After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  “This” would be finalizing a book. “This” would be attempting, with no prior business experience whatsoever, to start-up a news service exclusively focused on inspiring and hopeful stories about people who are trying to make the future better. “This” was dealing with chronic pain, for almost ten years, by then, trying tons of doctors and medications and therapies and getting nowhere. “This” would be Lee’s family officially announcing they won’t be attending our wedding (a consideration that became official after he brought me back to that restaurant on Fifty-Fourth and Madison Avenue and popped the question, to which I smiled said yes, giggling and kissing him through a horrible migraine) because he left the Orthodox Jewish Community when he was twenty years old, and then half-Jewish me came along to put the nail in the coffin.

  “This” was doing it all stone-cold sober.

  My current sponsor, who also has PTSD, will similarly remind me that it will pass, that for a very, very long time, my higher self—and my brain, and my body, and my nervous system—have all lived in harmony, almost seamlessly. So when times of big stress come on, it may trigger this PTSD, especially when there are greater forces at work in my body. I just have to take five minutes, breathe, and tell myself that I’m okay, even if transmitters in my body are trying to trick me into thinking that I’m not.

  I will have to fight that heavy feeling, the sensation that darkness is collecting inside of me again. I will have to push away the idea that people who disagree with Lee’s decision will try to find us and hurt us or ruin our wedding. I will have to slow down enough to realize that I am not any of these feelings, and that as much as FEAR can stand for False Evidence Appearing Real, it can also stand for Face Everything And Recover.

  There will still be beautiful moments in those two long months before the roller coaster finally comes to a stop and my hormones readjust in the midst of these trial-and-error hormone pills that are supposed to help with my migraines. I will put on what will become my wedding dress and instantly think about how much Grandma would have loved it, and my mother will tell me, in the loving way I knew she would, not to worry that it is over budget, she will figure it out, and my maid of honor, one of the truly dear friends I’ve made over time, will clap and cheer.

  I will feel like I’m on my last legs but take a very long, “express-is-running-local” 2 train ride uptown to meet a friend for dinner, one that I’ve had for five years now, and I won’t need to take a Klonopin to be able to do it. We’ll laugh and talk over meatballs and soda for two hours, and I’ll be able to experience that joy in its entirety.

  Lee will go away on business for a few nights, and I will realize upon our happy reunion that I never once wondered what he was doing or even called him, whereas once upon a time it would be 24/7 check-ins, a need for reassurance and constant contact.

  I will find a team of people who believe in my dream to bring positive news stories to the world and prepare to go toe-to-toe with the negative and terrifying headlines that still plague everyone today. We’ll try to figure it all out together, from the ground up.

  * * *

  I’m sitting with Estelle, an old lady I visit with. She was one of the women that belonged to the group my grandma “socialized” in. Their home health aids would bring them to the community room or to each other’s apartments to have cake and “party,” something that stopped when my grandmother died.

  Some people have a hard time knowing what to say or do in these situations, with the elderly, but I’ve picked up this ability to ask questions and make conversation where other people would fall short, silent, and awkward.

  “What’s your favorite place in the world?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “What about you?”

  “I think it would have to be Paris,” I say.

  “It’s bad, what’s happening in Paris now,” she says. She can’t see, but she listens to the news on TV. “Who are the people doing this?”

  I clear my throat, and say, “I think they’re called ISIS.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An Islamic state,” I say, not wanting to follow this conversation thread for too long.

  “The religion tells them to do that?”

  “Well, technically not. Islam is a peaceful religion. They’re misinterpreting it. I think anyone who hurts people in the name of religion is abusing that reason.”

  “Oh,” she says, wiping her nose slowly with a tissue and taking this information in. “It seems that bad things are happening everywhere.”

  “Yes, but also, good things are happening too.”

  “You don’t hear about that.”

  “I know, and I’m working on it.”

