Frederica Freyberg:
Looking now at the aftermath of the Waukesha tragedy, what is known as “collective trauma” describes a situation that breaks norms and expectations that we have about an individual or society. A driver plowing through crowds during a holiday parade certainly fits. There is trauma born of confusion and uncertainty about what happened and why. Of course, it’s acute for people who were injured there or lost loved ones, but also for witnesses and the immediate community. What about the broader community? We turn to Scott Webb, who’s the trauma informed care coordinator at the Department of Health Services and the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Thank you for being here.
Scott Webb:
I appreciate this opportunity to talk.
Frederica Freyberg:
How do any of us make sense of what happened?
Scott Webb:
I don’t really think you can make sense. That’s one of the hallmarks of collective trauma is that it happens to wide groups of people, could be entire societies or entire community, and one of the biggest features of it is that it is hard to make sense of it, and so I think that it is natural for us to feel like, you know, we can’t wrap our brains around what happened, and it is confusing, and it throws us into this extreme state of confusion and uncertainty. That’s part of the reality of collective trauma.
Frederica Freyberg:
So for people who were at the parade, even as witnesses, how likely is it that they are traumatized and will experience symptoms of that?
Scott Webb:
I think it is very likely that most of the people that were there have been traumatized. Now, the way they respond to it is going to be very different, depending on a person’s makeup, their own experiences, maybe past traumas that go back to their childhood, and so there’s going to be a wide variety of responses to this traumatic event as horrific as it was. I think that we need to understand that the healing from trauma takes place with relationship, and that’s one of the things that we hopefully can get to talking about, the healing part of trauma, happens in the context of healthy, loving relationships. We come together in this pain.
Frederica Freyberg:
I was just about to ask, for those who were injured themselves, or lost loved ones, how do they heal?
Scott Webb:
I think a lot of this is grief. I think that we’re dealing with a grief which is a very powerful emotional reaction to loss. Through the pandemic, there’s been a lot of grieving. We lost loved ones. We lost what used to be before the pandemic happened, and then now with this, people were coming out of the pandemic, gathering for this festive occasion. We’re entering into the holiday season, there’s a lot of hope and expectation and excitement and then this horrific thing happened. So that adds to the layers of trauma we’ve experienced with the pandemic, and so the way people heal from it? They have to grieve. What I often — what I used to tell my clients when I was a psychotherapist many years ago is you have to feel it to heal it. You have to be able to acknowledge there is a loss, a grieving process that we have to go through. You do that, hopefully, within the context of loving relationships because, again, that’s how you heal most from most types of trauma, all types of trauma, is through those healthy, loving relationships. I think that you have to be able to find people that will care for you and let you talk about what you feel, what you’re going through, and that they are able to kind of bear witness to that and be there for you and we support each other that way. So it is just acknowledging that the grief is real. We can’t — we often try to avoid grief. We try to stay away from it, and I think it is important to really walk through that door of grief and really experience what it is feeling like, and sometimes you have to take time out of your day, like, between this time right here, this period of time, I’m going have that be grief time where I’m going to feel this and experience all the emotions of what happened because when you acknowledge that and you allow yourself to grieve, you move through that process a little bit quicker, but it is different for everybody. The grieving process, there’s no set recipe. For some people, it could be months. For some people, it could be years.
Frederica Freyberg:
Presumably, we only have a half minute left, but people are still in shock, those most acutely affected by the trauma of this, and then they would be expected to then move through that grieving and so what can you say to people who are kind of still in that place of immediate shock?
Scott Webb:
Well, I think the first thing is it’s okay not to be okay right now. We’ve been through a lot in the past two years with the pandemic, the violence we’ve seen in Kenosha, what happened in Waukesha so give yourself some grace and reach out to those who love you and be there for somebody else and just know that healing happens within that loving relationship.
Frederica Freyberg:
Scott Webb, thank you, thank you for joining us on this.
Scott Webb:
You’re very welcome. Thank you.
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