“Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life.”
— Viktor Frankl
Part I opens with the quotation, “Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.”
Startling and ominous, suitable for what follows. But it offers a question, not an answer.
The quotation suggests the certainty of death. Our voyage, having begun, will end. The sea will take us, and it may take us at any time.
The voyage, though, is precious, more precious for the certainty of its end, more precious still for the uncertainty of when it will end. The voyage is a gift, allowing us to appreciate, enjoy, discover, create, learn, share, and love. And a challenge, asking us to live with dignity, courage, virtue, excellence, and compassion.
We find meaning in purpose, contributing to the lives of others, those in our time, and those who will come. And as we find strength through the storms, we help others find their own strength.
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The purpose of Part VIII is to offer thoughts on how survivors of violent crime can cope with trauma and how people in their lives can help them. Violent crime is all too common. I have been saddened to learn that many people I know, or members of their families, have been victims.
To face death, yet live, invites us to think about how to live. I thus include philosophical observations.
Trauma means “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” The term also is used to refer to the psychological response to the experience, i.e., the psychological wound. I use the term in the first sense, referring to the experience itself.
While my focus is on victims of crime, we all experience trauma of various kinds and degrees. The discussion may also be helpful to those who have experienced other types of trauma and those who wish to assist them.
Everyone who experiences trauma, and those in their lives, will have their own responses and their own challenges. Victims and their loved ones have the responsibility to use their own judgment and to seek professional help when this is needed. I am not, of course, offering advice.
I use the terms victim and survivor descriptively. I discourage using them to define or limit people. All of us should endeavor to thrive, whatever our circumstances, whatever the obstacles.
I see having been a victim of the crime as part of my history; I see being a survivor of the crime as one part of who I am. As I observe in Part V, “You do not let [the crime] ruin your life. You do not let it define you. It is only one event in your life, but it changes you.”
Life as a Survivor
In this section, I discuss the following:
• How I coped after the crime;
• My experience in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack, and broader lessons on resilience;
• Compassion;
• Suffering and meaning;
• Posttraumatic growth; and
• How I have come to view Nietzsche’s aphorism.
After the Crime
Following the crime, I reacted intuitively and intentionally. From Part III:
I created a framework.
I would not be a victim. The crime would not ruin my life.
If the crime had to happen, it was better that it happened to me. I was able to remain calm. I was able to remember details. I had long experience interacting with the authorities to help bring criminals to justice. Most importantly, I was able to endure the stress and the violence; others might have died.
Many have experienced worse. Many have not survived.
The crime would not deter me from pursuing my missions or goals.
And no good comes from evil, but we can do good despite the evil. I would help others.
In Part V, I discuss how I have continued working on my missions — international liberty and international animal welfare. I also note how I have endeavored to help people, including through writing this article:
My goal is to help heighten people’s awareness of the risk of crime; help those who have experienced trauma and those who wish to be supportive of them; offer ideas for those who want to make their homes safer; and discuss my thoughts on the criminal justice system and the need for change.
I also reacted intuitively to the warnings that I should get help to deal with what was presumed to be inevitable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). My view was that my response to the trauma was natural and healthy, that I experienced order, not disorder.
An old friend who was in a graduate program, studying family therapy, happened to contact me a few days after the crime. I told her the story, and she was shocked and sympathetic. I asked her, “Please do not tell me to get therapy.” With her natural wisdom and good heart, she replied, “It sounds like your helping others is your therapy.”
Finally, I reacted intuitively to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous claim, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” It struck me as facile. And it seemed to encourage the unhelpful idea that we benefit from trauma.
Were my intuitive responses sound?
9/11 Terror Attack
Months after the crime, after I had sold the house in Virginia and returned to Connecticut, I had time for reflection. One thing I thought about was my experience in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, in 2011, I wrote an article on my experience. It opens,
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., at the annual conference of the Enforcement Department of NASD. NASD, now known as FINRA, regulates the securities brokerage industry, and I served as Chief Counsel of the New York Region. Our office was at One Liberty Plaza, half a block from the World Trade Center. Most of the staff was with me in Washington, but we had two assistants scheduled to be in the office that morning.
I spoke with one assistant by telephone as the second plane crashed into the South Tower. She escaped the area and made it home safely. The other assistant was in the area, heading to the office, when the devastation began, and she too made it home safely. The building was damaged and remained closed for several months.