  I try to explain to her that the journalism I do is “only on the computer, not in a newspaper.” I tell her there are a lot of people doing good things out there and that my job is to shine a light on what they are doing to help, that I try to get them attention by writing about them so even more people can help.

  She nods, her head falling into her chest, her eyes closing.

  “Listen, I’ve got a defrosted chicken in the kitchen and a hungry man on his way home, but I’ll see you soon, ok?”

  “Ok, thank you for coming to see me. I didn’t have any visitors this week.”

  “Its my pleasure,” I say. “Can I give you a hug?”

  “Of course,” she says as she accepts my hug.

  “I want you to be happy, okay?”

  “You make me happy,” she says.

  “She doesn’t say that to nobody,” her home health aid chimes in.

  I think about our conversation, about how there are days when, if I’m stupid enough to turn on the news, I worry about how dangerous and dark the outside world still is. There are mass shootings, there are people who behave like they have no souls, there are more terrorist attacks. But there is a new filter, almost like a translucent window shade, that is gold, not black. It allows me to see, in between those dark places and nasty people, the good things, and the good people, and the potential for better.

  That night, the news, as usual, is not good. I flip through the newspaper, reading about how, after the recent attacks in Paris, ISIS threats were now prevalent in NYC, still the number-one terrorist target in the entire world. Lee walks in around 7:00 p.m., bringing the cold in with him. Wiley immediately begins hopping around on his hind legs to greet him. I start bringing our food to the table, and say, as casually as I can, “If anything ever happens, just get home. We may lose cell signals, so just get here. Don’t go underground, though. Get in a cab or on a bus, or just run.”

  “Someone else was talking about this at work,” he says. “Did something happen?”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Preparedness,” he says. “Did they name a specific place?”

  “Yes,” I sigh as I curl up on the couch and rest my head in my hand, elbow propped up against a throw pillow. “Times Square and Herald Square.”

  Six blocks from your office.

  Lee whips out his phone, asking, “Do you mind if I watch this video?” ISIS had released a video that all of the news sites were posting, which was freaking everybody out.

  “No,” I say. “In fact, you can bring it over here.”

  He joins me on the couch, and I ask him to put his headphones in, because I don’t want to hear. I rub Wiley’s stomach instead, talking to him in the silly way we talk to babies and dogs, glancing at the screen occasionally. Some days, we just spend hours cooing over this baby, marveling at him like he’s our own flesh and blood.

  “I think we should leave,” Lee concludes, pulling his big blue headphones off.

  “And go where?”

  “Florida,” he says. “Nothing happens there. Nobody cares about Florida.”

  “That’s what Thomas said,” I chuckle. “That’s why he went there after 9/11.”

  At some point, I would like to leave—as much as I love this city and dread the sting of being a New Yorker living some
where else—I don’t want to live in the same place my entire life.”

  “So, let’s go,” he says. “Babe, we have to take this seriously. What’s to prevent them from doing this?”

  “The same thing that has been for the last fourteen years,” I say calmly, cradling Wiley’s head in my lap. “Nothing. Maybe it’s a real threat, maybe it isn’t. But we can’t run every time we get scared.”

  The 9/11 Tribute Center, located across the street from the World Trade Center since 2006, invites visitors to share their thoughts at the end of their experience in their galleries. Here are three comments from those notes (originally published in 9/11: The World Speaks).

  My three young daughters asked if they were safe. I reassured them living in rural Pennsylvania was safe … but they watched flight 93 fly low over their playground in Ligonier, PA. It crashed three miles beyond. God Bless all of USA.

  —Anonymous. Pennsylvania

  I am a history teacher. Last year my students said, “What’s the big deal about 9/11?”

  —Anonymous, Missouri

  Everyone has a story! NEVER stop listening

  —Anonymous, South Africa

  Afterword

  Helaina reached out to me as she began her journey to learn more about the condition that rocked her existence and her identity, shattering any sense that life could be within her control. At the time, I was organizing a conference on Trauma & Resilience for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP).

