Here are some helpful hints in dealing with stress, anxiety and panic, especially those associated with the recent tragedies. The Counseling Center offers supportive and caring group therapy to aid in the development of coping skills. Please contact us for additional information.

Some Things to Consider When Talking About This Disaster With Your Children

ALERT***Carefully consider whether children should be watching the unfolding news coverage. Today we have witnessed dramatic and unsettling television footage. This can be very frightening to children. If you want to keep up
with the breaking news, consider a pocket radio with an earphone, or catch the evening wrap up when the children have gone to bed, or consider restricting the time for disaster related family viewing. ***

Remember that children are good observers but poor interpreters. It's up to parents to interpret what has happened for their children. Keep them talking about what they are hearing and seeing - and don't forget the feelings.

Barbara Fairfield is Pep's longtime Adlerian Open Forum Counseling therapist and consultant. She makes the following suggestions for talking with the kids about this tragedy:

•Don't make safety the issue - this will cause children to worry.
Reassure children that they are safe now, but don' guarantee that you can
keep them safe -
•Even very young children know that their parents and caretakers can'
guarantee safety. This will cause the children to worry, and worry doesn't
help.

Barbara recommend that parents focus on two things that Alfred Adler taught:

Model for your children responsible ways to react to a disaster of this magnitude.

Don't let the natural anxiety of this situation run your life, and avoid making yourself or the children more anxious.

Consciously focus on taking care of yourself and your family during this crisis period.

Over the next few days, plan and carry out family based activities that will calm the children (cook and eat together, offer warm baths with bubbles, encourage young children to use art (drawing, clay modeling, collage) to express their emotions, older children to draw or journal their feelings.

Focus the children's natural anxiety to social interest, the "royal road to mental health" according to Barbara. Focus on how you as a family can be helpful to those who have been hurt. Parents can donate blood, relief agencies such as the American Red Cross will be issuing appeals for help, contributions of needed goods and family money can be sent. Include the
children in the planning for your family's help in this disaster. If your family is religious, praying for the victims of the attack, peace, and wisdom for leaders of the countries involved will help. Help children to take the moral high ground in reacting to this disaster.

Talking about terrorist attacks:

Barbara reminds us that terrorism is about righteousness. Terrorists believe that their "cause" is more important than an individual life or property. Keep your discussions about terrorism calm and factual. Don't speculate in front of the children about what group could have been responsible. Children could interpret this to mean that anyone around them might be planning a similar event, or they might react with fear or negative actions toward the children from the group that you think might be responsible.

Linda Goldman, author of Life & Loss, A Guide to Help Grieving Children shared her thoughts about helping children with this tragedy:

This incident will shake both children and adults because the assumed protections of our society have so dramatically failed. Affirm to children that they are now safe, and talk about ways that the adult world was competent to take charge when the disaster happened. For instance, the other airplanes were stopped and searched, the police and fire safety people and hospitals all had their plans to help people, they have practiced, and they knew what to do - just as they would in our community.

Help children re-establish their sense of order. One way may be to try to
keep to the daily routine as much as possible - this will re-create a sense
of security for them.

Children's reactions will range widely and most of these are quite common for traumatized children. Some children will listen to your explanation and then go out to play, others will want to stay near you and talk about it for a length of time, or maybe ask you to drive them school instead of taking the bus. Your neighbor's child may react very differently from the way that your child processes this disaster, and that's okay. Reassure children that there is no "right" or "wrong" reaction, and encourage them to talk about this with you. They may need to tell their story over and over again. They may want to write or draw about where they were when they heard about the incident. Give children many ways to tell their story.

Keep your answers to their questions simple and age appropriate. Remember that young children can employ "magical thinking" and may believe that they somehow "caused" the problem. Reassure them that you know that there is nothing that they could have done to cause it or prevent it. This was an act of violence and will be punished. People are not allowed to do this to other people. There is a law against this kind of violence.

