When pain is mysteriously deep, talking helps. So does writing. For Brent Payne, words were a struggle, but she ached over the loss of longtime friends Jennifer and Kenneth Lewis, married flight attendants who perished when their hijacked American Airlines flight plunged into the Pentagon.
So she kept telling their stories. By the second week, Payne laughed when she described Jennifer’s winsome smile and penchant for in-flight practical jokes. She talked about how the Lewises met, how they rarely worked the same flights, and how their families took comfort that they were together at the end. The couple was so close, so devoted to each other, Payne said, that they were known simply as “Kennifer.”
“Talking about them has actually made me stronger,” said Payne, who owns the horse farm where Jennifer rode her horse, Poet, and fielded phone calls for the families after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “In the beginning I’d start remembering, talking about things and it made me sad because they weren’t here . . . ” She paused, fighting a round of tears. “But when the family came around and we talked, it actually made me happy. Does that sound weird?”
Not to mental health professionals, who know the potent healing powers of expression and call the discussion of traumatic events everything from “narrative therapy” and “critical incident debriefing” to “obsessional review.”
To the rest of us, it’s just storytelling, a beloved tradition and ritual that transcends cultures and dates to the beginning of language. But while generally considered entertainment for children, storytelling is now used to help cope with chemical dependency, anorexia and diseases such as multiple sclerosis. It’s used to address marital conflict and help heal apartheid victims. And it has a dark side: exploitive television talk shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.
Human beings have an “awesome power and need to tell a story,” said Alan Wolfelt, director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Colorado. “Storying brings meaning and purpose to our life and death experiences.”
After all, stories, especially unfathomable real-life epics, can do much more than engage. Verbally transferring an experience to another person helps diffuse the shock of the event. It can make things real. When they’re real, they can hurt. But that, say experts, is when the healing can begin.
“Grief is thoughts and feelings inside. Mourning is when grief goes public,” said Wolfelt, who has written several books on grief. “When you’ve been rendered helpless [by an event], in order to recapture some sense of control, you attempt to take what is inside and share it outside.”
Raw emotions
Nearly four weeks after one of the most traumatic events in modern history, survivors are still relaying their raw emotions and memories in e-mails to friends, in phone conversations, to strangers with kind faces and to the world, on radio and television talk shows. While families of the victims are eulogizing and talking too, experts say those who lost loved ones and have been denied the closure that accompanies viewing a body may need to talk more than ever.
“Telling the story over and over again starts by giving us a sense of awareness that this really happened,” said Janine Mariscotti, assistant professor of social work at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.
It also provides a connection with the lost person, a way to keep their spirit alive.
Dennis Marlo’s 28-year-old son Kevin worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. Though Dennis Marlo wasn’t sure he could bear it, he surrounded himself with Kevin’s friends and listened to three hours of heart-wrenching, heart-warming “Kevin stories.” Afterward, he knew for sure that his son, who had a passion for acting, lived a dynamic, full life that others admired. “I needed it,” Marlo said. “I needed to hear the funny stuff too. I have a greater respect for my son than I ever had before.”
Many other families described their relatives to the media, hoping they would be found lying unconscious in a hospital or still alive in the rubble. Later, they wanted a tangible memory, a newspaper photo and clipping, something to show children who might be too young to understand.
“Thank you for the opportunity to share my wife with a wider audience,” Donn Marshall wrote to a reporter after Shelley Marshall was killed at the Pentagon. “People need to know that she was more than just a budget analyst. . . . I ramble, but I think it’s cathartic, so please forgive me, but I’m going to ramble every now and then. I miss her so much and I keep thinking that she’s standing behind me, in the blind spot between my shoulder blades and I keep waiting for her touch. I’m just amazingly sad right now.”
Though it’s too early to detect symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, psychologists say Payne, Marlo and Marshall are doing the right thing by giving their grief a voice. Those who don’t can become, as lyrics to the U2 song say, “Stuck in the Moment” they can’t get out of, said Dr. Daniel Yohanna, medical director of the Stone Institute of Psychiatry at Northwestern.
“The song fits what trauma victims go through,” Yohanna said. “The reason to talk about some of it is to reframe it in a different way that makes it acceptable to take in. Then they can incorporate it into their personal history.”
Storytelling process
After a letter bomb blew off his hands and blinded him in one eye, Rev. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and apartheid opponent, founded The Institute for Healing of Memories in Cape Town, South Africa. The institute uses storytelling to start the healing process for apartheid victims. “You take the bandages off the wounds. By looking at them, you’re also cleaning them before fresh bandages are put back on,” Lapsley told America Magazine in June. “That happens through the process of storytelling.”
Now the institute draws traumatized citizens from around the world. Workshops, seminars, talks and sermons have been held in Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Australia. In Nigeria, the Oputa Panel, which heard stories from victims, was set up as a first step in investigating human rights violations.
“It is evident that the emotional and psychological wounds are as deep as any physical wound, and if left unattended can fester and permanently impair and even dehumanize an individual,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the institute’s annual report.
This damage can occur because emotions are stored as molecules of different chemicals in the brain, said Dr. Laurie Nadel, a psychotherapist who helps people recover from stress disorders. “With trauma, it actually causes a certain part of the brain to lock up or seize up so you don’t get the normal cycle of brain chemistry you need to have a natural sense of flow in life,” she said.
Nadel said those who witnessed free-falling bodies on Sept. 11 might try to act like nothing happened. “They’re looking for escapes, substances to numb out with, and that causes a greater likelihood of the freezing phenomenon and post-traumatic stress syndrome down the road,” she said.
Therapeutic tool
Steve Baker, 27, a New York investment banker who grew up in Glenview, was one who watched office workers hurling themselves to their deaths. He happened to be a block from the site and was caught in the maelstrom of debris when the towers collapsed. But Baker took his sister’s advice and e-mailed a lengthy account of his harrowing experience to friends, partly to let people know he was OK and partly to process the shock.
Today, he is glad he did.
“Writing is another extremely therapeutic tool,” Nadel said. “You write in private, you’re not looking for any cues from someone else to approve or disapprove; it’s a straight flow from yourself, your memory. You don’t even have to save it. The act of doing it helps release it,” she said.
Different approaches
Still, there isn’t universal agreement that constantly retelling one’s story is always beneficial, and experts warn that people should never be forced into talking or writing about their situation. “The public notion is that it’s cathartic and helpful but it can also maintain the level of stress and for some, it’s pushing emotions too far,” said Celia Fisher, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Ethics Education at Fordham University in New York City. “For some, talking is a sign of distress and they might need mental health consulting. For others, it might be a healthy way of dealing with the situation and gaining social support.”
Marshall, now a single father of a 3 1/2-year-old son and a 22-month-old daughter, said that, before he began talking to others about his wife, he considered her a victim. That changed.
“It was a chance to talk about her as something other than a victim,” he said. “It brought back good memories, the things I liked and things we did. It was worth it to remember there were good things. The hard thing in remembering is going back and forth between the good times and not being able to have those anymore. It’s a balancing act. She was a great person.”
