{"id":364,"date":"2004-01-22T08:40:07","date_gmt":"2004-01-22T13:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=364"},"modified":"2010-07-11T00:09:39","modified_gmt":"2010-07-11T04:09:39","slug":"the-hoax-of-debriefing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=364","title":{"rendered":"The Hoax of “Debriefing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fantastic article in The New Yorker<\/i> on grief and trauma counseling<\/a>. I have quite a bit to say about this but not a lot of time at the moment.<\/p>\n

The article discusses, with the context of September 11, the trend of grief counseling – grief counselors rushing to the scene of the trauma, to de-brief those who witnessed it, to try to head off any debilitating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.<\/p>\n

There was a WONDERFUL essay in The New York Times<\/i> about a year ago – which I did print out – I’ll have to dig it up out of my files to quote from it – but it was called “In Praise of Repression”. The title certainly caught my eye, because I, like so many others, have been taught, by our culture more than anything else, that repression of anything is bad. Unhealthy.<\/p>\n

The author, cannot remember her name, said something like, “In the immediate wake of September 11, there were 5 grief counselors for every traumatized person. That image alone is something I am going to need to repress.”<\/p>\n

In the last couple of years – I would say since September 11 – I have come to the conclusion that repression of terrible events is not only NOT bad, but it can be the psyche’s way of healing itself. This is not always the case, and there are certainly some people who become so debilitated by their trauma that they can no longer function, they start drinking heavily, they abandon their families, whatever. They are unaccustomed to having strong emotions of any kind, and so they freak out. But in the New York Times<\/i> piece – follow-up had been done a year later, with many of the survivors of the catastrophe, and they found that those people who successfully “repressed”, who did not continuously re-live that day, were the ones who had a high quality of life, who had survived psychologically. People re-committed themselves to their families, people became workaholics, people played golf like maniacs. These are coping mechanisms, yes, but they are coping mechanisms on the side of LIFE. What good does it do to keep talking about it, keep reliving it?<\/p>\n

Dredging up the pain, re-living memories (especially very soon after the event) is not only not helpful, but can be quite damaging.<\/p>\n

Read the article in The New Yorker<\/i> – I thought it was incredible. I’ll have more to say about it, when I have time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fantastic article in The New Yorker on grief and trauma counseling. I have quite a bit to say about this but not a lot of time at the moment. The article discusses, with the context of September 11, the trend … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16446,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/16446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}