We took temporary space.
Downtown New York was hellish. The air was barely breathable, thick with smoke and ash and the stench of burning. We had to navigate police and military lines.
We carried on:
My role was to endeavor to provide the leadership needed to maintain morale and help the staff function with limited resources. I urged courage and discouraged fear. When the anthrax scare began, I volunteered to open the mail.
I was proud of the staff, the way they overcame their grief and fear and coped under the difficult circumstances. When One Liberty Plaza was ready to reopen, our department returned immediately. The staff hummed away at work as soon as we moved back, and we were happy to be home.
We had a sense of purpose, respect and affection for each other, and individual and collective strength. These factors helped make us resilient.
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What we did not need was the intervention of therapists. We found it absurd that the trauma industry was encouraging anyone even remotely affected by the tragedy to seek symptoms and get help.
The industry’s efforts were solutions in search of problems. Some people in the city, particularly among those who were directly affected, needed and benefited from help, but the assumption that the masses needed therapy was wrong.
Just five days after the attack, the New York Times published an article titled “After the Attacks: Counseling; Some Therapists Fear Services Could Backfire.” It notes, “For many mental health professionals the disaster was a summons.”
However, it continues,
[I]n an open letter to their colleagues distributed this weekend, a group of psychologists questioned whether the ministrations of a therapist are what all people want or need now, at a time when stress, fear, anger, uncertainty and grief are entirely normal, and when the full impact of what has happened has not yet sunk in. And they cautioned that thrusting help on people instead of letting them seek it themselves might in some case do more harm than good.
The article explains,
The symptoms that some experts are publicly calling post-traumatic stress disorder — like startle reactions, intrusive images like the tower collapsing, fear of tall buildings, sleeping problems, irritability and intense sadness — are in fact normal responses to extreme fear and stress that will fade with time, for most people. A diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a serious, abnormal reaction to trauma, is made only when symptoms have lasted for at least a month.
Ten months later, In July 2002, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by psychiatrist Sally Satel, “New Yorkers Don’t Need Therapy,” reprinted here. The following anecdote captures the assumptions of the trauma industry clashing with the reality of resilience:
Last October, Sharon Kahn, a senior psychologist at Coney Island Hospital, manned the phones at a televised call-in show sponsored by PBS called ‘Reach Out to Heal.’ Experts described the symptoms of traumatic stress and viewers were urged to call in with questions and to get referrals for help. Ms. Kahn took calls all evening. She referred two people for therapy. The vast bulk of calls were queries about the resumption of regularly scheduled programming.
Shortly before the tenth anniversary of the attack, in July 2011, the New York Times published a piece titled, “Sept. 11 Revealed Psychology’s Limits, Review Finds.” It discusses what was then a pending special issue of American Psychologist, “9/11: Ten Years Later,” a collection of articles.
From the NYT article:
Experts greatly overestimated the number of people in New York who would suffer lasting emotional distress. Therapists rushed in to soothe victims using methods that later proved to be harmful to some.
And they fell to arguing over whether watching an event on television could produce the same kind of traumatic reaction as actually being there.
The article also notes that Richard McNally, “a psychologist at Harvard who did not contribute to the new report,” observed that the attack “drove home the fact that people are far more resilient than experts thought.”
The American Psychologist publication is gated, but the three relevant articles are accessible as linked here:
“An Introduction to ‘9/11: Ten Years Later‘” (PDF)
“Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Following the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks: A Review of the Literature Among Highly Exposed Populations” (“The publisher’s final edited version of this article is available at [American Psychology]”)
“Postdisaster Psychological Intervention Since 9/11” (PDF)
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Again, trauma can be overwhelming, and people needing help should seek it. But I suggest skepticism of claims of the prevalence of pathology in those who experience or are exposed to trauma. And I encourage recognition of the natural power of resilience.
Compassion
In addition to thinking about my experience after 9/11, I also have reflected on the effect of trauma on our capacity for compassion, and the importance of compassion in our lives.
The Oxford Dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” Merriam-Webster’s definition reflects that compassion can be a call to action: “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” The etymology of the word is Latin, “suffer with.” To feel compassion is to suffer with one in need.
