Watching the Twin Towers fall on Sept. 11 was a particularly wrenching experience for Jim Adams, a Boulder draftsman who had helped prepare the construction plans for the buildings in the 1960s.
Even though he was living nearly 2,000 miles away, he was so upset by the images he saw on TV that – like thousands of other Americans across the country – he fell victim to post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“I was incapacitated for several months,” says Adams, now 66. “I couldn’t work. I had nightmares. I kept forgetting things.”
Eventually, with the passage of time and help from a support group, he recovered. Now he feels so completely over the horror that he recently watched the movie “World Trade Center” without ill effect.
What helped most, he found, was something experts routinely recommend after any stressful event: talk.
In Adams’ case, this included a visit to his daughter’s middle-school geometry class to explain the structural failures that he believed led to the collapse of the towers – a subject with which he had become obsessed.
“The best way to deal with a trauma is to talk about what bothers you,” Adams says. “Talking about it – to anybody – did help.”
Here are some other tips for keeping your psyche healthy in the event of another attack, or just for coping with daily life in an era of increasing anxiety:
Turn off the TV. “You don’t want to be uninformed, but you don’t want to overexpose yourself to those graphic images,” says Nancy Rich, a Denver trauma specialist who has helped first responders and others in the aftermath of several major disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Columbine massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11.
“What we suggest is that people rely on the print media, so they don’t see the 6-year-old daughter crying when her dad is not there. It’s not that the print media can’t capture that; it’s that the images are just not as graphic.”
Assume that your responses are normal. “One of the myths out there is that there’s a single pattern or set of stages that everyone goes through (after a traumatic event). There isn’t. There’s a wide amount of variability that’s normal,” says University of Denver psychologist Daniel McIntosh.
Some people may have positive feelings after a negative event, like the parents who took more joy in their children after Columbine. Others, McIntosh says, may have trouble feeling positive even about things that always have given them pleasure.
“How people respond, in terms of what they do and in terms of the emotional impact on them, depends on who they are, where they are – in both physical and social context, the specific stressor, and when in the coping process this is: hours, weeks or years after the event.”
Give yourself time to recover. “Talk about it and write about it, and don’t put an artificial deadline on when you need to be done thinking about it,” McIntosh advises. And conversely, “Don’t make other people talk about it unless they want to, and don’t assume that they shouldn’t be feeling that way.”
Be prepared. “One of the antidotes to having long-term adverse psychological reactions is preparedness,” says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, and author of the newly published “Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Mega-Disasters and What We Can Do Now” (Knopf, $24).
“The more we are focused on the nuts and bolts of planning, the more we feel in control, and the more adept we are at being able to function in a disaster,” Redlener says. “Beyond the notion of having a food stockpile and a go-pack, the actual process of talking to your family about what to do is psychologically strengthening.”
Keep your body healthy. Take a vitamin supplement to shore up your defenses against stress, avoid excessive use of caffeine and beware numbing your feelings with medication, alcohol or illegal drugs. “You don’t need to complicate this with a substance-abuse problem,” says Rich. In addition, she counsels, “If you do aerobic exercise, you will have fewer symptoms. The stress response is based on the body’s fight-or-flight reflex, and exercise helps burn off the chemicals it produces.”
Know when to seek professional help. Symptoms of stress such as irritability, insomnia, changes in appetite, hyper- alertness and intrusive images (flashbacks) are common in the wake of a disaster. But if such responses don’t go away after three to six weeks, counseling may be in order.
“You shouldn’t assume your own suffering is too small to be concerned about,” says Leif Wellington Haase, a senior health-care fellow with the Century Foundation in New York. “If your daily routine is being impaired, you should definitely see a doctor, just as you would in other circumstances.”
– Jack Cox
