After the Cameras Leave—T he Story Is Not Over
Journalists provide an important service: They focus our attention on the survivors’ critical needs. Until the cameras leave, that is. Then, the world seems to forget about you. Friends and coworkers stop listening. People whom you thought you could count on say, “Get over it, already.”
“There’s a honeymoon period when everyone wants to help. Survivors feel that people really care about them. But then the news cycle changes and the survivor feels abandoned,” says trauma specialist Dr. Demaria. While the importance of psychological first aid cannot be over emphasized, it is not a magic wand. Nor is it a shortcut for deeper healing.
“Psychological first aid does primarily focus on loss, which takes several years to fully process,” says Dr. Demaria. “There is no protocol for this that can quickly bring closure to this type of loss.”
As one critical incident stress management (CISM) trainer puts it, “Americans have a robust ability to respond to crisis. We maintain no level of preparedness for after the event. We suck.”
How Do You Feel?
In the aftermath of tragedy, the ubiquitous “How do you feel?” must be among life’s most loathed FAQ’s. As Paul Schweinler observed in Chapter Three, “How do you think I feel?” may be the most fitting response.
The presence of media at the scene who persist in asking that very question can be disturbing, especially to children, teens, and young adults.
“I hated going to church with my mom after 9/11. The cameras were creepy,” says a young man whose father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
Although his reaction reflects how many people feel about reporters in the wake of tragedy, journalists are doing a job under pressure to get their stories out on tight deadlines. They have to push, pull, and verbally probe for sound bites and quotes they can use. After the interviews, they have to write and/or produce their assigned story, file it with their producers and editors, and post to social media. Even professionals say that sensitivity can take a hit on their list of priorities.
Facing the Camera: It’s Your Choice
Getting comfortable in the presence of journalists can take practice. Those of us who are naturally extroverted and love attention will enjoy the experience, while those who tend to be quiet and private are more likely to find it distressing.
Whether you find yourself facing a camera or overwhelmed by well-wishers when your house is in ruins, you can just say no. You are not obligated to answer questions. It is your choice. Although many survivors, mourners, and eyewitnesses say that giving an interview about their disaster experience brought them relief, others find it unbearably stressful. You do not need extra stress at this time. But, it may be cathartic to let it all out. Your story of survival and endurance may touch a broken soul who takes heart from your honesty.
If you choose to face the camera, take a breath and collect your thoughts. This can help to relieve performance anxiety. You can ask the reporter or producer to please slow down or give you a minute if you need to calm yourself.
If It’s Not on Our Screens, It No Longer Exists
TV news stories run between 30 and 90 seconds. A 90-second piece is considered long. It could be an obituary of a world leader, a military situation report, or a background report on a breakthrough in cancer research.
In the edit booth, producers and in-house editors choose sequences of footage. When I started in the industry, we worked in sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film. The editors who showed me the ropes were twenty-
year veterans of newsreels and documentaries who believed that any scene or sequence shorter than three seconds is too fast for the mind to absorb.
But that was B.D. (Before Digital). Now, from the time we turn on our devices, we are exposed to digital streaming of flash frames intercut with shots that are less than two seconds long. In the 1980s, we were told the audience’s attention span was about three minutes long. In 2015, a Microsoft Corporation study found the average American adult’s attention span was eight seconds. Our growing deficit in attention, focus, and concentration skills is attributed to the effects of what Time magazine called “an increasingly digitalized lifestyle.”
Continual exposure to rapid-moving images of destruction combined with a shorter attention span takes a toll on our short-term memory. It seems to be getting harder to focus on anything that is not flickering on a screen right in front of us—such as other pedestrians, fellow passengers, and groups of friends who are more likely to be staring at their phones and texting, rather than making eye contact with each other.
If it’s not on our screen, it no longer exists.
But in real life, once a disaster moves off the screen and away from the headlines, it’s all too easy to forget about the people who have to get up again tomorrow to deal with the wreckage of their lives. Soon, images of a new tragedy will play nonstop, throughout yet another news cycle. Seriously, who can remember what happened last week?
“The public consciousness wants everything to be fine. But destabilizing events throw people off,” says Dr. Demaria. “We become emotionally numb and frozen, like we are in a trance and can’t figure it out. People are still processing what 9/11 meant. When we don’t have any way to organize the experience in our consciousness, we remain fearful and can become more dissociated.”
Vicarious Traumatization (VT): A Civilian Epidemic?
Glued to our phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices for most of our waking hours, we spend as much time—or more—looking at screaming images of pain as do many media professionals. It is my belief that millions of us are probably traumatized to a certain degree because of so much indirect exposure to trauma.
Exposure to violent images is not considered a diagnostic criterion for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM V). There is an exception for professionals whose daily work requires hours of exposure to pictures of traumatized people.
