Group Trauma

by Kelly

Who else remembers September 11, 2001?

I live on the West Coast, so it was 6:00 our time. I had the alarm clock set for 6:00, and it was set to start playing the news instead of ringing an alarm, so we could kind of ease into our day. So it went off and I was laying there listening to it when I realized they were talking about a plane hitting a building. I just looked at my then husband and we leapt out of bed, ran to the living room and turned on the TV. There was the first tower with smoke billowing out of it and the announcers speculating about it being some kind of freak accident. I was frozen, just watching it and thinking about those poor people and wondering how it happened. 

Then the second plane came into view, flying straight toward that second tower. I remember a feeling of panic and my ex told me that I screamed out NO!! and reached toward the screen. Then it hit. Then we knew that it wasn’t an accident. Then we knew that someone had flown those planes into those buildings full of people on purpose. 

I was absolutely traumatized. I was crying, my head was spinning, I felt confused and panicked and I didn’t know what to do or what to think. My world changed at that moment. 

I sat down and tried to think. 

It was a weekday but I didn’t know if we would be working. I called my boss at the State and asked her, “Are we working today?” She was surprised and answered yes. I was taken aback. I asked if she knew what had happened, and she answered yes. Like it was no big deal. Like it didn’t bother her at all. Here my world had tipped on its axis, here there were God only knew how many people dead, instantly crushed or burning to death or trapped. I hadn’t thought about anyone jumping out the window at that point. We had no idea why such a tragic and senseless thing had happened, and she treated it with the same amount of concern she might have felt while writing a grocery list. Maybe less.

I went to work but I couldn’t concentrate. I was absolutely horrified. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that people were just continuing on with their day. I was that way for weeks, and still in a very somber mood for months. Looking at photos of the memorial to choose the one accompanying this article has me crying. 

I found a really good interview with Dr. Roxanne Cohen Silver on this event and the ensuing constant media coverage and the trauma it caused and continues to cause. There is a recording and a transcript, and I highly recommend going over the whole thing. 

https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/9-11-twenty-years

The introduction:

This week marks 20 years since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Researchers call this kind of shared disaster a “collective trauma.” Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, who studies collective trauma and led a multi-year study on the mental and physical health effects of 9/11, discusses that research and how what we learned in the aftermath of 9/11 can inform our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires, and other large-scale disasters.

About the expert:

About the expert: Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD

Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD, is a distinguished professor of psychological science, medicine, and public health at the University of California Irvine. She studies the long-term physical, cognitive, emotional, and social effects of traumatic experiences, both personal traumas as well as large community disasters such as terrorist attacks, earthquakes or firestorms, infectious disease outbreaks, school shootings, and war. She also studies resilience factors and how people cope with these traumas. She was the principal investigator of a multi-year longitudinal study of the national impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks on mental and physical health. She has also studied the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the Ebola public health crisis, the 2016 Orlando nightclub mass shooting, and Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Michael. Most recently, her research team has also undertaken an NSF-funded national longitudinal study of the 2020 novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States.

The parameters of the study:

My colleagues and I began in the days after the September 11th terrorist attacks to study a large representative sample of Americans who were followed for about three years. Those individuals were from across the United States. We had people, of course, who were from the New York area, as well as people in every state of the country.

We started a few days after the 9/11 attacks to ask people about their exposure to the attacks, whether or not they knew anybody who was in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or on one of the airplanes, whether or not they themselves were in New York City or Washington, D.C., whether they knew anybody who was lost and presumably at that point killed by the attacks. We also asked people the amount of television that they watched in the first few days after the 9/11 attacks.

You may remember, or those who can remember that day, know that in general, most regular programming was suspended, with a very intense media focus on the 9/11 attacks and the attempts to find survivors in the rubble, and also to understand a little bit more about what happened. We followed these individuals in our study. It was about 3,500 individuals. We followed them, as I said, for three years, and we looked at their emotional responses, their ongoing concerns about terrorism.

We also measured some of their physical health complaints, those physical health complaints that developed over the next three years. And in addition, during that period of time that we studied people, we assessed their ongoing, as I said, concerns about terrorism, but their continued exposure to personal traumatic experiences like, did they lose a loved one to cancer? Did they themselves get sick? Did they witness violence?

We explored the impact of people's exposure to 9/11, the impact of exposure to other events in their lives, and how that impacted their psychological state over the next several years.

I don't just have empathy, I am an empath. This event had a profound effect on my life.

So what about it? 

Do you believe group trauma is a thing?

Did you witness it on TV? Live? YouTube? (Did it happen before you were born lol?)

What were your immediate reactions? Were you traumatized? How did it affect your life going forward (if at all)?

What do you think about the changes in the routines for air travel?

What do you think of the documentaries and the anniversary specials?

Did it change your life/how you see the world in the present day?

Let’s talk about it.