Children are going to see the imagery associated with this disaster - if not at your house or school, then at a neighbor´s. Prepare them for it by talking about the disaster, keeping in mind the age of the child and awareness of the society around them. The images that they see later may re-trigger their initial fears and your child may experience their original reactions once again. Reassure them that the problem is being handled, point out how the people who were hurt are being cared for, the buildings are being cleared, things are getting a little better each day.

Watch for symptoms of heightened anxiety including stomachaches, nightmares, difficulty in carrying on the regular "routine". This can happen to people of all ages but children need special attention to help them through it. Bedtime needs to be reassuring, and parents should consider an increase in transition time, story telling and book reading to get the nighttime off to a good start. Secondary reactions may emerge such as fear of riding on a plane or visiting downtown Washington or New York, anticipate these and use active listening to talk them out in advance.

Last, remind children that our nation has the support of people throughout
the world. They will be empathizing and praying for us, and helping us find
the people responsible and stopping them. Point this out as you are reading
the follow up stories in the newspaper over the next few weeks. This will
reassure them that we are in a basically friendly world where people work
together to help solve problems.

Coping with Terrorism...
Mark Dombeck, Ph.D.

There are not words to describe the inhumane, incomprehensibly enormous tragedy and sickening display of premeditated violence America has experienced.

Human beings waking up on this day after and the many days after to come will need to find ways to cope with this awful event. Here then, are some suggestions for how to accomplish this task.

People reacting to losses and traumas tend to go through a set of 'stages of grief' which are usually listed as denial, outrage/anger, working through, and resolution. Although these 'stages' don't always occur in this order, they are experiences that many people will go through as they come to terms with this event. Although a verbal description is not the same as experience, it is nevertheless a good idea to know what you and others are likely to feel.

Denial

You can't believe that this is happening, has happened. It seems unreal, like a dream. The world may even seem unreal and you may go about your day in a sort of fog. In the more serious scenarios, true dissociation can occur where there is distorted memory for the event. Just this morning on the news, I saw an interview with the parents of one of the Pennsylvania victim's parents. It seems that this brave man was able to call his parents after the hijacking, tell them he loved them, and also tell them about the hijacking events. The parents noted that he "is a proactive sort of person" and would be someone who would try to take action against the hijackers. Maybe, they wondered out loud, maybe he helped crash that plane into the ground rather than allow it to hit a target. I noted the parent's use of the present tense in describing their son - the reality of the son's murder hasn't quite sunk in yet.

Outrage/Anger

You are angry, furious, outraged at the event, at being victimized, at the scope of the tragedy, at the death toll of thousands of innocents, at the vulnerability that has been forcibly brought to your attention, at your own vulnerability. You are hurt, you may even find yourself crying. You are both sad and angry. You want revenge. You want blood. You want to take the eye of the perpetrator (who at this point is not known), for having taken your own eye. In the more severe scenarios, you will not wait to know who did this, will not limit your anger to those who legitimately deserve it, will not allow the government and military to do their jobs, but rather will race out to harm others who, in your own mind are associated with the perpetrators.

If these are your feelings, please do not act on them. Feel them, talk about them even, but do not act on them. The people you as an individual could harm are not to blame for this tragedy. They were not the perpetrators. Instead, they are as much victims as you are. Allow the United States government to "hunt down and punish" (in the words of President Bush) the true perpetrators.

Working Through

Working through happens over time. It is the process through which one ends up sorting all the many feelings out and weaving them into the fabric of ones life so that, as it were, things return to 'normal'. Many different feelings may be felt during this sorting out process: anger and outrage may alternate with periods of relative detachment, fatigue, sadness, bursts of tears, even numbness at times. You may find yourself not wanting to feel anything, and then later find yourself overwhelmed by feeling. It is as though you have swallowed an emotional meal that your body and soul are not quite able to digest all at once. Eventually, over time, most will find a way to digest it all, and life will return to 'normal'

