Trauma to the soul wounds our sense of self, disrupts the continuity of our personal biography and shatters our confidence in our physical, emotional and moral environment. Its effects should not be underestimated. However, simple steps can resolve our personal trauma and minimize its lasting effects.

Our national experience will be resolved by our leaders, but personal experience is ours alone to sort through and to come to terms with in our own thoughts, our own feelings and our own deeds. Most of us will spend weeks and months, some of us years, resolving the personal experience of September 11, 2001. The speed and degree of recovery for each of us cannot be measured or fixed. Each of us has an individual process of healing and resolution.

Trauma is individual. Trauma cannot be compared.

Television has made us all intimate witnesses to the fear and devastation. A witness to horror is just as much a victim of evil as the ones at ground zero.

Many who lost loved ones or colleagues and those who were at the sites of attack, destruction and death will find themselves dwelling in the valleys of the shadows for unrelenting periods of time. These individuals must seek out counseling and therapy to help and guide recovery. Far more of us will appear to return to normal and to move on with our lives.

However, trauma lives in the human soul in shadowy ways. Much like acts of terrorism, moments of trauma appear when unsuspectedÉ to attack our daily lives in moments of sudden darkness. Many will find their return to normal challenged by reoccurring incidents of internal trauma.

What can help these individuals - young, old, male, female, ordinary and powerful cope with these destabilizing moments?

There are three steps to recovery from trauma:

1. Self-Awareness: Naming the specific source of your trauma.
2. Self-Compassion: Recognizing your response to trauma.
3. Self-Direction: Practicing healing activities.

These tasks are a guide to help you make distinctions and establish a clear picture of your own individual experience. The source of trauma returns in our thoughts, the response appears in our feelings and the healing activities in our will to shape our souls for our future.

SELF-AWARENESS: THE SOURCE OF MY TRAUMA

We need to identify and name the precise source of our personal trauma.
We have a natural and understandable tendency to generalize and blur together all the events and experiences of the terrorist attack on the US. Yet, there were a variety of distinct traumatic events and experiences in that attack beginning with the planes flying into the Twin Towers.

Each of us has our own vulnerabilities to horror. By defining the different shocks of the whole week we will be able to find our way to the source of our own lasting personal trauma and find a start to our own personal path to healing our own soul. Here are some examples of named trauma and how they relate to a personal trauma:

Boundary Trauma: Our core sense of security has been totally shattered. The piercing of our national boundaries by evil (people, deeds, forces) and the piercing of the Twin Tower facades overwhelms us with fear for our own personal boundaries, our homes, our workplace, our bodies.

Disintegration Trauma: The integrity or wholeness of our daily lives and our sense of personal self is threatened with a potential breaking apart into a thousand unmendable pieces. This is the trauma described in the tragedy of Humpty Dumpty taken to a vast scale in the crumbling of the WTC.

Violent Death Trauma: Falling from a high place, being crushed, burning to death, being torn apart, crashing in an airplane, being buried alive. Being unprepared and alone at sudden death.

Trapped and Helpless Trauma: A common trauma. Those above the impact on the two towers could not escape nor could they be helped. By extension, Manhattanites were trapped on the island and could not leave.

Resources Trauma: Without warning, we find that we cannot depend on any thing. We are all dependent on the daily resources provided by individuals and institutions. Suddenly, power, communication, and transportation resources were threatened, were attacked, or actually disappeared. Ordinary patterns of living are disrupted.

Knowledge Trauma: Suddenly the confidence in knowing what to do, what to feel, what to think is gone. Everything is strange and unfamiliar.

Survival Trauma: To survive, to be unaffected in a physical way, to have an ordinary day when others have lost so much cause the deep suffering of a nameless guilt, a sense of being undeserving.

Financial Trauma: Disaster usually has serious financial consequences. No cash, credit cards not working, job loss, not enough savings or insurance. Wall Street is closed down. All financial givens in your life become risky and variable.

Visual Trauma: Too many horrible sights repeated over and over and over. Nothing familiar to see. The visual landscape altered forever.

Sound Trauma: The sounds of screams, of crashing, of sirens blare into our souls making them brittle.

Your soul may be profoundly vulnerable to one or more of these traumas and not affected deeply by others. Being able to find the source of your personal trauma experience can lead to ways to heal. Naming and containing a beast is the first way to taming it.

SELF-COMPASSION: MY RESPONSE TO TRAUMA

The human soul has three faculties: thinking, feeling and willing (the impulse to act). Trauma can alter, damage, or confuse one or more of these three. Feeling trauma is the most common arising from tragic and unexpected events such as what happened on September 11.