I have long been concerned with compassion. Compassion was the basis of my efforts in my legal career to alert the world to investment fraud and abuse and to call attention to the need for change. Compassion is also the foundation of my current missions. And in my personal life, I have long tried to be helpful to those in need.
A decade ago, when I belonged to Christ & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Westport, Connecticut, before returning to the Boston area for several years, I participated in a wonderful interfaith workshop on caregiving. One of the ideas the leaders offered was that our suffering creates seeds of compassion.
Now, after the crime, I more strongly sense — and feel — the suffering of others.
Now, more than ever, I try to help those in pain find hope, those in struggle find strength, and those in fear find courage.
And now, more than ever, I appreciate others — for their goodness, their kindness, their compassion, their worthy lives, and their perseverance through pain, struggle, and fear.
And, more than ever, I am grateful for the kindness of others.
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Benevolence, the quality of wishing others well, is the foundation of compassion. We can cultivate our own benevolence. Kindness inspires kindness.
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Compassion begins with self-compassion. When we experience trauma, we serve ourselves and others by being compassionate toward ourselves.
It is pointless to blame ourselves for being victims of crime. While we can learn to be safer, the blame for crime lies with criminals.
Self-compassion means feeling the compassion for ourselves we would feel for others in the same circumstances. We need to be advocates for ourselves and our own well-being.
We should seek to alleviate suffering, including our own. And when we lighten our own burdens, we can better serve others.
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A call for compassion is not a call for weakness. Compassion requires strength. And coping with a world where some are malevolent requires the capacity for toughness — toughness to protect ourselves and others and toughness to pursue our ideals.
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In his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798,” William Wordsworth writes of “that best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”
But we do remember. We appreciate those still among us, and miss those who have passed, for their kindness, for their love. And we will be remembered for own kindness, our own love.
Suffering and Meaning
Experiencing a violent crime creates suffering. The memory of the crime does not vanish, and we may continue to suffer. But we can accept the reality of the crime, the existence of the memory, and the fact of the suffering. We can accept that life comes with suffering.
I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning three decades ago and have recommended it to many people seeking meaning in their lives. I recently re-read it. The citations are to the 2006 Beacon Press paperback edition.
Frankl was a survivor of concentration camps during World War II. He went on to found the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, logotherapy, which “focuses on the meaning of human existence and on man’s search for such a meaning” (98-99).
Man’s Search for Meaning, written in 1946, describes the horrific life in the camps and offers wisdom on how we can endure — and find meaning in — suffering.
Frankl observes, “[E]verything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” “It is this spiritual freedom … that makes life meaningful and purposeful” (66-67).
He continues,
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. …
The way in which a man excepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity … to add a deeper meaning to his life. … Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he’s worthy of his sufferings or not. (67)
In the second section of the book, in which Frankl explains logotherapy, he counsels, “In some way, suffering ceases to become suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice” (113).
As Frankl teaches, “man is ultimately self-determining” (131). After experiencing trauma, we can determine how we will respond and what meaning we will create.
While an understanding of traditional psychology is valuable, some of us who have experienced trauma are best served through spiritual and philosophical perspectives. I am among the many people who value Frankl’s wisdom.
Psychology professor Paul Wong, in “Meaning-Seeking, Self-Transcendence, and Well-Being,” observes that Frankl views self-transcendence as spiritual. In “Frankl’s Self-Transcendence Model and Virtue Ethics,” Wong and researcher Timothy Reilly explain that Frankl’s model, with “four basic tenets—courage, responsibility, meaning-seeking, and meaning-finding,” “provides a practical framework to live a virtuous life.”
Posttraumatic Growth
In preparation for writing the article, I began researching how people respond to trauma. I discovered the concept of posttraumatic growth (PTG), which is associated with positive psychology.
Humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow first used the term positive psychology in 1954. The creation of the contemporary field began twenty years ago, and interest has rapidly grown. Positive psychology is not “positive thinking.”
The late Christopher Peterson defines the field in 2008:
Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living. It is a call for psychological science and practice to be as concerned with strength as with weakness; as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst; and as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling as with healing pathology.
One of the concerns of positive psychology is happiness. The field recognizes that there are two types of happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. Psychology professor Veronika Huta explains, “[A] hedonic orientation involves seeking happiness, positive affect, life satisfaction, and reduced negative affect; a eudaimonic orientation includes seeking authenticity, meaning, excellence, and personal growth.”
