I just finished reading The Little Book Of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security Is Threatened by Carolyn Yoder.
It is excellent!
We would be living in quite a different world if all Americans read it and took its major points to heart.
Traumatic events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina strike fear and visceral defensive reactions towards perceived threats. We are wired to retaliate in revenge and yet such behavior is not in our long term best interest. The retalitory instinct served human beings well fighting bears, tigers, sharks and other human predators in our environment. Our reptilian brain wires us for this, but in our contemporary times it is the cerebral cortex, the rational brain, which must be in control of our animal brain.
Trauma creates unresolved grief and unresolved grief fuels retaliation and more violence and the cycle becomes vicious.
The self and group management skills are difficult to develop and utilize but they can and must if we are to survive as a species on this planet.
We could go back and ask what we might have done different in the post 9/11 time instead of creating a War on Terror which was a terrible idea cooked up by immature minds? Yoder outlines some answers well worth considering. (The book is in the carousel of My Picks.)
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