A week later...

Today marks a week since the earthquake hit Christchurch--there is a country wide moment of silence at 12:51PM today. The impact of the earthquake continues to take its toll on residents, family and tourists. Unfortunately, as each hour and day goes by, the chances of finding any of the “missing people” alive weakens.

The death toll rises each day as the search and rescuers identify more victims. The frustrating part is that the aftershocks have continued up to 4.1 magnitude forcing more residents to evacuate and buildings to collapse. The dangers are still present.

As a counsellor and therapist, I wonder the psychological impact this has on the people of that region. The repeated exposure to trauma is overwhelming. Our brains have very specific ways of dealing with unpredictable experiences of this kind. Any time that we are present during an event that threatens our own or other people’s lives, our brains go through two critical processes – immediately evaluating the risk, and instantaneously finding ways to avoid being destroyed. However, once the imminent danger is past, we have to find ways to integrate the memories of the terrifying events into our understanding of how the world works.

Perhaps, you yourself, have had a life-threatening situation and know what this means. Yet, thankfully the vast majority of us have not been in a life-threatening situation before, and so our memory networks inform us that the world is generally safe and that we, or the people around us, will not suddenly die from tragic circumstances.

For a period of time, the memories of our traumatic events “float” around – flickering in and out of our conscious awareness – before they can be built into a restructured memory system. It takes a while for us to reconcile a life-threatening event, like an earthquake, with our existing beliefs about the world. If it continues for several months, it can develop into PTSD or acute stress disorder symptoms (I won’t go into diagnostic criteria here).

I worry that it will be quite some time that people can come to make sense of this tragedy as the trauma continues to unfold day by day. Yet, before one can do any of this “psychological healing”, one has to ensure physical and emotional safety: food, shelter, water, clothing, injuries, being in touch with loved ones, etc. Many Christchurch families and victims have not even got these basic needs met.

In my experience doing trauma work of this kind, trauma/grief work can be better suited to wait until the imminent danger has passed. Cary and I both have strong desires to go down, run groups and talk individually to people, but psychological help is not what’s needed now. It becomes a helpless feeling, sitting back and not being able to do much. We decided to go to a charity event Saturday afternoon where proceeds went to the earthquake. For the (maybe 4th) time in my life, I bought a lotto ticket, because profits go to earthquake victims this week. You do what little you can to support, but it never seems enough somehow when so many are hurting.