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Martin Seligman is viewed as the founder of positive psychology. I disagree with his view on the acceptability of painful experiments with animals. I also reject his embrace of the state, reflected in his writing and, through the center he leads, a contract with the U.S. Army and the acceptance of government grants. In the years ahead, perhaps those in the field of positive psychology will become more concerned with animal welfare and liberty.
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Just as positive psychology in general relates to development beyond healing, PTG relates to gain beyond recovery. Psychologists generally distinguish PTG from resilience. As psychology professor Nina Ogińska-Bulik and researcher Magdalena Kobylarczyk explain, “Resiliency assumes an ability to move forward with life after adversity, whereas PTG involves a movement beyond pretrauma levels of adaptation.”
Pioneers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term “posttraumatic growth” in their 1995 book Trauma and Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering. They are faculty members with the Posttraumatic Growth Research Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. The group’s website explains the concept of PTG:
It is positive change experienced as a result of the struggle with a major life crisis or a traumatic event. Although we coined the term posttraumatic growth, the idea that human beings can be changed by their encounters with life challenges, sometimes in radically positive ways, is not new. The theme is present in ancient spiritual and religious traditions, literature, and philosophy. What is reasonably new is the systematic study of this phenomenon.
The site explains the five forms growth may take: sensing new opportunities; having improved relationships with specific people and experiencing “an increased sense of connection to others who suffer”; attaining “an increased sense of one’s own strength”; having “greater appreciation for life in general”; and deepening of one’s spiritual life, possibly involving “a significant change in one’s belief system.”
The site also offers clarifications: people who grow may still suffer, the possibility of growth does not imply that experiencing trauma is good, and not everyone will experience growth.
Stephen Joseph is a leading expert on positive psychology in general and PTG in particular. I recommend his book What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth (Basic Books, 2011) to people who have experienced trauma, those who are close to them, and coaches and mental health professionals who work with them. Joseph recognizes Frankl as one of the early scholars who theorized on the idea of growth following adversity, and he includes observations from Man’s Search for Meaning.
For an introduction to PTG, see the article “What doesn’t kill us…: Stephen Joseph discusses the psychology of post-traumatic growth” and Joseph’s articles on the Psychology Today website, including “Some Advice on Coping Following Trauma.”
The following summarizes some of the fundamental ideas in the book.
First, the focus on PTSD, while creating benefits, also has had several negative effects: “in taking responsibility away from people, in creating a culture of expectation, and ignoring the personal growth that often arises following trauma” (xvi).
Second, we can distinguish between PTSD and posttraumatic stress (PTS). PTS, the broader term, encompasses the range of intensity of posttraumatic reactions along a continuum. “What readily distinguishes those with PTSD from those without is that their lives revolve around it.” PTSD should be diagnosed only where symptoms are “intense and persistent” (39-42).
Third, PTS is “a natural and normal process with the potential to lead to posttraumatic growth” (35); it is an “engine of transformation” (10). This perspective “resists the tendency to medicalize human experience” and “places responsibility for recovery back in the hands of those who have experienced the trauma” (35).
Fourth, most people are resilient. Of the minority who develop PTSD, “only a minority develop persistent PTSD” and “only half of those whose problems are persistent do not benefit from treatment” (64).
Fifth, the theory of change is based on the concept that trauma challenges our assumptions about the world, shattering illusions. “On the whole …, we are unrealistically optimistic about the future, see ourselves as relatively invulnerable, and have inflated perceptions of control and justice” (99-100).
Accommodating our experience leads to growth (104). We can understand PTS as “indicative of cognitive processes” “rather than as symptoms of a disorder” (102).
PTG is “a process of change” in the direction of “eudaimonic well-being.” People may “realize that what ultimately matters is what we think of ourselves” (112-13).
Sixth, as Frankl counsels, the meaning we create determines our reactions to experiences. The stories we tell ourselves and others transform us. PTG entails “changes that cut to the very core of our way of being in the world.” We become “more authentic and true to ourselves” (130-35).
Finally, therapists for PTG can serve as guides, helping clients “explore the meaning and purpose they attach to their lives” (147). The aim in therapy “is not to ‘cure’ trauma survivors but rather to grapple with existential issues alongside them” (160).
