Disaster Recovery and Hope
hey i’m brooke
i’m a traumatologist which really just
means i’m super into disasters
i’ve studied and treated disasters and
trauma my whole career so you would
think that during a pandemic
one person who might be able to manage
the fallout for herself and her family
would be the person who studies
disasters right
but my family and i were in the middle
of a research semester in belize when
the pandemic broke out and we had about
a 40 hour notice from the state
department to pack everything up and
come home
so no goodbyes no seasonal appropriate
clothing for my kids
we had to travel home through three
airports with babies who were
licking the back of the airplane seat
leather and by the time we got home
i would say by day two of shelter in
place
i was drinking beer at noon and making
two can-shaped
pancakes for my kids who missed the
belize pancake guy
and frantically subscribing to disney
plus just so that i could run my
counseling practice
normal i mean bird pancakes beer at noon
on a tuesday not normal
normal in disaster totally normal
like most people i’ve spent the last
several months trying to find a whole
new way to work with all these other
people who live in my house
and run a home-based preschool and try
not to bring home a deadly disease on my
groceries
it’s been a little chaotic and it’s not
just me
everybody i’ve talked to has asked why
is this so hard
why do i feel so lazy so tired
so anxious so depressed and should i
even feel this way
i mean i’m not sick my family’s safe i’m
not on the front lines
can what i’m going through really be
considered traumatic or traumatic stress
so today i’d like to answer some of
those questions and i’m hoping that by
the end of our time together
we’ll walk away understanding why our
stress response to this pandemic is
normal
that we’re probably going to be okay
when this is over with no lasting
traumatic stress
and we might even see a little bit of
emotional growth on the other side of
this
so first things first you’re normal i’m
normal however you’re feeling whatever
it looks like
in disaster times it’s normal one of my
favorite quotes by a psychologist who
studied which people survived in
concentration camps was
an abnormal response to an abnormal
situation
is normal behavior anything goes right
now
disasters have stages and this stage
that we’ve just been in this stage that
some of us are still in
is stay alive luckily our brain’s exact
purpose is to do just that to keep us
alive
so we have three parts of our brain that
work together to protect us we have
the thinking brain that’s all of our
reasoning our logic
our thought we have our emotional brain
which is our feelings
our gut reactions and then we have the
reptile brain which is basic body
function
so heart rate breathing body temperature
when life is good and safe our thinking
brain is in control and these other two
parts are just kind of in the background
doing their thing quietly
but when there’s a threat the thinking
brain moves aside
these other two parts kind of jump to
the forefront and we go through all
these physiological and
hormonal changes that make us able to
respond to danger
in its most extreme state we would
recognize this as the fight flight or
freeze response
so as we’re in the middle of this slow
motion disaster with a tagline of
safer at home implying what that
we’re not safe outside our home or we
might be safe but someone we love might
be in danger
or we might be the asymptomatic one who
passes along a deadly disease to someone
we love
so really you know this is game day for
the parts of our brain that exist to
protect us from danger and our brains
are just doing the exact thing they’ve
been wired to do
and that’s to protect us with hyper
vigilance
black and white thinking energy
conservation
so why am i so tired why do i feel lazy
why am i anxious or keyed up why can’t i
sleep why do i only want to eat carbs
because our brains are in survival mode
because we’ve been fighting this
low-key low-grade threat for
70-something days
and half of you became teachers during
this
the other thing we know is that as we
move throughout life our memories are
stored with several things attached
so we have a snapshot image of the
experience
we have an emotion about the experience
we have a body sensation so a taste or a
smell or a gut feeling
and then way deep down we have a belief
about ourselves and about the world
according to that experience and then
those
memories are filed away by associations
so things that look like this
are over here things that feel like this
are over here things that smell like
this are over here
and those associations are connected by
these quick
neural pathways that act like road maps
and that connect
are present to our past so
in present day quicker than our thinking
brain even realizes what’s happening
when we experience something our
emotional brain has already
pulled the file of all the other things
that looked like this or
felt like this or smelled like this
before and it informs and predicts our
behavior
our response now it’s meant to be
protective it’s automatic
so this dread this panic
this fear it feels a lot like that other
time in life when fill in the blank
