Responsive / Reactive: Reflections on Trauma Aftermath

A coaching class today put an all-too-real world perspective on the difference between being reactive and being responsive when a student spoke of these two ways of holding and interacting with our experience in relation to tragic events. Specifically, she spoke about the looming anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th in the US. Another student spoke of being in the lingering impact of hurricane Katrina, with its recent cousins Gustav and Ike re-traumatizing folks on the Gulf Coast.

Psychologically speaking, anniversaries of traumatic events tend to refresh the memory of the horror, helplessness, confusion, and chaos experienced in the original event. When we've been through such a thing as a mass casualty attack or a huge natural disaster, it's difficult to make sense of the randomness of it. We get shaken to our core in a deeply existential way. Beyond the material level of destruction that happens, we are forever psychologically altered as well. Some of us never fully recover.

It is natural to be reactive about these anniversaries. But it isn't good for us to be reactive for too long. Let's examine what reactivity is, in order to understand why responsiveness is more healthy.

When we're reactive, we re-experience the trauma again -- perhaps to a lesser degree but often in disturbingly vivid, cellular memory detail. We get overwhelmed by fear and grief or anger, and feel powerless again.

This reactivity has physiological consequences in the body. Our neuro-chemistry goes on alert, flooding the body with corticosteroids (the stress hormones) whose purpose is to help us flight or flee when necessary. But when this flood is in response to a memory, there is nothing to fight, no real threat from which to flee, so the hormones don't get discharged in the way that's intended, and instead do damage to the immune system and especially to the adrenal glands -- two systems we need to keep us healthy and keep our energy up.

In this class, one student pointed out that sometimes in the aftermath of a traumatic event, we have a bit of guilt-fear over ending our reactivity, as if to do so would dishonor those who died. This is also quite a normal reaction. Connect to this, I believe, is a reluctance to let go of reactivity because in a way it keeps us alert, hypervigilent against the potential of another disaster happening to us again. If we let go, we might forget to be careful, and could leave ourselves vulnerable to being dangerously caught off guard again.

These reasons for staying in reactivity are somehow logical, but not the less harmful to mind, body, and spirit.

Responsiveness takes nothing away from those whose lives were taken on September 11th, or during Katrina. Responsiveness simply shifts our intention from being determined to perpetually mourn and not let it happen again, to the more productive perspective of finding the good, or the opportunity in these anniversary days of remembrance.

Another student in the class shared that in the Jewish tradition when loved ones die, family members honor their memory each year on the anniversary of the passing by making a charitable contribution in their name, or doing some good deed that the loved one is obviously no longer in a position to do. Honoring the day, and the life and life work of others is a great way to be responsive to our feelings of sorrow while at the same time using it as an opportunity to turn it into a blessing for someone else.

Listening to the student discussion in the class, I wrote two question sets that coaches could use with clients who are experiencing the reactivity associated with traumatic anniversaries, to help shift thrm from reactivity to responsiveness.

• How can you bring love and compassion into this moment for yourself? How can you do so for others who are also still struggling? What can you do to increase love and compassion in the world? What's one small thing you could do that would be an act of love or compassion in your family, your community, the world?

• What's one step towards peace that you can take today? How can you honor one or more of the lives lost in these tragedies? What could you contribute to or create that would be a voice for peace? What's the commitment you will make to serving Life, not fear, and how might that change you for the better?