Therapists should not push “the idea of growth,” but instead “allow clients to notice it in their own time.” “No one who is going through a crisis wants to hear they should look on the bright side — or feel blamed for not taking a more positive attitude” (149).
As Joseph notes, the American Psychological Association offers educational materials as a resource for those coping with adversity (146). Currently accessible, from 2012, is “Building your resilience: We all face trauma, adversity and other stresses. Here’s a roadmap for adapting to life-changing situations, and emerging even stronger than before.”
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Since the publication of Joseph’s book, the American Psychiatric Association, in 2013, issued a fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The new edition changes the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD. Professor of psychiatry Michael S. Scheeringa, in “What is PTSD Exactly?”, explains the new criteria, “20 possible symptoms that are divided amongst 4 clusters.” He questions the need for and significance of the revision.
James Phillips, also a professor of psychiatry, in “PTSD in DSM-5: Understanding the Changes,” likewise doubts the significance of the changes. He additionally observes, “DSM-5 has introduced many changes in the wording of the PTSD diagnostic criteria, so many that the manual evokes an almost obsessive need to make things more precise, as if, in the uncertain area of psychological trauma and its consequences, DSM-5 will at all costs pin it down.”
Phillips implicitly notes the risk of scientism. Merriam-Webster defines the term, as relevant here, as “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities).” As we know, each individual is different.
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As with health care in general, the entanglement of government and government-regulated insurance companies in mental health services inhibits care and the development of knowledge. The centralization of the determination of diagnoses is a symptom, as is the guild-like nature of organizations of mental health practitioners. Freedom fosters evolution, innovation, and competition; government stifles these.
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As noted above, Joseph views the change that can follow trauma as coming from victims processing their shattered illusions. I do not think of myself as having had illusions. My prior and current work have required understanding reality and dealing with countless people of ill will. However, as Joseph writes, “Deep down we all tend to believe that nothing bad will ever happen to us” (98).
The crime did intensify my awareness of my mortality; our lives can end in a moment. And I do feel changed.
Nietzsche’s Aphorism
I remain skeptical of Nietzsche’s claim. I continue to consider it facile, at least as it is commonly understood. And Nietzsche’s intended meaning is unclear.
Nietzsche expresses the aphorism in two books. His first statement is in Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, written in 1888 and published in 1889.
I quote from the linked translation by Richard Polt, with an introduction by political scientist Tracy Strong (Hackett, 1997). The aphorism appears as the eighth of forty-four epigrams: “From the military school of life. —What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Strong, in “In Defense of Rhetoric: Or How Hard It Is to Take a Writer Seriously: The Case of Nietzsche (gated on Sage Journals here, accessible on JSTOR with registration here), drawing on his introduction to the book, observes,
The two parts of the aphorism resonate with each other (as do the italics) and forbid a simple conclusiveness about what Nietzsche ‘means.’ What does it mean to speak from ‘the military school of life’—especially as the aphorism now becomes part of a military training, perhaps a training that is necessary to write a book like the Twilight, one which Nietzsche says to be a ‘declaration of war’? And ‘war’ is here, Nietzsche says, a way of wounding oneself, so that one can heal from being ‘too inward, too deep.’
I leave these questions unanswered except to call attention to the fact that they make the whole matter of reading anything in Nietzsche much more complex than the conclusion that Nietzsche is a propagandist for Conan the Barbarian. (518, footnote omitted)
The latter point refers to the fact that the 1982 film paraphrases the aphorism.
Strong later explains,
I am arguing that Nietzsche purposively writes in such a manner as to make many of those whose read him think that they have understood Nietzsche, only to find, on further careful or more careful reading or rereading … that they have made something out of Nietzsche after their own image, an image or an idol that they must now call into question. (523)
Thus, Nietzsche’s meaning is ambiguous, and he may be calling for readers to question the truth of the aphorism.
Writer Chris Palazzolo, in “Teasing Threads – Sundry Film and Literary Criticism: What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” notes the absurdity of the maxim:
Nietzsche of course had experience in this ‘military school,’ he was an ambulance orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. He would have witnessed terrible wounds during his service; young men with arms and legs blown off, blind and deafened from shelling, insane with shock, being treated in field hospitals without penicillin or the pain-killers that we now take for granted.
