When we open ourselves and share our stories, we mitigate the effects of trauma.

by Marian MacCurdy

Everything we believed about safety in the United States was shattered on September 11. This is a monumental change for U.S. citizens. And the picture of the plane crashing into the second tower has become an icon for this traumatic event. Trauma is most commonly defined as a normal response to an abnormal situation. Traumatic images are encoded as emotions into our brains; if we are to use our emotions constructively rather than allowing them to ambush us, we must understand how to access them.

Such traumatic images are noncognitive and therefore not easily accessible, but they have deep emotional presence. These images are hard to verbalize because they are locked into a preverbal part of the brain. They pop up sometimes unbidden when we smell, hear, see, or touch something that takes us back to the time of the traumatic event. This process is even chemical: when high levels of adrenaline and other stress hormones are circulating through the bloodstream, memory traces are deeply imprinted into the brain. We will remember the image of that plane crashing into the second tower of the World Trade Center for the rest of our lives because it is burned into our midbrains. But the image need not retain its original horrific quality. Eventually the immediate terror will fade, leaving a sadness that will remain with us forever. How does this process happen, and how can we help it along?

We are hearing a lot about "healing." We are supposed to "get past" the trauma. Yet those closest to ground zero have said how hard it is to go into the financial district, to look up at the sky where the buildings once were, knowing that colleagues and friends died at that site. Ithaca College lost alumni and others connected to us. Many of us knew someone who perished on September 11 or know someone who lost a relative. One financial firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, lost close to 700 of its employees. A month or even a year will probably not be enough for many of these people to see their internal images without terror. What does "healing" mean in this context?

When a trauma first occurs, we are speechless. The shock is so great that we simply stare and cannot take in the reality. The closer we are to the trauma, the more intense the shock. Poet laureate Billy Collins, when asked on September 11 for his response, said, "Nothing. I can say nothing." Emily Dickinson knew this nothingness: "Pain has an element of blank. It cannot recollect when it began, or if there were a day when it was not." We cannot think. Our minds and emotions are anesthetized. Then with the passing of each hour, our bodies remind us that we need feeding, our minds begin to ask questions, our hearts begin to bleed, and the tears come. At that time we turn to family, friends, and fellow citizens for support, love, assistance.

We all saw and perhaps participated in the outpouring of help from firefighters, police, emergency medical technicians, doctors, blood donors, and those giving time, money, warm socks, and love and support for those aiding in recovery. When we lean on each other, we are all stronger. When we act, we defeat despair. We saw this in a searingly dramatic way with the actions of the passengers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania: they banded together to defeat the terrorists’ plan to crash the plane into a populated area. They did not let shock render them helpless.

So, too, with the firefighters and police who went into the fatally damaged buildings to rescue others. We owe more than lives to those people. We also owe them our sense of stability, our sense that even in the most grievous danger we can act with honor. Appropriate action helps us mediate the long-term effects of trauma. Those who resist attacks are less likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I am not urging resistance in every instance of attack; that can be dangerous, even fatal. However, when we can resist relatively safely, our psyches do better. Even after a trauma, doing something constructive helps us to integrate the event into our lives, which is the hallmark of healing from trauma.

As time passes after trauma, we begin to share our thoughts and feelings, as well as our actions. For centuries poetry --- that intensely focused form --- has, in its beauty of language, helped give our grief an order. As Emily Dickinson wrote: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes/This is the hour of lead/ Remembered, if outlived/As freezing persons recollect the snow/First––chill––then stupor ––then the letting go."

Ben Jonson’s poem written after the death of his young son is as sharp with grief today as it was when it was written in 1616 and has provided the comfort of the commonality of loss for many: "Here doth lie/Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry."

In spite of loss, most of us learn to love and hope again. We heal, perhaps with scars, but we do heal. What helps us to move past the images that are burned into our brains, the grief that makes love such a danger, the fears that made two of my students not want to sleep in their rooms on the 10th floor of Ithaca College’s West Tower the day after the attacks?

Hundreds of people who recorded what they experienced on September 11 have been sharing their fears and grief with thousands, maybe millions, of others via the Internet. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at Princeton, witnessed the destruction from his Manhattan neighborhood. He posted his responses online: "All I could understand was that the written word somehow humanized what was going on. . . . I was simultaneously emotionally charged and wounded."

And that is exactly a description of the effects of trauma: We are simultaneously emotionally charged and wounded, and writing begins the process of integrating those internal, preverbal wounds with the verbal parts of the brain, so we can pull them out of us and into the world. By talking and writing we create a community with others. Through our writing we begin to feel less isolated, and therefore less helpless, and so we begin, ever so slowly, to heal.

We must remember, however, that everyone heals at a different rate and in a different way. The person to your left might have lost someone close; the person on your right might have witnessed the attack. We need to be respectful of our differences as well as note the similarities of our grief. Remember that in spite of the desire of our national leaders that we "get back to normal," we will never be the same again. Our psyches can never wipe out what happened. But we can integrate it into our existence and share our stories, doing our part to mitigate the effects of trauma.

This is why so many survivors of sexual abuse, family members of victims of drunk drivers, and other survivors take their stories to the world. They want to make some good of their experience, to ensure that what happened to them will never happen to anyone else. In the case of the atrocities of September 11, we need to think carefully about the difference between justice and revenge. When we are hurting we want to inflict pain on our enemies. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to more senseless pain. We have seen the acts of a few in this country who seek to blame all those of Arab descent for these attacks. This is, of course, not justice. It makes us as vicious as the perpetrators and continues the cycle of violence.

In our grief we come together; in our pain we see each other; in our reach for justice we join with the larger world. We can do no more and no less.

Marian MacCurdy is associate professor and chair of the Department of Writing. She wrote about writing and healing in ICQ 2000/no. 2 and in Writing and Healing: Towards an Informed Practice (NCTE Press, 2000), which she coedited.

Photo by AP/Wide World Photos