parents of Murdered Children founded by Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris Tate. If you don’t remember, Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s followers.
Prior to joining that group, Susan had said that she couldn’t go anywhere without thinking how different she was from everyone else and how awkward and awful it was whenever she met a person who asked her if she had children.
Even with me, she felt that whatever I said didn’t matter, because I couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through.
In the Mothers of Murdered Children group (which I attended on occasion), each person would go through the following steps when they they spoke:
- What had happened to their child
- Where they were the moment when they found out
- What they thought and felt upon discovering it
- What it made them immediately want to do (which was often destructive)
- What they did do (the group being one of their main supports)
- Who helped or was helping them with it
- What their current focus was
As survivors of the string of shootings and now the fires in California and also survivors of hurricanes in locations that have still not fully recovered, try to get past these tragedies, their goals will also be how to “live with life never being the same again.”
One of the most tempting impulses — step 4 above — may be to withdraw and isolate as an effort to pull away from everything in their life that is continuing to re-traumatize them.
In order to get past and hopefully recover from these traumas, it is the one impulse that you might give into in the short term but should be resisted in the long term.
Why?
When our psyche has been traumatized and we pull away from everything, there is a greater chance that our fears and anxieties will only increase and possibly cross over into panic attacks. When that happens, the impulse to pull away and isolate becomes stronger and can harden into full scale phobias. And if that happens, it makes it more difficult to cope and recover.
So if you’ve just been through a tragedy or trauma, be it a shooting, fire, hurricane, flood or even being laid off and believing you are unskilled to find another job, don’t isolate.
Instead, reach out to others and if possible groups of others who have been through something similar and begin sharing your experiences using the above seven steps so that you can live with life never being the same again.
