Therapists use many modalities to help people heal from trauma. But an important question is: how can all of us help to prevent traumatic responses from taking hold in the first place -- even before birth, even on the battlefield? Yes, awful things happen. But, as with pain, it is sometimes our interpretation of what's happening that makes things worse. When our emotions and the biological chemicals that deliver them react in horror and "awful-ize" already frightening events, we remember them more achingly.
I've coauthored several books on Verbal First Aid and written one for children about how to speak in moments of crisis to shift the way we experience those moments in the present and remember them in the future. Verbal First Aid is so much more than being nice in an emergency -- it not only helps to start the physical healing in the moment of crisis, but it can affect how we hold and remember it in the future.
It has occurred to me that at every stage of life, we have a chance to short-circuit the trauma. If we can treat a crisis with compassion, wisdom and presence, we can store it in our memories differently so that we don't bury it away as a time bomb for the future, when, overreacting, we're actually replaying and mistaking that crisis for the present one. Perhaps we may even remember the incident, instead, as an experience of rescue or a remarkable instance of our own courage.
Changing Potential Trauma in the Womb
"Doctors should have an obsession to protect the emotional state of the pregnant woman," says Dr. Michel Odent, world renowned expert in the prenatal field.
Current studies validate that a mother's stress affects the baby in utero and beyond in many undesirable ways. Stress has been shown to cause preterm delivery and reduced birth weight, to influence the choice of genes expressed (see Bruce Lipton), and even to affect life beyond the womb, including such important factors as sleep patterns expressed in toddler-hood and deficits in regulatory control of behavior during childhood. If we can help the mother to a place of calm, we are protecting the new life in ways we hadn't even considered in medical terms alone.
If we can help the mother to feel safe, we can influence the chemical soup in which the baby swims and grows, and that will be reflected in a variety of ways in future emotional as well as physical health.
Sometimes some of us who are therapists regress our clients and patients to the womb to find the origins of the fears that plague them today. My point is that if we can protect the emotional state of the mother, as Dr. Odent suggests, we may be able to alleviate some of that emotional, traumatic suffering even before it begins.
Changing Potential Trauma in Childhood
I coauthored "Verbal First Aid: Help Your Kids Heal From Fear and Pain -- and Come Out Strong" in the hopes that children whose parents learn to use this healing language in times of emergencies develop a de-stressed (as opposed to distressed), resilient mental picture on which to depend for future crises, big or small. Experientially, you might let yourself remember an incident in your own past when you were injured or afraid and someone said something that made you feel even more frightened. Then contrast that with a memory of a similar incident when what was said helped you to a sense of safety.
Adults, and especially parents, are the ones who explain to children how the world works. When adults know what to say at those times, the voice in a child's head can be one of courage and self-healing for the rest of their life.
Changing Potential Trauma on the War Front
The amount of post traumatic stress suffered by military personnel is incalculable. Even the best words said during fear and pain cannot antidote all of the horrors that have been witnessed. However, they can help mitigate the overwhelming emotional trauma that wells up at the very moment when one has been injured and feels the devastation of battlefield risk.
Several months ago a chaplain training for his deployment to Iraq with six other military chaplains wrote to me and requested a copy of "The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts" in the expectation that they might find the words that could make a difference on the battlefield.
He wrote to me again this September that he had also distributed the books I'd sent to the medics. "During the entire month of July, we trained at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. I used Verbal First Aid during dozens of simulated mass casualty scenarios: some involving soldiers from my unit asked to pretend as if they were injured in a particular way and others involving a combination of soldiers assigned to Fort Irwin and Hollywood-style role players (some of whom were real life double amputees). I found Verbal First Aid techniques to be very well received by all. In fact, the entire group influenced by your book -- myself as chaplain and our medics -- received extremely high praise from outside evaluators for our overall care-giving methodology which I contribute, in part, to the impact of your work."
He'll be deploying to Iraq for Operation New Dawn and plans to continue sharing this work so chaplains and medics can help as the traumatic situation unfolds to create calm and engage the body in a positive way to set a course toward recovery.
All this is not to minimize the awful reality of trauma, which by definition is an experience that is emotionally painful, distressful, and shocking and which may result in lasting mental and physical effects. There is nothing good about trauma, yet even in frightening situations there may be openings in interpretation, and there may be verbal suggestions that can help a person feel safer, feel whole or remember who she/he is even while it seems that all is lost.
When the bomb went off in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, an injured woman lay buried under a mound of concrete and metal. As it happened, although she was fearful and in the dark for many hours, she not only survived but told reporters that what kept her hopeful and alive was one rescue worker whom she couldn't see, but who held her hand -- all he could reach, throughout her ordeal. She heard his soothing voice as he gained her trust with his steadfastness and she borrowed strength from his kind and warm presence. This allowed her to remember the incident very differently.
How it Works -- The Firefighter and the Little Girl
A firefighter once called to tell me that he had always known that there were firefighters who had good bedside manners, but he never knew what it was they did to make everything come out right. One night he read "The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts" and the next day he was called to a collision in which a mother and child were pinned in a car. The mother was easily released, but the little girl, about six-years-old, was trapped -- not badly hurt but panicked and crying. He would, he said, ordinarily have been shouting out instructions and orders for the Jaws of Life to pry the little girl out. Of course this did happen, but first -- and it just took a second -- he remembered Verbal First Aid, reached in as best he could through a broken window, touched her knee, and said, "I have a little girl just like you. And I'm going to take care of you as if you were my little girl."
Everything became very quiet. The child stopped crying, and the rescue was relatively smooth and calm. He was impressed that it worked, but what he hadn't realized was the effect that his actions would have beyond the incident.
Forever, when the child looked back on this event, it would not be the terrifying trauma it might have seemed at the time. Rather, it will perhaps be remembered, at least in part, as a comforting rescue by a caring father figure in which she was able to use her own resources of courage. That's a gift to the future, one way to keep a crisis from becoming a trauma.
It starts before the words, with the heart. Trauma grows in a terrain of fear; healing in a field of love. When we move from fear and anger to love, we shift the ground, the field, in which we all live and breathe and may flourish.
Judith Simon Prager () is coauthor of "Verbal First Aid: Help Your Kids Heal From Fear and Pain--And Come Out Strong"
and "The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts"
and author of "Owie-Cadabra's Verbal First Aid for Kids: A Somewhat Magical Way to Help Heal Yourself and Your Friends."
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