Trauma and Resilience.
This was the title of the course I participated in during my volunteer internship this summer. Taught by experts from the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, where I worked, the course brings together people from around the world. What I’m going to do over the next few weeks is share a bit of what I’ve learned about the topic, starting with a trip to the Israeli city of Sderot.
In the past ten years, more than 11,000 rockets and missiles have fallen in the area of Sderot, an Israel city in the north. This type of situation affects the people of Sderot in not just physical ways, but psychologically as well.
This post will discuss part of this psychological aspect. It is not about politics, and should not considered as favoring one view over another. Rather, what this represents is an a look into the psychological aspects of the situation, and how we can help people deal with these issues better and more effectively.
Living in a city under fire can cause enough stress to cause trauma, and in its most severe form, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The special situation in Sderot presents a new kind of trauma, different from one-time terrorist attacks or child abuse. In fact, researchers have suggested added a new kind of trauma, peritrauma, in order to incorporate instances like these. Peritrauma differs from other kinds of trauma, such as Simple Trauma and Complex Trauma.
Which is exactly what brought my class there last week. The trauma center I work (full name above) has conducted research and offered treatment to the people in Sderot. But in order to truly understand the situation there, we had to travel there in person. So one hot July day, we boarded a bus and headed up north.
The focus of this blog is the topic of resilience. Resilience is defined as an individual’s or community’s ability to deal with stress and bounce back. Sometimes they can even grow from the challenge, and achieve post-traumatic growth, PTG for short. Unlike resilience, PTG occurs when someone is not only able to bounce back to normal functioning during or after adversity, but when the survivor also learns, and grows, from it. To keep this focused, we are just going to focus on one lesson the people of Sderot can teach us about resilience: maintaining control and routine.
Control and routine are critical for maintaining resilience in the face of stress. No matter what adversity hits us in life, it is usually important to stay in routine. Keep living. Function as normal. Once this breaks down, people are more likely to be affected by the adversity.
And they are more likely to lose control. Locus of Control, or whether or not we view ourselves as being in control of a situation and what happens to us in life, has been found as a major component in maintaining or draining resilience. The people of Sderot understand this. Which is why, a police officer told us, instead of running or letting the rockets control their lives, they will control their lives (this is paraphrased and was originally spoken in Hebrew, so it is not exact).
How do they maintain control? Two ways are through transportation and play. The bus stations, critical for keeping a city running and moving, have been built as bomb shelters. Which means that if a “Red Alert” sounds the signal of an oncoming rocket, the people can wait in safety for the bus. This not only helps them maintain their routine, but control as well: they decide whether they can travel, not the rockets.
Another, even more profound, way the people maintain a sense of resilience is in their children. They do this in many ways, but for the purposes of this post we will only cover the area of playgrounds.
Hmm. Playgrounds? What do they have to do with resilience?
Answer: Everything. Play is a crucial part of growing up, and important in the healthy development of children. But living in a city under fire means children may constantly be in “survivor mode.” They may be too stressed and focused on avoiding the next missile attack that play gets pushed out of the way. The unpredictability of the attacks also means that wandering too far from a secure place, like a bomb shelter, is just too dangerous. The result is not only a loss in childhood play, but in control and routine as well.
So now what? Playtime or safety?
Sderot decided to do both. By adding a bomb shelter in the middle of a playground, they ensured children can play as normal but still be close enough to safety in case of an attack. Even more creative, they built playground whose structure(s) were bomb shelters, just in a creative shapes. One such palyground consisted of a long winding snake with that the children could play inside of. But this snake was not only made for play, but reinforced with the same material as the other bomb shelters.
Both of these ideas represent more than creativity. They represent resilience. The city of Sderot can offer many lessons in this topic, thanks to their own inner resolve and the help of the Israel Center of Psychotrauma. But if one thing was made clear from this trip, it was this: in Sderot, the people control their lives and their routine, not some external threat. The result? A city-wide example of resilience in action.