Vicarious traumatization (VT) presents with similar symptoms: avoidance of triggers, anxiety, arousal, and hypervigilance, plus flashbacks in which the body gets to feel what it’s like to go through a traumatic event again.
A Newsroom Insomnia Club
In 1982, the Israeli military bombed refugee camps in Lebanon. Several newsroom colleagues reported nightmares about screaming children and adult victims were persistently interrupting their sleep. While I had not yet decided to go back to graduate school to study psychology, I felt at the time that since most of our shift was spent screening pictures of gruesome deaths and injuries, the emotional impact of so much pain might be affecting our sleep. When I brought that up, no one laughed. I took it as agreement. I had no way of knowing that years later, I would be studying the impact of dreams in connection to September 11th and Hurricane Sandy.
PTSD: An Overview
If acute stress reactions do not resolve within six months, they can become post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They are similar but not interchangeable. PTSDUnited.org, a not-for-profit organization that provides information and resources about post-traumatic stress disorder offers the following facts:
Acute Stress or PTSD?
PTSD is not a bad hair day although it comes up a lot in conversations. Trauma refers to a life-threatening event. According to the Veterans Administration, the following symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder present six months or longer after exposure. They must last for at least one month to qualify for a clinical diagnosis. As we previously discovered, many of these criteria are identical to acute stress disorder, which presents immediately after a traumatic event and resolves within a few months. Sources of PTSD include: direct exposure; witnessing the trauma; learning that a relative or close friend was exposed to a trauma; and indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duties (e.g., first responders, the media, and medics).
The Three Thresholds of PTSD
1. Re-experiencing the event
2. Avoidance of triggers
3. Hypervigilance
Reformatting Flashbacks
My cousin Jay invented a method of cleaning out air ducts that was so successful it earned him numerous industry accolades and awards. His reputation attracted the attention of a national business magazine whose editors decided to make him their cover story. It was big news in our family, and we could not have been more excited for him.
A few months after the shoot, his mom called me, crying.
“You have to go see him. He’s a wreck,” she sobbed.
When I asked what happened, she whispered, “He’ll have to tell you.”
Jay and I have been very close our whole lives. An only child, twelve years my junior, he looked at me as his older sister. On the Staten Island Ferry after school, we were fascinated by the parade of tankers and ocean liners coming into New York harbor. Naturally extroverted, he grew into a young man whose exuberance was nothing short of contagious.
That Jay was gone when I got to his home. The man sitting in the June sun wrapped in a blanket reminded me of Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather III, where he keels over, dead in his chair. Beads of sweat gathered on Jay’s forehead, but his face was pale and his pupils dilated. His voice was so low I had to lean in to hear him.
The morning of the shoot, everyone in his crew and the photographer suited up in full hazmat gear for a walking tour of the site. Jay planned to point out where the environmental damage was and explain how it would be mitigated. After telling the photographer to stay close to the group’s leader, they started their tour on the roof. Apparently, the photographer wanted a different angle so he stepped away from the group.
Suddenly, Jay heard glass shatter. He rushed over, only to see the photographer had stepped onto a skylight and had fallen to his death.
It was ruled an accidental death, but lawsuits were pending, and Jay was unable to eat or sleep. He had stopped going to the office.
“I keep seeing his body. It won’t go away. It just comes back, whether I’m falling asleep or wide-awake. I can’t work, and I don’t know how I’m going to go to court.”
Flashbacks are usually spontaneously recurring movies of the mind that you cannot stop watching. They are visceral in intensity and impossible to ignore. A strong flashback can feel a kick in the solar plexus, taking away your breath. After days or weeks of them, you can start to question your own sanity.
These images are nothing like those that we construct in creative visualization or daydreaming.
In fact, there is nothing about a flashback that you would consciously want. I believe they are a mechanism that the unconscious mind uses to metabolize the unthinkable. However, the repetitive nature of the flashback means that feelings and sensations get worse with each replay.
Flashbacks usually present as associated three-dimensional, life-size images, meaning that we see what happened in the present tense because we are in the movie, looking out through our own eyes as the scene unfolds around us. This perceptual perspective is so compelling that we are back there, reliving every horrifying second in real-time.
Through the science of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a flashback can be neutralized by shifting our perspective from a three-dimensional association to a two-dimensional, dissociated frame. Based on principles of cognitive psychology, hypnotherapy, and anthropology, NLP use protocols that work quickly at the unconscious level to release unwanted, unhealthy beliefs, values, and emotions and replace them with new images, thoughts, and behaviors. To alleviate painful flashbacks, NLP exercises tap into your brain’s unique patterns of storing and accessing memories in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems.
Since a flashback tends to be a visual image, which we see in our mind’s eye as if it were happening around us, visualizing the traumatic event in 2-D lets us observe ourselves on a screen as we went through that event at an earlier point in time. Seeing what happened to ourselves then, knowing that now we are safe in real time, usually brings relief from the repetitive pain caused by flashbacks.