for nicole why is this so heavy oh it’s
the exact message of my home growing up
you are not safe
for carissa i’m stuck i’m trapped i
can’t go to target why am i so mad that
i can’t go to target
just like i was trapped in my home for
16 years with abuse it’s not target
it’s the feeling of being trapped for
marla
man i haven’t felt this way since my dad
died what’s going on and then she
remembered the last time she closed down
her small business
loaded up her family in her car and left
town was for her dad’s funeral
so marla’s carrying kovid plus the grief
of losing her dad
and here’s the kicker the root of most
trauma is
immobilization feeling stuck
lack of personal agency and the feeling
that this is going to last
forever so these are the messages people
are reconnecting with right now
i’m not safe the world is not safe
i’m not in charge of my own body i’m
powerless
there’s no end in sight i mean that’s
this
and we haven’t even gotten to the losses
yet besides
all the losses we can see empty
playgrounds empty storefronts we have
the loss of routine the loss of touch
the loss of gathering together and we
have the loss of our most
powerful protection against traumatic
stress and that’s
social support our brains have been
wired to rely on each other since birth
it’s literally how we survived as
infants
so here we are in this worldwide
pandemic and our best
most research vetted biological way to
cope
is off the table in all the ways we’ve
previously accessed it because it’s
dangerous to be around other people
so if it feels heavy it’s because it’s
actually grief but we don’t want to use
that word i mean i’m not going to go
that far i can’t say that word for
myself
i’m not sick i’m safe my family is safe
i can’t be sad that my time in belize
was cut short
i can’t be upset that my residency was
cancelled or my 40th birthday party or
my kids little league season people are
suffering and dying
renee brown calls this comparative
suffering and it’s this evaluating and
then
ranking our our pain on a suffering
board
and then denying or rejecting our
feelings because they don’t score high
enough on the suffering board
like i’m sorry payne but here’s the
suffering threshold and you only come up
to here
so then we reject those feelings and
they just go away right
no they grow roots they get deeper and
stronger
and then guess what shows up shame
because now not only do we have all
these feelings we wish we didn’t have
we feel like a bad person for having
them in the first place
and we can’t tell anybody about it and
so we’re just alone in it
so let me recap where a good portion of
the world is living right now
we’re carrying around this cumulative
low-grade
functional stress about a threat that’s
real
plus the physiological and emotional
muscle memory of all the other things
that felt like this before
we can’t use social support in the same
way and we have a ton of grief that
we’re not quite sure is allowed
so have i convinced you yet that it’s
acceptable to just go ahead and lose
your mind i mean let go it’s fine
because now i want to walk you back out
of the chaos
good news we know that about 80 percent
of americans will be exposed to some
type of a traumatic event in their life
and of that eighty percent in cases not
involving human cruelty we know that
only nine percent will go on to develop
ptsd
so odds are in the context of this
pandemic
91 of us are going to be okay but how
can we be sure we’re in that 91
i spent a couple of months in rwanda a
few years ago now there’s a
post-disaster community
they had this horrific interpersonal
trauma a genocide where
a million people were killed in 100 days
and i don’t know
what i thought i would find when i went
there but i could not conceptualize how
people could just move forward after
something like that like i couldn’t
picture what it would look like
but i got there and people were eating
and they were working
and kids were playing and going to
school bikers were biking choirs were
singing
and everybody kept asking brooke how do
you find our country
and i found it to be the exact picture
of resilience like if i were gonna take
a picture of somehow humans survive
it would be a picture of rwanda in march
and then april came around and april’s
the anniversary of the genocide and the
whole country shuts down for a national
mourning and banners and billboards go
up that say
genocide against the tutsi those exact
words no sugar coating it
and for the first week businesses are
closed schools are closed there’s no
music and any public places all the tvs
are off
and you start to see microphones and
podiums and chairs going up in all these
public spaces
so that survivors can share the story of
their experience
and other people could witness it and
then for the rest of the hundred days
they go out and physically care for the
survivors so they’re rehabilitating
homes they’re farming the land
they’re visiting the memorials they’re
actively participating in this
collective
remembering naming grieving of the
trauma
and bearing witness to each other’s pain
and april is really hard it’s triggering
um there are flashbacks
teenagers are moody adults have
overwhelming grief
but at least the people we were with
