How To Overcome Grief After A Disaster - Society

What can you counter the destructive effects of stress? How to avoid traumatizing the psyche as a result of misfortune or grief? For example, such as the fire in the Kemerovo shopping center "Winter cherry", which killed 60 people, including 37 children

In the psychology of grieving, MD, psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and journalist Elizabeth Zintl propose to form a social environment in which mourners feel free to express any emotions. Free release of emotions is the key to successfully overcoming a stressful crisis situation.

5 stages of mourning

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book On Death and Dying, proposed the Five Stages model of going through grief and pain of loss, which includes the following stages:

1. Denial

A person, faced with tragic events, experiences a shock and believes that what he saw and heard is not true. He denies the obvious, wages a desperate and often meaningless struggle to keep his peace, tranquility and life.

2. Anger

There is a defensive reaction aimed at finding the guilty, punishing those who are related to the tragic event. As a rule, such "culprits" are doctors, rescuers, relatives, friends, all those who brought bad news.

3. Bargaining

A person begins to think about how to fix the irreparable, what needs to be done (negotiate, pay, pray, take actions, etc.) in order to rewrite the past.

4. Depression

A person falls into deep sadness and despondency, feels hopelessness, seeks loneliness. The help of others is perceived by him as humiliation.

5. Acceptance

The victim lets a new reality into his life, begins to make plans taking into account the new inevitable. An incomprehensible and frightening reality is put under personal control, a person makes decisions and acquires a new meaning in life.

See also: Catastrophe: rules of survival

Domestic psychologist Fyodor Vasilyuk, considering the phenomenology of mental pain, found that the destruction of the old connection with an arbitrary separation and observation of the distance of the image of loss causes mental pain. At the same time, the pain of acute grief was considered not only the pain of decay, destruction and withering away, but also the pain of the birth of a new one. The psychologist proposed his own approach to the experience of grief, in which five phases were also identified that the grieving person lives in.

The stages of grief have different amplitudes in different people. It depends on many variables. Those stages that are constructively experienced lead to overcoming the crisis situation

How to support the victims?

Will the person affected by the disaster successfully pass through these stages? This largely depends on receiving social support, thanks to which a person regains the opportunity to return to normal life.

Many studies found that those who felt they could talk to other people were the best at dealing with traumatic experiences. Relatives will help or show participation in solving their problems.

At the same time, social support has three main ways of implementation:

• firstly, it is emotional participation, expressed in sympathy, love, or empathy;
• secondly, it is instrumental assistance in material form or in the form of rendering services;
• third, providing information that relates to the stressful event.

Social support effectively reduces psychological distress and improves the functioning of the immune system

In individualistic and collectivist cultures, there is a difference in the provision of social support. People in advanced collectivist societies suffer less from the effects of stress than in individualist ones, because they are more likely to receive help. Therefore, in a crisis situation, individualists quite often "go their own way of suffering alone", and collectivists - "together with everyone."

We mobilize internal resources

In real life, first of all, it is necessary to use internal resources. We are talking about dispositional optimism, which provides an opportunity to more positively assess stressful events and mobilize their resources to have a direct impact on the stressor.

Optimists were found to have fewer negative changes in the immune system in response to stress than pessimists

An important feature is such a personal aspect as stress resistance, which is a combination of attitudes such as a sense of duty, a positive attitude towards difficulties and an internal (internal) locus of control. These qualities serve as a strong buffer against the negative effects of coping with stress and their consequences.

So, viewers with an external locus of control (externalities), watching tragic events, often "drive" themselves into stress, provoke various psychosomatic illnesses. At the same time, TV viewers-interns have more endurance. They are able to overcome even those stressful events that, in principle, cannot be controlled. And disasters are just such situations

Also, people with increased neuroticism, being at the epicenter of a disaster or watching it from the outside, react much more strongly to its circumstances than people with a low level of anxiety.

This is especially important to consider in a situation where eyewitnesses become a valuable source of information in conditions of uncertainty and heightened emotional arousal.

Why is it so difficult to help in extreme situations?

The fact is that the victim's picture of the world changes dramatically, he begins to divide his life into two parts - before and after. There is a feeling that those around him cannot understand his feelings and experiences, and the mental trauma takes the form of an all-consuming cloud. Therefore, it is so important to create conditions under which the victim can openly express feelings associated with the experienced or experienced event.

The main thing is not to allow the victim to enter the role of "victim", that is, to use tragic events to obtain some benefit. For example, "I have experienced a tragedy and I don't want anything anymore." The struggle for victim status is inherently destructive and can only increase mental trauma