Disasters, whether they are manmade or natural come with a physical and emotional cost. The true trauma of a disaster occurs after people have recovered from the initial shock. Survivors who continue to live in the disaster zone are burdened with the clean up and the costs: financial, material and emotional.

Take care of yourself

It is critical, for you and those around you, that you take care of yourself. Stress and emotions require a huge amount of energy. If you have insufficient energy life is going to be harder for you, you will have less energy for the clean up, less energy to support those around you, and you may become terse, irritable, emotional or irrational. These responses make a difficult situation much harder for everyone. The solutions in this case are easy. Eat well, sleep well. Try to take time out to do something you enjoy and which relaxes you.

If you have trouble sleeping at night, make sure you do enough physical activity during the day so you can sleep well. You can also take a nap during the day if you are disturbed at night. Stay rested.

Eat comfort foods. This is something which we tend to do automatically when stressed, but it is worth mentioning. We all have some food or beverage which reminds us of better, happier times. Take time to enjoy it. It might be a cup of tea or a particular sweet.

Listen to music. Like comfort food, we all have favourite songs which can throw us back into a good mood. If you are feeling down, put it on. This is no time for parties, but right now we need to stay focused. By looking after ourselves and by staying positive, we can be much more focused and get much greater results.

Talk about it. The chances are you are going to want to talk about your experiences. This can be good way of getting the experience out of the system and to come to grips with what has happened. However, how you talk about an experience affects your memory of that experience. I have come across cases where people have survived traumatic events without suffering any trauma, but have later become traumatized because of the way they talked about that event and thought about it. REMEMBER no experience is traumatic in itself. It is how you think about it that makes it traumatic or not. The way you talk can affect the way you think.  When you think about the experience:

THINK POSITIVE.

KEEP TO THE FACTS.

STATE WHAT HAPPENED and WHAT YOU DID.

Stay focused with your thoughts. Talk about what needs to be done and do them. When you are not doing them: relax, do things you enjoy doing, spend time with people you like. Try not to think about the bad things that have happened: you will simply feel bad. KEEP YOUR MIND ON WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Take care of those around you

Make sure that those around you are eating well and sleeping well. It will make things easier for everyone.

Talk about the experience following the guidelines above. It is typical for people suffering shock to talk only about the experience, and repeat descriptions over and over again. If this is happening, talk them through the experience, keeping to the facts, and talking about what they did and what you did. If people mention the victims or the destruction caused by the earthquake, acknowledge it, but try to move on. Keep their thoughts on making the present as comfortable as possible and ensuring the future is going to be one you are proud of.

Do fun things together – play games or sport. Go for a bike ride or do gardening. Be active. This will keep you from thinking about events and get you tired for sleep at night.

Do things that help each other and others. If you and the people around you feel like you are making a positive contribution, you know that you are mastering the situation. That feels good and removes the threat of a victim mentality. We are not victims, we are survivors and we are moving on with our lives.

Show sympathy, empathy, and lead people on to doing something positive. It might be helping clean up the neighbour’s yard or making pancakes or delivering water to friends.

Use comfort food and music.

Recognise the need for help

If you or those around you (loved ones, friends, flat-mates, neighbours) continue to suffer from anxiety, worry, insomnia, depression, panic attacks, flashbacks or an inability to concentrate, then seek professional help.  These reactions are natural and can be resolved. If you would like a personal consultation to help you through these, contact me. I provide one-on-one consultations both in person and on Skype.

What is NLP and why I prefer it

There are many types of support available. I use NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) for the simple reason that I found it extremely effective and useful for dealing specifically with trauma and depression. NLP is a results orientated therapy. The focus is on identifying what issues you have and resolving them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

In the case of psychological trauma, an experience takes on whatever meaning you subconsciously give it. Recent research into neuroplasticity has shown that when we recall an experience, by the process of remembering it we recreate it in our mind. We then store that new recollection in our memory. This gives us a crucial key in dealing with traumatic memories. By getting people to recall experiences in a way that is non-threatening, future recollections of the experience no longer cause anxiety or any of the other symptoms associated with psychological trauma.  NLP has numerous, elegant techniques which enable people to effectively alter the way they think in order to overcome a wide range of problems and enable people to perform to much higher and greater levels. NLP is used successfully to help: build confidence, motivation; deal with stress, anxiety, insomnia; develop resourcefulness and overcome fears and addictions.