shared with us that that during that
time it’s set aside
for collective grief it allows them to
just let everything out
to feel it honestly without shame
together and that it helps them function
better the other parts of the year
knowing that this time is set aside for
this collective grief
so obviously we’re not rwanda and we’re
not dealing with
you know the aftermath of a genocide but
we do have a long history of
racial inequality and trauma that this
pandemic
has both like compounded and highlighted
so we know that it’s important in the
process of recovery
to name our losses and then to give
ourselves permission to feel pain
it’s okay to offer ourselves empathy and
to offer empathy to people around us
because empathy is not finite it’s not a
zero-sum game
where if i reserve some for myself i
have less to give to
the front-line workers or my friend who
got furloughed or survivors in rwanda
but if i offer myself empathy and
empathy to people around me we put even
more empathy into the world
the next thing we have to do is change
the way we think of social support as
just being in the presence of each other
have you heard the story of the long
spoons
there’s a guy who’s being ushered into
the gates of hell and he gets into this
dining hall and there are rows of tables
heaping piles of delicious food
but everybody’s moaning and starving and
as he gets closer he realizes they have
spoons
but the spoons are too long to get any
food into their mouths
then he goes into the next dining hall
which is heaven same rows of tables
same heaping piles of food but they’re
using their spoons to feed the person
across the table from them
that’s social support it’s not enough to
just be together
but i’m going to witness your pain and
you’re going to witness mine
i’m going to feed you and you’re going
to feed me and that’s our most powerful
protection
against stress and trauma one other
protective measure is the ability to
name
meaning or goodness as we’re on the
journey through suffering so in the same
way we can name our pain
and give ourselves permission to feel it
we can also
name the good things and the meaningful
things and give ourselves permission to
feel joy
it doesn’t mean the loss or degree for
the pain is meaningful but it means that
we can find it
while we’re in the middle of it so we’ve
talked about why our response is normal
we’ve talked about
the likelihood that we’re all going to
be okay now it’s time to actually talk
about the growth
so you can see in this disaster graph on
the left hand side
this person is starting out at a
baseline of like this level of um
emotional functioning and then the event
happens it’s that red dot we’re shocked
we’re confused we don’t know what’s
happening
and we see this quick emotional rise to
like gratitude altruism hope we’re
clapping for our nurses at 8 p.m
and then we have the true nose dive of
disaster we’re tired we’re weary
we’re like when is this ever going to
end grief sets in stress that’s in
we’re getting angry we’re blaming each
other and then at some point we do
actually start
the climb back up to a new normal we’re
accepting the new normal we’re
integrating into our lives and we end or
this person the graph ends at just a
little bit higher level of
emotional functioning than when they
first started and we call that
post-traumatic growth it’s not growth
that happens in spite of the event had
this event not happened we would have
still been sitting here at baseline
but it’s growth that happens because of
the event because of the things we learn
about ourselves and other people along
all these ups and downs
what does this look like in real life
when i was in rwanda i saw people who
had been so previously divided
along these tribal lines that they were
literally killing each other
now living and working with intentional
peace
offering forgiveness offering mercy
trying to know each other in these new
ways with these new identities
when i was at one of the memorials there
was a sign outside that said if you knew
me
and you really knew yourself you would
not have killed me
and this is their growth in that way
that despite
overwhelming grief caused by the people
they’re now seeking out peaceful living
they’re they’re committed to knowing
each other with these new identities
offering forgiveness in a way i can’t
even comprehend
one other thing to remember about growth
is that in the same way
our bodies pull the automatic response
to suffering we can also pull the file
of survival
somehow we survived that other thing and
we’re going to survive this one because
we have the muscle memory of survival
but we also have the perspective of all
the life lived between that time of the
original suffering
and now so we can suffer better with
more resources
more perspective more purpose so if we
can remember that a response to this
pandemic is normal and let ourselves off
the hook for that whatever it looks like
however it feels
if we can name our our losses allow
ourselves permission
to feel pain give ourselves empathy if
we can find meaning
and goodness in the middle of it and if
we can remember our survival stories
then
we’re probably going to be okay and we
might even be better than okay
and we might actually grow thank you