As Jay held an imaginary remote control in his hands, he gained mental control over his mind movie. Following a protocol from neurolinguistic programming (NLP), he switched the movie from color to black and white, froze the action at the end of the scene, and whited it out. In addition to gaining a sense of control over the battlefield that his mind had become, Jay was immensely relieved that the flashbacks stopped.
It can be debilitating to find ourselves flooded again and again with the neurochemicals of dread. Understanding the structure of a flashback gives us the keys to resolve it. Once we recognize that our flashback is a mind movie, we can mentally project it onto a wall so it can be screened from a neutral position. Once we can detach, we are on the way home.
Dreams and Nightmares
Rachelle Quiyara was in school when she heard “three really loud bangs.” She had no idea what they were.
“I don’t think it registered that it was something bad, but I knew it was something out of the ordinary,” she says. “Then I saw my teacher. Her body language told me something horrible was going on.”
Rachelle, then fifteen, was among a group of some twenty students who were rushed into a classroom that could be locked.
“Let me be honest with you,” her teacher said. “Those were definitely gunshots. But you are safe.”
Then a SWAT team knocked on the door and hustled the students downstairs to a waiting bus that brought them to the middle school where they were united with their parents. No one was killed but two teachers were shot. Rachelle learned later that the shooter was a boy from her homeroom who brought a rifle to school because he was upset with his girlfriend. Luckily, he did not find her.
A few nights later, the nightmares and insomnia began. They would haunt her for years to come.
“Although I hadn’t seen him at the time, in my nightmares I saw him and the rifle. I had trouble with that for years and I was very jumpy,” she says.
When she got to college, the nightmares were replaced by hypervigilance. In April 2007, during Rachelle’s freshman year on a New York City campus, a lone shooter on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg killed thirty-two people and injured eighteen more.
“Even though I was in New York, I was always scanning, waiting for the next explosion,” she says. “That feeling of anxiety whenever there is a shooting, I don’t know if it ever stopped.” Several years later, her PTSD nightmares increased when she survived a gang shooting on a New York City bus.
When Nightmares Are Good News
No one wants nightmares but they serve a purpose.
“Recurring dreams after a traumatic event are good news,” says Kathleen Olivetti, who taught the seminar Trauma, Dreams, and Nightmares after September 11th. “They show us that the psyche is working on it. If the dreams continue for months or years afterwards, the message is, you haven’t processed this yet.”
The process of metabolizing a traumatic life event has an organic rhythm that cannot be hurried.
As we move out of shock and survival towards the six-month anniversary, disturbing dreams and nightmares frequently surface, making people wonder why they feel worse. Visceral dreams stir up feelings of vulnerability and sorrow, which are too deep for words. Six months to the day after Hurricane Sandy, I was standing in my home, watching the water gush in through the seals on my greenhouse window. Standing on the terracotta tile floor, my feet felt the icy water swirl around my ankles. My own screams woke me up.
As I described in the Introduction, I am one of those people who gets calm in a crisis. The night that the water came in, I felt no fear. But it didn’t take long before my waking life was a tangled mess of contractors’ bills, lawyers’ documents, and to-do lists, which had to be tackled one at a time, day to day. I had no idea that I was harboring residual emotions until that six-month marker dream woke me up. It was far from pleasant, but it made me aware there were unsettling emotional themes I would need to explore.
Catastrophe Serves a Higher Purpose
Disaster strips us of our masks. We face each other emotionally naked, unable to be anything other than honest. It may not be elegant but it’s true: There is no place for BS in a disaster zone.
“Disaster impels us from our fantasy world and our fanciful self-image, to which most of us are attached. The reality of who we are and what our lives have been can be such a shocking contrast,” says Dr. Anne Redelfs, author of The Awakening Storm and a retired psychiatrist, who evacuated from New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina.
Although more than a decade has passed, when she returns to New Orleans where she resided for twenty-six years, people still need to talk about what happened to them as a result of the storm. “Most have not dealt with all the layers of this trauma—the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—so there is more to resolve. Secondly, the Katrina disaster may symbolize some major unconscious threat, such as the fear of God or of their own mortality,” she says. “They need to talk about it in an indirect, less-threatening fashion; thus, the need to talk about ‘Katrina.’ ”
As we sift through the wreckage of life as we knew it, disaster brings us closer together with people we might not have known before. Sometimes, we lose friendships because those we thought we could count on are unavailable. In her own life, Dr. Redelfs has found that “disaster taught me to engage with people with a new regard for our mutual humanity and human need.”
She and I both believe that catastrophic events serve a higher purpose.
“Disasters can move us to become more fully alive. The suffering—as individuals and communities—expands our minds and welcomes our spirits,” she says. “Disasters make us aware that the life force within us needs tending daily. This is why we are here.”
Keys to Staying Balanced Under Pressure