What To Do When Everything Has Been Lost

by John Schneider

The overwhelming media presentations of human made and natural disasters at the start of the 21st century has made it difficult to evade imagining what it would be like to lose everything in an instant. We can know what it is like to be “poor like that” and know we are just a hair’s breath away from being that way ourselves.

Are despair, outrage, helplessness and hopelessness our only recourse? Does our skepticism over failures to deal effectively with these disasters inevitably lead to passive cynicism?

For many it has and will continue to do so. It is so easy to either identify with the victims or the survivors, and fail to see the larger picture into which the responses of all those affected will fall over time.

There is another course one can take. It is one that acknowledges the four ways we respond to the tragedy of losing everything:
1. Traumatization
2. Discouragement
3. Depression
4. Grief

1. Traumatization.
We can respond with traumatization. Who is not shocked by the images of the collapse of the World Trade Center, of mutilation from suicidal car bombings, of a tidal wave sweeping away everything in its path or viewing corpses floating unattended in a major American city? Those who are a part of such disasters are much more liable to this traumatization, of being paralyzed by losing everything.

We’ve learned over a long period of time that one must help those most directly affected to overcome their paralysis, the tendencies to fight or flee in order to simply survive.

I remember the emergency response teams that came into my home town of Corning, New York after hurricane Agnes had devastated it with a ten foot wall of water as the levees broke. For days they found people sitting on the hillsides, paralyzed. They had to get them to shelter, to find basic necessities for survival, talk to them, bring some semblance of normalcy to them, clear the glassy eyed deer in the headlights stare by engagement with another human being.

Nothing else can proceed until there is the resulting feeling of safety, grounding in something familiar in the face of surrealistic changes that touch every part of life. Surprising to my mental health colleagues, it doesn’t take one of us to do that. A neighbor, a caring friend, an emergency service worker can do it even more effectively.

We’ve also learned that those who go in to rescue others in that unreal world are themselves likely to become victims of trauma as well if they try to do too much. That’s why so many of the firefighters after the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 first responders were out of work a year or two later, traumatized themselves. That natural impulse can cause the one rescuing to drown as well. The missing dot in much of the relief efforts is caring for those first responders, something The Chamber of Commerce made possible for a group of Staten Island firefighters after 9/11.

There are ways to help those in trauma. It means grounding them in normalcy, in nature, in a safe place, in music and art, with safe people who do not judge or demand.

2. Discouragement.
What do you do when you have lost everything? It is a reality that cannot be ignored. Distractions only work temporarily. There is no alternative but to feel fully the absence of everything familiar and dear—the material world and well as family, friends and even one’s spirituality. These are times of profound discouragement. It takes courage (the opposite of dis-courage) to keep going under most circumstances.

Surprisingly, many people find this courage. Yet it begins with validation: things are as bad as they seem. It is the admissions of Rilke of our mutual poverty. We all, it seems, must let our selves recognize that vulnerability in order to minister to others from that deep empathy of spirit. It is the source of true empathy that allows us to “sit in the mud” with them rather than try to distract people so devastated.

3. Depression.
Sometimes all it takes is a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” for those people already on the edge, for whom a disaster is more than enough justification to give up on life. Two policemen in New Orleans committed suicide within two days after Katrina hits; numerous returned Iraqi war veterans have done the same. Some will stop trying in spite of professional help; accept the permanent role of victim, now with justification that is hard to counter. Cynicism becomes even more intransient. The spiritual core for making life bearable is gone. It is the only one of the four responses that professional treatment or intervention cannot alter in any reliable way. Yet even that cannot guarantee a positive outcome.

4.What can you do when you have lost everything?
Inherent in the human spirit to be able to take stock of what has been lost and to find something remains. It may only be a spark within us that says I will not give up. It may be the talents and abilities we carry within. It may be the courage that sees us through. Already one hears from the survivors their quoting or Nietzsche: “That will does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Out of ashes rises the phoenix of new life. We can be more despite having less, having nothing. That is the way grief transforms us. First we face losing everything and feel it all the way through. Then we discover what remains within us and in our connections to something or someone beyond us. That often comes by realizing there is more to us that our mortal coil, that we also have a spirit and a soul. Only then can we find new possibilities we would never have sought, never have dreamed of before the loss.

In time, most people will respond this way. Such transformation of tragedy often comes by having someone who believes us capable to being that way. Beyond the material contributions to survival, those of us at a distance can give our willingness to connect, our belief in the resiliency of the human spirit. We can hold hope in this darkest of times for those who have lost everything.

John Schneider is an author, therapist and retired professor of Psychiatry from Michigan State University who consults internationally with programs on torture, homicide and life threatening illness. He lives in Old Mission, Michigan.