Resolution

Resolution is a relative term. Mostly what it means is that the acute emotional mess of working through is resolved enough so that life has returned to a regular rhythm, and once again, worry about paying the bills and holding and keeping a job, and keeping your relationships on an even track become the day to day worries. Some people will resist resolution in the belief that to resolve and be over this tragedy means that the horror has been forgotten and that the meaning of the attack has been forgotten. Others will find solace in spiritual teachings of forgiveness and confidence in the ultimate ability for eternal judgment to sort out things better than any human being could. For many people, resolution will be hard to achieve until there has been some satisfactory response by the United States government. The intensity of this process of grieving and working through will likely be in relationship to how closely you have been impacted. Those who have lost loved ones will be hardest hit, as will those who do the actual rescue and emergency work. Those who know people who were lost, but are not related to them will be hit to a lesser degree. Those who only saw this on the television and heard it on the radio will have an easier time.

Trauma Disorders

Those people most directly impacted by the violence and death are at heightened risk for experiencing trauma disorders. A trauma disorder occurs (in the broadest sense) when a person is not able to follow a normal process of grief through to resolution, and instead gets stuck in it, reliving the emotions and memories associated with the trauma over and over. There are two forms of trauma disorders: Acute Stress Disorder and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. As the names suggest, the big difference between these two disorders is that Acute Stress Disorder happens directly in the aftermath of a trauma, while PTSD by definition cannot occur until six months after the occurrence of the trauma. Trauma disorders are characterized by: 1) heightened startle responses, arousal, and anxiety reactions, 2) avoidance of trauma related people, places, things and memories, and 3) intrusive re-experiencing of the trauma in the form of nightmares, waking dreams and memories, and sometimes
even hallucinations.

See Your Doctor

If you have been traumatized, it isn't a bad idea to see your doctor, or even better, a Psychiatrist with an understanding of trauma. Doctors may be able to prescribe a treatment plan for you that will help address and help you work through your traumatic circumstances. Such a plan will likely include medication and psychotherapy.

Encourage But *Do Not Force* Talking

It is most important that people exposed to a trauma be encouraged, *but not forced* to talk about what they have experienced. Traumatized persons are very vulnerable to being flooded with the emotion of what they have experienced- it is quite important that they be able to speak about what they have witnessed in a safe environment in front of people who will have the strength to witness what they have to say and feel without themselves becoming overwhelmed, angry, etc.. Many lay people will have a difficult time doing this and so, in many cases the task of encouraging traumatized people to talk will be best left to trained mental health professionals. If you are a traumatized person, consider seeking psychotherapy at this time. If you know of people who have been traumatized, encourage them to participate in psychotherapy sessions. Both individual psychotherapy and group psychotherapy sessions with other persons who have experienced similar or the same traumas can be very helpful to trauma victims. In some cases, therapy may be the thing that prevents trauma victims from crossing the line from Acute Stress into Posttraumatic Stress Disorders.

Combating Helplessness

Most all people are on edge in the aftermath of a national trauma like that we have just experienced. Don't be surprised if there is an increase in the number of household arguments you have.

Don't be surprised if you find that fears and phobias you had a handle on before (fears of flying in an airplane, of being in a tall building, etc.) become exacerbated. Chalk this up to the normal process of working through and trust that in most cases these will recede as this event becomes resolved (and if they don't that there is effective therapy that can help).

In the mean time, there are a few things you can do to combat feelings of helplessness:

1) Give Blood.
The Red Cross and hospitals in the New York City and Washington D.C. areas are in need of blood. Be part of those who help the victims get the blood that they need by donating some to your local Red Cross or Blood Bank. Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-448-3543) or try the Red Cross' website (which seemed to be down when I just checked it, hum - more attacks or just coincidence?)

2) Talk About It.
If this tragedy is bothering you, talk about it with others who also want to talk about it. This sort of talk could happen anywhere, at home, work, with a therapist, with a religious leader, etc. It doesn't have to be formal. Just watch out for expressions of violence and anger. It's really okay to talk about being angry, hurt, devastated, etc. but it is *not okay* to threaten others with violence.

Let the government handle that part.