Palazzolo concludes, “The maxim fails, not only as a universal truth of resilience, but even for the narrower truths of military life.”
Nietzsche’s second use of the aphorism appears in his last work, his autobiographical Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is, written immediately after Twilight of the Idols in 1888, and published in 1908. I quote from the linked translation by Duncan Large, published as an Oxford World Classic (2009).
In the first chapter, “Why I am so Wise,” Nietzsche describes the traits of a person who “has turned out well.” These include, “He guesses correctly what will heal harm, he exploits strokes of bad luck to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger.” He goes on to acknowledge that he has been describing himself (9).
The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Nietzsche’s Life and Works” (last substantive revision May 8, 2017) notes that, in January 1889, i.e., two months after completing his last work, “Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life.” As the entry discusses, the cause of Nietzsche’s incapacitation is uncertain, but there are multiple hypotheses.
The entry observes, “That Nietzsche was able to write so prolifically and profoundly for years, while remaining in a condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain, is a testament to his spectacular mental capacities and willpower.” Perhaps Nietzsche believed the challenges he faced made him stronger. But ultimately, his affliction debilitated him; it did not make him stronger.
Nietzsche is not alone in oversimplifying the idea that confronting adversity or suffering can strengthen us. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay “Compensation,” published in 1841, “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.” Shakespeare, in As You Like It, albeit, I believe, with ironic intent, has the deposed duke assert, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” And religions and ancient Greek philosophy include claims we should welcome adversity or suffering.
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Adversity and suffering come with life. In responding, we can find meaning, and we may experience growth, including becoming stronger.
But Nietzsche’s aphorism drains the humanity of those who experience and cope with trauma. And some who survive are left with wounds, not scars, any greater strength no compensation.
The aphorism also fails to acknowledge the sadness that comes with the loss of friends and loved ones. They visit us in dreams; we awaken, they are gone. The loss does not make us stronger; the sadness makes us human.
Life with a Survivor
Having a friend or loved one be a victim of a violent crime is disturbing. We feel concern for the victim. We may also feel concern for ourselves based on our awareness of our own vulnerability to crime.
The helpful response is the compassionate response. Compassion calls us to focus on the survivor, not ourselves. The most important action is the most difficult: simply listening.
Questions about the crime serve us, not the survivor. The survivor will share what he wishes to share. Our questions may be an exercise in curiosity. They may reflect our wish to solve the problem by, somehow, retroactively preventing or stopping the crime. Or they may be a search for how we might have avoided being a victim had few faced the same circumstances.
The same is true of advice and reassurance — they serve us, not the survivor. We do not have the answers to the survivor’s unasked questions, and we cannot force the process of healing. We have to accept that the survivor has suffered and will suffer. The survivor will find his own strength and his own peace; we can do the same.
We need not try to cure; caring is enough.
The late priest and author Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude, observes, “[W]hen we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand (38).”
He continues, “A friend who cares makes it clear that … being present to each other is what really matters. In fact, it matters more than pain, illness, or death” (39).
Similarly, writer and speaker Parker J. Palmer, in “The Gift of Presence, The Perils of Advice,” counsels, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is.”
We serve a survivor by quietly listening, by being present, by being empathetic, by offering acceptance, and by trusting him to find his own path. We can remember the wisdom of the late Spencer Morgan Rice: “You have no idea the effect you have on others.”
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How should survivors live with those in their lives? Ideally, with grace, “a generosity of spirit.” Consider the thoughts of writer and scholar Troy Earl Camplin and Universidad Francisco Marroquín professor Albert Loan in “Why We Need More Grace.”
Conclusion
Last summer, gazing through telescopes at the moon, planets, stars, and a distant galaxy, fortunate to be alive, I felt the preciousness of life, life here at home, amidst the universe.
Our home, though only a speck, is nonetheless our home, perhaps the only one we will ever have, one destined to perish. Each of us is only one among billions, each life destined to end.
We have the chance, in our time, to live well, to make the world better, to leave it better. Each of our lives is important, each voyage sacred.
Precious, fragile, and short lives. Lives to be lived well.
[Updated information and link on a resource on resiliency from the American Psychological Association: Feb. 3, 2021]
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Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
