Recovery Expert Believes Strengthening Connections Will Help Newtown Heal
Renowned recovery expert and author Dr Bruce Perry believes that when it comes to individuals — even entire communities — struggling to recover from trauma, healing happens faster and more effectively if those involved don’t try to go it alone.
Dr Perry will be the keynote speaker at a pair of upcoming events being hosted by The Ana Grace Project and partners including The Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation, Western Connecticut State University, Newtown Recovery & Resiliency Team, Newtown Public Schools, the Resiliency Center of Newtown, and the ChildTrauma Academy on December 2 and 3.
The first event is exclusively for the community, and is patterned after a similar community gathering hosted in the Hartford region in 2013 by Jimmy Greene and Nelba Marquez-Greene whose daughter Ana Grace was among the young victims of 12/14.
Ms Marquez-Greene called the December 2 breakfast a giveback to the community. Dr Perry will also be visiting with local educators who were directly or indirectly affected by the mass shooting privately later in the day.
He is the senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, a not-for-profit organization based in Houston, and adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Dr Perry is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with abused children; and Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. His most recent multimedia book, BRIEF: Reflections on Childhood, Trauma and Society, was released in 2013.
Over the last 30 years, Dr Perry has been an active teacher, clinician, and researcher in children’s mental health and the neurosciences, holding a variety of academic positions. He is a strong supporter of The Ana Grace Project.
The subject of Dr Perry’s Newtown talk will be how “Deepening Connections & Relationships Transform Families and Communities.” Parents, clergy, civic groups, seniors, and community leaders are all urged to attend.
In a recent conversation with The Newtown Bee, Dr Perry attempted to put both trauma and grief in perspective to those most affected by the events of 12/14, as well as those who may have become affected by it in the months and years that followed.
“The experience of loss, and the way people process and deal with an event like [12/14] is highly personal,” he said. “And we know that everybody has their own journey. Some were up close to that event — maybe you knew someone immediately affected, you may have been there, or maybe you’re just part of the community where that event took place.”
Concentric Circles
Dr Perry explained that when examining tragic events like Newtown experienced, experts see the impact as a set of concentric circles.
“We know at the center of those circles are the ones who were directly impacted by the experience — they witnesses the event or lost somebody or they were part of the event. Then there’s the secondary circle, which is the family or close friends of the ones in that innermost circle,” Dr Perry explained.
The third circle involves everyone else who may be experiencing what he calls second-degree impact.
“Part of what we know, is the closer you are to the immediate event, the more challenging and complex the recovery process will be. It will involve multiple nonlinear phases,” he said. “People use the term one step forward and two steps back. Some might have a moment of happiness, before experiencing a feeling of sadness that you don’t want to get out of bed for the next week.”
So is Newtown suffering more today, as a community, than it was in the immediate days and months following 12/14? And if so, how does the community continue healing as the financial underwriting for support services and counseling begins to fall away.
“It’s one of the major challenges getting any major system to understand that the time lines they have for accountability, the timelines they have for decisionmaking, the timelines they have for funding are completely out of sync with the natural timelines for recovery that follow traumatic events,” Dr Perry lamented.
“The longer-term consequences of serious traumatic exposure in a community — it’s well known that these have trans-generational impact. So the idea that a two- or three-year [infusion] of money, attention, and effort is going to make any significant difference, well that’s a wish,” he said. “They want that to be true, but all of us who study this know trauma-related problems have the potential to affect people for a lifetime. It’s not like an infection — these things just don’t go away. These are life course-changing experiences.”
Dr Perry said the close-knit nature of the Newtown community pre-12/14 means the fallout from the tragedy has the potential of affecting a lot more residents a lot more deeply than say, those who were residing in other parts of greater New York on 9/11.
Becoming Retraumatized
That means more Newtowners can become retraumatized, or exhibit emotional or behavioral reactions whenever they hear about a mass shooting, or a school attack.
“After you’re exposed to something like Sandy Hook, you become somewhat sensitized in ways other people won’t be,” Dr Perry said. “There have been dozens and dozens of these incidents since Sandy Hook.”
And he said while most people will hear or see that news, say it’s terrible and move on, those who were exposed to Sandy Hook might experience as much as a couple of days or more of feeling retraumatized.
“And if you were really affected by this, hearing about a school-related stabbing in Arizona… well, it becomes so evocative,” he said. “It’s the unpredictability of revisiting these things that makes working on recovery so challenging.”
Dr Perry said most people have mechanisms for dealing with small daily and even highly acute stresses. But for those in the concentric circles of Newtowners radiating out from 12/14, the unpredictability of these outside event triggers “can literally alter your physiology.”
Dr Perry said he wants those who attend the Newtown breakfast, which is being conducted at the Newtown Congregational Church on December 2, as well as those attending a daylong professional symposium the following day at Western Connecticut State University, to walk away with the same message.
“Having a healthy community, having an array of highly diverse relationships is both protective when one experiences a traumatic event, and healing after that traumatic experience,” he said.
Dr Perry said one of the most frequent unintended consequences of an event like 12/14 is that many well-intended efforts to help heal end up instigating divisiveness and undermining the very foundation of relationships and the connectedness that can help Newtown heal.
“This is something you always need to be aware of,” he said. “And oddly enough, money can sometimes be the cause of this. Anger and frustration over the competition for limited resources — even though it is an increase to the community’s resources globally — it can make people disconnect and undermine relationships which, in the end, provide the most powerful element of healing.”
Allies Become Enemies
That means the mental health and recovery personnel who were all rowing together can eventually revert to competing and even harming the very goals they set out to accomplish.
“It’s ironic that these well-intentioned organizational efforts to help heal will have the unintended consequence of dividing and undermining long-term progress,” Dr Perry said. “I’ve seen this in so many places, where money ends up having a toxic versus a unifying impact.”
He said many of his colleagues who have worked with communities affected by trauma have learned that the traditional mental health model is inadequate to ultimately help long-term healing.
“The mental health professionals need to learn to get out of their office, and get out into the community promoting some of these more important initiatives — reweaving social fabric, supporting community growth and reconnecting people with one another,” he said. “It’s not about getting the right diagnosis or doing the right evidence-based treatment. It’s about providing leadership in the community to help facilitate forming and maintaining healthy relationships of respect and support.”
Unfortunately, many mental health professionals may not have the wherewithal to do this.
“In general, it’s a challenge for the field,” Dr Perry said. “But the tremendous growth in knowledge about these community mental health factors is coming. Everything we’re learning about resilience is about creating and supporting relational connections in the context of family, community, and culture.
“When we do this our work becomes magnified,” Dr Perry concluded. “When we ignore that we are frequently ineffective.”
There will be limited space at the event, so anyone interested in attending the Newtown community breakfast December 2 should secure a reservation by clicking here.