Both natural and people-made crises and disasters can induce post traumatic stress in those who are confronted or afflicted by them. Feelings and symptoms of PTSD can be felt immediately after the event(s) and exhibited in shock reactions or virtual paralysis, extreme fear and anxiety, withdrawal, incomprehension, denial, or desire to escape. Reactions that may set in after the causative event, like a hurricane or flood, has passed, may include severe depression, utter confusion, anger, feeling overwhelmed and unable to go on, tremendous grief and a sense of devastating loss. Longer term reactions can include, in addition, rage at the perpetrators of political or military oppression, destruction, and murder; loss of faith and a system for meaning and value, total feeling of being displaced or abandoned, and paranoia – often based in reality, frightened about the future when the past has been destroyed, loss of appetite, loss of will to live, etc. Therapists working with victims of disasters must be solidly grounded in knowledge about the impact of both kinds of disasters, how to offer critical incident stress debriefing at the scene of a mass disaster (like at the Twin Towers in New York after the terrorist attack of 9/11/2001), how crisis intervention in this kind of atmosphere or after a suicide bombing requires different attitudes and skills than ordinary office-based, regularly scheduled therapy.

Months and sometimes years after the events, the effects of the trauma still linger and influence a person's behaviors and relationships, as has been true of survivors and their descendants of the holocaust and other genocides. A skilled therapist should be astute in recognizing the signs of unresolved grief and anger that haunts the person decades later.

Listening empathically to the tragic stories, and then validating and normalizing the survivors' perceptions and experiences are essential ingredients of treatment. So, too, is the ability to “be with” the people in their grief. Sometimes taking concrete actions on their behalf and connecting them to responsive resources and agencies is essential.

This workshop will explore models and techniques for intervening with people exposed to a variety of traumatic occurrences, and attempt to help participants expand their repertoire of the strategies and help them decide how to match these to the needs of the individuals based on type of disaster, depth and breadth of person/family's crisis, clients age, symptomatology, their remaining support system, and other possible resources and strengths. The overall emphasis will be on ultimately mobilizing a person's resiliency and helping them heal without mitigating the reality of what has occurred.