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Health & Fitness

10 years later, still trying to heal from the trauma of Sept. 11

A country suffering a trauma is not so different from a person suffering a trauma. Why healing takes so long when we avoid feeling the pain.

Ten years ago, the people of our magnificent country experienced a great shock.

Ten years later, we are still struggling to recover from that great shock.

Trauma is an experience that is undeniably common in our world. Yet the date of Sept. 11, 2001 marks a kind of trauma that is singular in modern times in how its ripples have affected our people, our country and our planet.

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As a psychotherapist, with expertise and knowledge in the soul-searing effects of trauma and the delicate matters of healing, I have been watching, listening, reading and writing about this trauma for 10 years.

A country suffering a trauma is not so different from a person suffering a trauma.

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Let’s look at what happens when an individual person suffers a trauma – a car accident, an act of abuse or violence, an experience in war, a crime, a sudden and great loss.

First there is shock. The traumatic experience is too, too much for the person to take. The brain, the senses, the body and the spirit are overwhelmed. The person is disoriented in every way. There is immediate disbelief and denial. The feeling of pain is more than we can bear.

Next there is the desire to stabilize. The person begins to understand on a visceral level that something very, very painful has happened, that a sense of predictability and safety has been literally ripped from us.

We are not able to verbalize this – and may never exactly say it in exactly these words – but we struggle to regain the personal power that we have lost.

Some people try to find power by feeling angry. They blame others. They fight and flail, not out of measured thought and plan but from unacknowledged pain and powerlessness. Others withdraw, expressing distrust and great fear to keep safe. There are those to turn to mood-altering substances to medicate the pain to trick themselves into feeling good again.

In the best of times, people are able to turn to each other and find help and comfort. They are able to acknowledge that something very painful has happened in their world. They are able to rediscover their personal strengths, positive relationships and spiritual connections – whatever they may be – as they move to healing. They are thankful for another opportunity at life while mindful of the terrible cost of the trauma.

In the words of Martín Prechtel, the indigenous healer and shaman who escaped the civil wars and death squads of Guatemala, they are able to grieve and praise, grieve and praise.

In the terrible aftermath of Sept. 11, our country has taken both routes in an attempt to regain power. In the first few hours, days and weeks, we clung together, with prayer and inspiring songs and the desire to donate blood, help victims and send money.

But our efforts to regain power have also created choices and behaviors that continue to impact us in adverse ways to this day. As it happens, many of our politicians stonewall authentic proposals to repair our problems and call each other names. Certain television and radio commentators insult anyone they don’t like and even suggest killing people who have different ideas. The office of the presidency and the sincere man who holds the office is defamed and disrespected. People argue for years about the exact proper way to memoralize the Sept. 11 dead.

And, billions and billions of dollars have been spent on wars that kill and maim people, poison the land and the air and bring our service men and women home to the United States with new traumas of pain and loss, as well as unemployment and foreclosure. It is as if our pain increases exponentially.

We have struggled mightily to recover from our nation’s shock in the past 10 years. In our desire to grasp the power of domination and control, we defer feeling the pain and the loss. Our healing as a people and a country, then, takes more time.

One of the popular slogans of Sept. 11 is that “We will not forget.” I find that slogan both vague and unfinished. Rather I would say, “We will grieve and we will praise and we will heal.”

Ultimately, we will find kindness in others and meaning in the trauma. But first, grief and praise.

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