Florida Trauma Survivors: Your Feelings Are a Normal Response to Abnormal Situation

Life has landed you in the community of trauma survivors. None of us is here by choice, but we do choose to support each other. From my heart, here are things I wish I had known when I was 17. In 1999, I was 17. I was sleeping at home with my family in Tel Aviv on the night of January 17. At 1am a loud siren woke us up. We knew what it meant. We also knew what we must now do. I ran shaking and crying with my family to our “safe room” where we bolted the door and sealed it for protection against what we thought was a chemical attack. Less than three minutes later, we felt and then heard huge blasts. Our house was shaking. Our dogs were silent. We thought surely, they were dead and that many of our neighbors must also have died. That was only the first night of a war when we all slept for weeks in our safe room. The missiles continued for several months. Eventually the war ended and people returned to their routines. Most people seemed to be fine and moved on quickly from that scary time. For me it was harder and more complex, you can read more about that here. Today I am a trauma therapist, working daily with survivors who have experienced debilitating trauma. Here is information that many survivors find useful: 1. While we all react in quite similar ways when we are in the immediate presence of danger, our reactions afterwards differ greatly from one person to the next. Even people from the same family who experienced the same event often have very differing responses. O...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Anxiety and Panic Children and Teens Criminal Justice General Grief and Loss Inspiration & Hope Personal PTSD Self-Help Stress Student Therapist Students Trauma Mass murder Parkland shooting Posttraumatic growth Posttraumat Source Type: blogs