The Family Assistance Education & Research Foundation (FAERF) has been at the forefront of the evolution of emergency management, combining the head-heart approach for a fully integrated response to survivors of traumatic loss. Practicing consciousness in the workplace involves caring for people first, without exception.
Written by: Carolyn V. Coarsey, Ph.D.
August 2024
Research indicates that even as adults, our brains’, preferred method of learning resilience continues to be through interacting with resilient people around us through dialogue and shared work and play.
– Linda Graeme MFT
Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-being (2013)
On August 28, 2024, FAERF held the third summer webinar, where another lesson in the International-Humanitarian Assistance Response Program (I-HARP)™ Practitioner Certificate was presented. The lesson, “Connecting to Others,” featured examples of how survivors of traumatic loss heal from meaningful and supportive interactions with both short – and long-term relationships.
The third lesson in the program provides examples of how support for both primary and secondary survivors came from those on the spot of the crisis who shared the trauma with them. Followed by compassionate hospital and medical responders, as well as family, friends, co-workers, and newly formed relationships with family members whose loved ones died together in the same tragedy.
FAERF’s case study research over nearly four decades supports Linda Graeme’s quote – survivors heal in the context of relationships. In this month’s article, we will highlight a few examples from the third lesson.
Shared Experiences – Primary Survivors
Two survivors featured in the program lived through the 2015 Pulse Night Club shooting, where 49 people died and 53 were wounded. Angel and Jeff were shot side-by-side in the crowded handicap stall in the men’s room, aware that others were simultaneously dying from their wounds. The power of their relationship for long-term support, understanding, and mutual compassion cannot be overstated.
A second example of survivors bonding onsite features a Chinese woman who survived the White Island Volcano explosion in 2019. Mrs. Jin was on a Royal Caribbean Cruise visiting the island off the coast of Auckland when she was knocked unconscious. Later she learned of others, uninjured from the fire, who poured cool water over her burns and cared for her while she awaited rescue by the New Zealand emergency response teams. Her gratitude toward the strangers, hospital workers, and the Royal Caribbean and Air New Zealand Care Teams, along with the local first responders, played an enormous role in her healing, also giving her hope for her future.
Shared Experiences-Secondary Survivors
Kinship of Sorrow
All our loved ones died at the same moment in the same way on the same plane. I mean, how much more commonality can you have?… and being with them and having them validate my feelings, me validate their feelings… exchanging emotional support: our group has been my mainstay.
– Carole Johnson, Mother of 21-year-old Beth Ann, Victim of Pan American Flight 103, December 22, 1988
The Cambridge Dictionary defines kinship as the relationship between members of the same family and two: feelings of being close or similar. No dictionary is needed to understand the meaning of sorrow. The lesson on the power of connecting with others as part of the healing process features family members who gained a new set of friends who often became more like family than they ever imagined – the true meaning of kinship of sorrow.
The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 as a group have played a significant role in raising awareness of the needs of families well in advance of the current legislation, which guarantees rights that once were denied families. Carole and Glenn Johnson, whose twenty-one-year-old daughter Beth Ann died along with a total of 270, including eleven villagers of Lockerbie, Scotland recognized the powerful healing that occurred when the families got together in the United States and the United Kingdom.
September 11, 2001 – Flight 11
There are so many highs and lows… so many negatives and positives. The positive happenings are the other families. The support we get from the other 9/11 flight attendant families (and) active flight attendants. We continually have calls from strangers, people that I have never even talked to. An American Airlines Flight Attendant called me last night. We have that support quite often.
– Mike Low, Father of Flight Attendant Sara Low, died on American Airlines Flight 11, 9/11
Families who came together in the aftermath of 9/11 also exemplify the meaning of Kinship of Sorrow, as illustrated by Mike Low who appears in the third level lesson. Years after the tragic loss of his daughter on the first flight that went down in the terrorist attacks on the United States, Mike and Bobbie Low and their daughter Alyson are consoled and supported by flight attendants as well as other employees of American Airlines. In Mike’s interview, he expresses his gratitude to those who have never forgotten about Sara, much less Sara’s family. Feeling connected to those who knew her, as well as complete strangers who never met Sara, helped Mike and his family in their grief, initially and continues to as the years have gone by.
When we know how to choose specific experiences to deliberately rewire our brains for better coping, we can fully recover our capacities for resilience and even strengthen the brain structures that encode the new strategies. Neuroscientists have proved refutably that you can teach an old dog new tricks. You can even heal the dog or the brain when necessary. Although the initial wiring of our brains is based on early experiences, we know that later experiences, especially ones that can undo or overwrite that early learning to help us cope differently and more resiliently with anything, anything at all.
– Linda Graeme MFT
Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-being (2013)
From the archives of FAERF’s video library, the final connection example shows a story from our earliest interviews with airline crash survivors. Byron survived US Air Flight 5050, which crashed on takeoff from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport in the Hudson River on September 20, 1989.
Just before takeoff, on the late evening flight, Byron had offered to trade his coach seat with two women whose reading lights were not working. They declined Byron’s offer. To Byron’s horror, both ladies were killed upon impact. The aircraft broke apart in the row where they were seated. Byron survived the impact uninjured, as his seat was out of harm’s way.
The morning after the crash, as details about the passengers became public, Byron learned more about the two ladies who were killed. He learned that a five-year-old boy, home with his father at the time of the crash, would now grow up without his mother or grandmother – the ladies to whom Byron had offered this seat.
The treatment by the airline and the local hospital was as poor as many of the responses were back at that time, which was prior to legislation that exists today, which protects and advocates for survivors like Byron. But the worst part of Byron’s experience was the guilt over surviving and leaving a small boy without his mother or grandmother.
Over the next twenty years, as the concept of Care Team was evolving and training classes were being conducted on improved processes and procedures for supporting passengers and families following crashes, leaders at FAERF connected Byron to hundreds of employees. He attended Care Team classes and more than one symposium. Byron also received letters, where airline employees expressed their sorrow over the poor treatment he had received by the industry employees at the time.
The pivotal healing event for him occurred when Byron was flown to a FAERF Symposium in Calgary, Canada in the twentieth year following the accident. At the meeting, FAERF leadership introduced Byron to a first cousin, of the young mother who died in the crash. At the Symposium, Byron was able to meet cousin “Kathy” and learn all about Reid, the young boy whose mother had died in the crash.
Reid’s father had never remarried and had devoted his life to raising his son. He had graduated from college, played rugby successfully on the university team, and was re-entering college to earn a degree in sports management.
A significant part of Byron’s story is FAERF’s way of reminding all company employees of the role each and everyone plays when bearing witness to the survivors’ stories – we all help with healing anytime we stop and listen to someone who has experienced trauma. There are other stories in the third lesson about how relationships with employees, medical and other responders, as well as friends, co-workers and family members. All serve as reminders of the role that connecting with others plays in helping survivors in their healing journey.
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