Published: June 17, 2008 07:59 pm            

Stephanie Salter: Dealing with the psychological aftermath of rising waters

The woman behind the desk was uncharacteristically tight and terse. If I didn’t know her, if I were some stranger who’d just come into her workplace for services, I might think, “Geez, what’s with her? Would it kill her to smile?”

But I do know the woman, so I asked a question that’s fairly common around these parts just now: “Did you get any flooding?”

Her shoulders sagged and she nodded. Then, in a rush, she began to describe the extent of the damage to her home and all her family’s possessions. As she recounted the scary evacuation the family had to make — one minute life was normal, the next minute water was rushing into her house — her eyes filled with tears.

I’m no psychologist, but I was pretty sure I recognized the signs of post-traumatic stress. I also realized that this woman’s experience was one of thousands in the Wabash Valley and south-central Indiana.

As the physical signs of the great flood of June 2008 begin to fade, so will the consciousness of those of us who were fortunate enough to only read and hear about it. The flood’s victims, however, may look like everyone else on the outside, but inside they will be coping for months with its disorienting destruction.

And that struggle just might make them crabby, spaced out, fearful or weird to the uneducated eye.

If only the Red Cross could hand out survivor buttons that say, “Bear with me — I was flooded.” Until then, Michael Urban, a clinical psychologist in Terre Haute, has kindly provided some of the common reactions people have to traumatic or deeply disturbing occurrences like the area’s recent devastating flood.

Urban also emphasized that, while coping skills and healing time vary among individuals, anything the rest of us can do to stay aware of (and sympathetic to) the tough place many of our neighbors will be in for some time can only help.

“Most of these folks will be managing their job and the rest of their life in addition to the aftermath of the flood,” he said. “You know, we often overlook it, but everybody had a life prior to this, and that life doesn’t stop.”

Right after a huge, negative event, Urban said, many people experience shock and denial, “which are pretty helpful emotions in these circumstances” given the chemical chaos going on inside the traumatized human body.

Shock causes a kind of emotional numbness; people are stunned and dazed. Then denial often sets in.

“We move away from a situation, emotionally. If people had to leave their home or apartment and are living someplace else, the situation may seem unreal,” he said.

In the following days, as people begin to connect to what has happened to them, they’re likely to experience “intense emotionality, irritability, they may be tearful,” especially if they have to “sift through their personal belongings, sift through their lives,” Urban said.

Anxiousness and nervousness are common, so are the inability to concentrate and even depression. Vivid, repeated memories of the actual trauma may come in mild flashbacks. Down the road, the emotional load may cause headaches, nausea and chest pains, impaired sleep, appetite changes and an “exacerbation of any pre-existing medical conditions like heart problems, back pain, arthritis.”

The good news is, most people are wonderfully resilient, Urban said, especially if they can be reminded that they have survived previous challenges and calamities in their life. We also can help them “give themselves permission to mourn their loss” and encourage them to communicate their experiences through talking, a journal or an Internet blog.

Gently, we can try to direct them to focus some time and energy on their own well-being, not just on the cleanup or rebuilding of their home or business.

Suggesting a weekend away, a movie, a long drive, anything that helps them return to a normal world for awhile, can do wonders. Just admitting, “I don’t have to get all this dry-wall out today,” said Urban, will relieve stress.

As the weeks wear on, “if a person becomes immobile, if they aren’t even able to take on routine challenges of the day,” he said, “it’s a good idea to talk to a mental health professional.”

As the months wear on, if the natural and common reactions to trauma don’t dissipate — or worsen — a person may be afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder and definitely needs therapeutic help. According to Urban, some signs of PSTD are:

Recurrent and obtrusive memories of the event; very vivid, disturbing dreams or prolonged sleep problems; some sense of the traumatic event recurring in ordinary circumstances (for example, the sound of running bath water triggering the sense of flood waters); intense, overwhelming psychological distress at revisiting the site of the trauma; physical reactions such as diarrhea or nausea to normal stimuli, such as rain falling.

For the rest of us, the significant task is to understand that most people’s post-traumatic symptoms are “normal and variable,” Urban said. “The length of time for recovery often depends on the intensity of the loss and whatever was going on in someone’s life before the floods.”

We also need to fight out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

“It’s hard to keep our awareness, especially in a situation like this one, where the flooding occurred in pockets, but other areas look as if nothing happened,” Urban said. Those of us not in those pockets “can’t possibly know what these people have gone through.”

But we can ask them if they’d care to tell us. At the very least, we can tell them how sorry we are, and we can cut them some slack.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com

        

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