Decreasing chaos in the midst of a community crisis
This column seeks to help educate our community about emotional healing through grief. People may write questions to Golden Willow Retreat and they will be answered privately to you and possibly as a future article for others. Please list a first name tha
Dear Dr. Ted:
In the last couple of weeks, our community has had many shocking losses culminating in the deaths in Dixon. It seems that whenever there is community loss, there is a high level of chaos that interferes with healing and may even cause more emotional trauma. Have you found this to be true in your experiences? Thanks, Joan
Dear Joan,
Our community has experienced some shocking losses lately and my heart and blessings go out to everyone who has been affected by these losses within their communities.
Most of the time when there is an unexpected and traumatic event, there is a high level of chaos due to the lack of information. Quite often, fear is stimulated by lack of information, and this leads to a high need within the psyche to scramble for facts and details to build a perception of emotional and physical safety. This need for information can lead to a high level of frenetic energy fueled by rumors, social media, media, family dynamics and other magnified incidentals that build more emotional noise as well as fear-based thinking.
If you look at the phases of grief, denial is the primary phase at the beginning of a loss. Denial buys time for your emotional world to take hold of what has happened even if your cognitive focus is well aware of the magnitude of the event. With trauma, a fugue state may develop in which a person loses awareness even to the point of loss of identity.
In this disassociated period, your body systems are so overwhelmed that it is like they have short-circuited and you have left your body. Many times, part of denial is finding other topics to focus on because the actual incident is too overwhelming.
Possibly people become mad at the press, police, politics, people or anything rather than the actual trauma. Many of these other issues may be valid and could be looked at later down the healing road, but early on, they cause chaos.
A traumatic event can also trigger the memories of other losses for people, compounding the present issue. I don’t think you can avoid this as it is how our internal system is set up for healing. Being aware that this happens and focusing on that present issue is a great start to decide if your story should be shared in that moment or could wait for another time.
No clean and clear answer to this dilemma exists because it can be helpful for some people to know they are not alone in their anguish from loss while others will feel that you are turning the present issue into your issue and hijacking the situation for your own story.
Within the unknown of a situation, the loss of understanding about how something could have happened, loss of the feeling of safety, a sense of being powerless and other uncomfortable feelings and thoughts, chaos ensues until the underpinnings of information can start to stop the feeling of being in a free-fall. As chaos decreases as people receive consistent and accurate information, healing for the individual, family and community can start to happen.
Blessings to the communities in Northern New Mexico (as well as the rest of the world) that have experienced trauma recently.
Thank you for the question. I wish you well. Until next week, take care.