The traumatized soul does not necessarily manifest in external behaviors. Most of us experience the suffering in our souls inwardly. We fiercely attempt to hide and control it. In other words, we have a remarkable capacity for appearing normal on the outside, while suffering within. Below is a list of some of the states or responses of the traumatized soul.^1.

Fear: From low level anxiety to fleeting moments of panic when you are not presently in any danger.
Anger: Sudden irritability to bouts of rage for little things within your personal environment and relationships.
Hatred: Prejudicial feelings towards others. Blame and resentment toward yourself, strangers, your loved ones.
Disorientation in Space and/or Time: Everything suddenly shifts for brief moments and you lose your sense of where you are, where you are going and the sense of time.
Doubt and Helplessness: You suddenly lose all your confidence in your abilities and the capacity to sustain anything for very long.
Vulnerability: You feel unsafe or weak within your body or insecure in your environment.
Grief & Profound Sadness: Suddenly you want to cry. Perhaps tears fill your eyes. You feel a global sense of loss.
Absence of Feeling or Numbness: You are without feeling or emotions and perhaps without a feeling of love for those close to you. It seems like there is an airbag surrounding your heart that you cannot get through.
Paralysis: No matter how much you want to do something you cannot find the will to begin or collapse in mid-task.
Compulsive Action: You unthinkingly continue an activity beyond the point of completion or necessity.
Despair: The future seems to hold no hope, possibility or opportunity.
Exhaustion and No Energy: Getting out of bed is difficult or in the middle of the day all you can think about is crawling into bed.
Sense of being disembodied: This is a strange experience of not being in your body. Sometimes this feels like you are watching yourself go through your activities.

Be compassionate with yourself. Let go of all self-judgment about your feelings. It is healthy not to be normalÑin response to this horrible trauma. Your soul is suffering now...it will take time to heal.

SELF-DIRECTION; MY HEALING PRACTICES

Realizing you are in a trauma flash or state, it is healing to reorient your thoughts, feelings and actions in simple positive directions. The need is very much to recover your self.

Again, it is healthy not to be normal in response to trauma. Our lives and world have changed. Normality will take time and the practice of healing, clarifying activities. To move forward to a new sense of life, a morally strengthened soul, a new and more productive capacity to act is the redemption of traumatic experience. A few clarifying activities succeed in the face of trauma.

First- Breathe
Deeply. Slowly. Rhythmically. In trauma states there is a tendency to breath in either short, rapid, shallow breaths, or to unconsciously forget to inhale or exhale. Breathing brings you back to your body and centers your feelings.
Second- Identify Your Feelings
Naming your feelings gives you a sense of control. It is important to know that you have identifiable feelingsÉthat the feelings as an amorphous mass do not have you!
Third- Speak to Someone
Share your feelings- Speak to another person. Tell them of your feelings. If you cannot speak to anyone, write your feelings down. Do not feel embarrassed about what you are experiencing. Everyone has disturbing thoughts, feelings and impulses.
Fourth- Do Something Simple and Productive
Organize your desk, fold laundry, go for a walk, take a shower. Ground yourself in activity. Trauma lives in chaos and fades in the presence of harmony and order.
Fifth- More Rhythm and Less Routine:
Maintain a daily rhythm for sleeping and eating but break your routine with new and comforting activities.
Sixth- Artistic Work
Sketch paint, write, poetry, sing, or dance. Keep a journal. Not just to make something artistic but to express your feelings truthfully - A quick sketch...a few expressive words...can release the invading feelings and return you to the present.
Seventh- Feel a Spiritual Presence.
A sense of a guardian Angel- standing behind you and surrounding you with love - much like your spine - supporting your ribs that wrap around your heart and lungs. And feel the rhythmic rocking of this presence - like a good parent rocking a crying infant.
Eighth- Experience the living forces of Nature.
Go out into the sun and feel its light and its warmth. If you are near water, experience its forgiving and constant movement. Feel the strength of the earth, our planet supporting you.

THE RECOVERED SELF

What we have seen and what we have felt will live in our souls forever. In following the three tasks to healing there is the possibility for the wounds in our soul not to fester or scar but to find new strength for truth, beauty and goodness. Our soul will grow to live with a new consciousness and act with a new force for goodness.

The human soul will now transform:

fear into freedom,

doubt and confusion into courage and order,

and

most importantly, anger and hatred into love.