Grygo is the chief content officer for FTF.
It’s been 17 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and most everyone has stories, moments, images and emotional links that defy the passage of time.
For many people who lost family, friends and co-workers on 9/11 the ties to trauma, grief and pain are very present and real. We should do what we can to understand and console them.
I reached out to New York psychotherapist and author Edy Nathan, a grief specialist, to ask her a few questions about how we should help those directly impacted by the tragic events of 9/11. Nathan is described as a therapist who helped out at ground zero “where she was called upon to apply all of her skills to negotiate the ocean of hopelessness, loss and destruction.” (More about her is available on her website here www.edynathan.com.)
What follows are my questions and her answers.
Q: How should those who lost loved ones on 9/11 respond to others telling them that they should be done grieving by now?
A: Grief doesn’t go away. It changes over time. What is it they need to get over? The loss of their loved one? This is not about forgetting — ever. It is more about learning how to integrate it, find an emotional calibration, so grief no longer has that strong grip it may have had.
Get over it? One’s heart and soul will always remember a loved one lost.
Q: What are some positive steps that 9/11 survivors can take to help alleviate the pain?
A: What is the pain? It is important to define where the pain resides. Is it filtered through the body? Is it in a cycle of depression? Is there potent anxiety that simply won’t quit? Talk about what is going on within the soul.
If the grief is an obstacle to living, begin to identify what needs to be different. Remember the self, prior to 9/11. Who were you? What was life like? Now, compare who you are now. What is different?
Do you need more socialization? Go to therapy either in a group or with an individual therapist.
Service to others in need can often help to create a shift in how the grief is being held within the brain. Exercise more regularly. Find other people who are also survivors. Pay the life of the loved one forward. Donate time. It all gets you outside of the self.
Live life with gratitude and find certain grace. Challenge the negative thinking with more positive, life-affirming thoughts.
Q: What can be done for someone who is on a self-destructive path because of 9/11?
A: Some people need their pain as a badge for what they have lost. Ask them what they need. Share with them, if they are willing to listen, if they would like loving, constructive observations. Yet, don’t take it personally, if they say no.
And, as hard as it is to leave them be, sometimes, you must go into a space of tough love. You cannot do someone’s work for them, they need to meet you somewhere on the path.
Give them a picture of what you hope for them — how you believe in them and remind them of who you remember them to be. This may coax them to tease out long ago memories of the self that may have died when they lost their loved one.
Overall, Nathan stresses that “everyone’s experience of trauma, abuse, or the loss of a loved one is as unique as a fingerprint … Ironically, grief can be one of life’s most important teachers … if you don’t try to deny it or run away.”
Need a Reprint?