  A young undergraduate, she bravely called me in 2011 to ask about the conference and to see if we could talk. I learned that Helaina was a middle schooler on 9/11 whose only thought was to survive, flee, and get home, an escape that sounded like the stories of many survivors of the disaster—until she described its aftermath. She and her classmates were eventually disbursed throughout the city school system. They were separated from each other and attended class as silent refugees from the Towers, fearful and socially isolated. This created what we now know as a secondary traumatization, impacting emotional and interpersonal development.

  Years later, as Helaina began to interview her classmates about their experiences, she learned that many of them, like herself, had suffered impaired psychological development expressed in many symptoms.

  What is astonishing in the stories of survivors is the degree of emotional resilience we often find. Research shows that, among the protective factors that influence development are strong early family ties, an ability to access interpersonal resources, a quest to problem solve, and a capacity to grow through adversity. Helaina, and many of the “9/11” children, encountered the struggle of forced adaptation after an overwhelming experience. Their fragilities were often attributed to troubled developmental adjustment, rather than to the squelched parts of healthy egos attempting to symbolically describe stories of traumatization. It was not only the experience of that awful September day, but its pervasive undercurrent in everyday existence, that challenged healthy maturation for the 9/11 children.

  How, I wondered, had the authorities, the adults in their world, allowed this to happen to these children? How could they imagine stifling the survivors could have any positive effect? How could an array of clinicians have not have truly understood Helaina’s condition as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Despite the outrage, I realized it was not a completely unfamiliar pattern. We have many recorded examples of survivors from terror and disaster feeling silenced or ostracized. We now understand that their presence can have a profoundly destabilizing effect on those around them, triggering guilt, deep anxiety, and too frequently, resentment.

  There are several successful methods—and combinations thereof—available to help young children who experience trauma, with cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and art therapy among them. CBT gives the child an opportunity to look differently at their experiences and to develop tools to cope with and manage the intrusive, debilitating thoughts that are a part of PTSD. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Art Therapy also provide forums for the child to process high stressor emotional experiences through symbolic communication, allowing the devastating experience to lose its center stage power in the child’s mind. They offer a safe haven for developing coping skills and capacity for interpersonal resource development, without the threat of re-traumatizing through enforced focus on the crises.

  Therefore, it is important to be aware of the various signs of PTSD among children at the onset, such as nightmares, unusual worrying about family members leaving the house, denial of the event, sudden unusual outbursts of anger, a tendency toward isolation, excessive daydreaming or distractibility, increased anxiety, sudden outbursts of crying, and secretiveness. Early and continued intervention is crucial when it is known that exposure to an overwhelming event has occurred, or when noticing symptoms such as those mentioned above.

  Helaina has become an outspoken advocate for herself and her fellow survivors. Her willingness to reach out regardless of the risk of rejection is just one example of how we can grow resilient within adversity. Her journey throws an optimistic light on the rocky road from trauma response to resilient growth.

  We may always live with the reverberating reminders overwhelming experience, whether from persistent developmental trauma, abuse, or environmental disaster, but, as Helaina’s story shows, there is always hope when you ask for help.

  —Patricia Harte Bratt, PhD

  Director, Academy of Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis (ACAP)

  President, National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP)

  Author: Reciprocal Resilience: Surprising Benefits for Clinicians of Listening to Stories of Trauma

  patbratt@comcast.net

  About the Author

  Helaina Hovitz is a journalist and editor specializing in positive and inspiring stories. She has written for the New York Times, Salon, The New York Observer, Forbes, Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, and Newsday and is hard at work on her latest venture, a news service called Headlines for the Hopeful. She lives with her fiancé and their rescue dog, Wiley.

  Photo: Justin McCallum

  If you believe that you or someone you know may be living with post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, or any other mental health issue, please visit www.HelainaHovitz.com for a list of Recovery Resources.

  Everyone’s journey is different, and Helaina hopes she can help you find a solid place to start yours.