I have wanted to write about this for 9 long years. I think it’s just been too difficult to put into words. I kept thinking someone else would do it.
For me, 9/11 created a national Post Tramautic Stress Disordered America.
We define trauma as an experience that hurts people to their core; an experience that shakes the foundation of their belief systems and wrenches away their innocence.
PTSD is what happens when the effects of these traumas are not dealt with, or debriefed within three months of the episode. As the shockwaves continue to embed themselves into our psyches, we exhibit more inexplainable, and more self-destructive behaviors.
The mind cannot piece together what has happened. What we believed was true before, the very things we counted on, just disappear. That we trusted the US and its ability to keep us safe within our borders, that we, with true American pride and naivete, considered ourselves good and righteous people, was tragically challenged.
We lost our citizens, we faced fear as we had never known it before. We, America, did not know what to do.
Since then, if you consider how Trauma is known to effect people, we have been suffering on a national level. Our economy and its historical principles don’t seem to work the way they used to. The principles of business, investing in our futures is suddenly anyone’s game. We don’t trust anything. We certainly don’t trust our government like before. We are like children whose parents have abandoned us; abused us.
There is no golden rule. There are no long ago truths that are not questioned and often discarded.
Many of us find that our most intimate relationships are more conflicted. The internet is being used to keep us worried and paranoid.
PTSD patients experience nightmares, flashbacks, triggers that make them anxious and depressed. How many times have you looked at a day, just like today, and said how beautiful and how just like 9/11? How many times have you assessed a transaction with a friend, a business partner, and chosen to be suspicious rather than curious?
I think we have nationally been off balance ever since 2001. We have lost perspective and have not regained or created a different way to get it back.
When the Oklahoma City Bombings happened, When Columbine happened, When the Tsunami happened, victims were gathered together and treated. They were treated for the psychological impact of what had happened to them. The severity of these awful moments were not ignored by the mental health community.
Debriefing means to go over the exact details of what happened until its properly brought into the light of day and the brain can reconnect. The right and the left brain can become a team once again: rationality and logic are woven thru emotional experience and some kind of sense made. The actual sadness and terror is encouraged to be expressed; its not allowed to go deeper and deeper inside.
No one did that here. No one called it.
What we did was watch TV hours on end, regurgitate the bile we experienced by spitting it at the Muslim world and crawling into a national ball.
What we are dealing with, still, today is a nation in the fetal position.
President Obama was elected to be our saviour, to give us hope again. But you can’t take a traumatized soul and begin to heal it without addressing the underlying damage. I still don’t think we have called the elephant out of the room. We are a country grown addicted to the worst elements of our individual fears. To recover we have to talk about it. The truth. We need to talk about how 9/11 wrecked our beliefs, how it made us scared and often paralyzed. We need to share it and then perhaps we can walk steadily again.
We are still suffering. It feels like a rape to me, someone stole our souls and we need to call our spirits back. We need to understand how this all happened and how we in our own way created an environment that allowed it.
I don’t know about some of you, but I feel the earth tremble like it did on 9/11 every single day. Don’t forget it. Learn from it . Don’t hide.
