When Hit by a Hurricane (article)

About midway through the first day of the storm when my next door neighbors moved in, lyrics from Bob Dylan’s 1975 song, “Shelter from the Storm,” started repeating themselves in my mind: “Come in, she said; I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” That phrase of the song repeated itself for days, maybe even a week. At first I did not notice, but as days passed, I started to pay attention to what was happening inside my mind. I became fascinated by the thinking that helped me cope with the significant disruptions all around. As I began to see clients, I paid close attention to what was happening in their minds too, and to the thinking that helped them cope.

“Did you see what Bloomberg did with the marathon? As usual, the very people who are supposed to help are off somewhere else,” said my client who is always alert to the hypocrisy of the powerful.

“I was embarrassed that two nights after the storm, benefit concerts were already starting up. This isn’t nearly as bad as the Tsunami in Japan,” said my client who tolerates terrible living situations by convincing herself that others have it worse.

“It’s amazing how calm I was during the storm! I am always so anxious and anticipating disaster that I felt I was prepared. Once the storm came, I felt totally calm. I knew it was really beyond my control,” said one patient who treats the world as though there is always an impending catastrophe on a daily basis.

Seeing people in the very middle of Sandy felt like receiving the gift of a window into how each person really does experience reality in a very idiosyncratic way. The stories they told and the tunes that played in their heads said more about the individual than they did about the storm. The opening sentences as each patient stepped through my door in that first week after the storm (the week when many people were still without electricity, and the coastal areas were just beginning to be assessed) was a clear articulation of how one reacts when reality intrudes. Reality had intruded

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but, real as it was, everyone experienced it as a dreamscape.

Watching myself react to Sandy was as familiar as it was inevitable. I was one of the lucky people whose house did not lose electricity at all. As I learned a week or two later at a conference on biology and emotions, I probably fall in the category of people whose oxytocin levels increase, rather than deplete, in stressful situations. When stressed, I open myself up to take care of others. I took in my neighbors, I took in good friends, I cooked for others, and I even put my name on a list to take in “an old person who had nowhere to go.” This is a perfect dream-like rendition of my family role as the one who had to grow up sharing a bedroom with my grandmother. Even as I did it, I was very aware that I was soothing myself as well as being “generous” or “hospitable.”

It was comforting to turn on my automatic coping and reestablish the predictability of the real. It was also a privilege to be present as others became aware of the stories they create to feel safe. I did some of the best work I have done in a long time during the week Sandy displaced many in my area. As my clients and I checked in with each other, we reestablished the safety of our space. In many sessions, we were able to examine the storm experience as a metaphor for how one sees the world, especially when stressed. There are few therapeutic moments more satisfying than sitting with clients as they vividly experience how they filter the world. We all find the one detail that confirms what we have always “known.” Like young children, we tell ourselves the same story over and over again because it helps calm us down. The storm was horrible, but if we could somehow transform it into familiar horror, then it became less of a shock to us and more of an experience we had already survived.

The lens through which we see the world is a direct outcome of how we are currently experiencing ourselves. We all have many parts of ourselves. When afraid and in need of defense, each one of us goes to a predictable part of ourselves. This is an attempt to control the outside intrusive world. Our first response when stressed—our automatic response—is often to return to the ways in which we coped as a child. During the storm and its immediate aftermath, many of us went to the self-protecting child inside us. We retell the story in a way that first made sense to us as children.

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For example, a client told me during Sandy that “I was speaking to someone who went to help in the shelter in Midtown Manhattan. It sounded like people were living in the most horrible conditions, suffering terribly without proper medication or clothes or even a bed to sleep on. Just a block away no one even knew there was a shelter there! No one knew what was going on, they kept going on with their lives as normal.” This description told to me by a child of a Holocaust survivor, closely mirrors the situations of so many Jews during the Holocaust.

We reestablish “normal” by attending to the one facet of the real that retells our stories. As we relax and recover, we are able to be more flexible and open in response to our reality. We begin to take in other points of view and this, too, is comforting.

Antonino Ferro, an Italian psychoanalyst, advocates that we look at every story our clients tell us as though it were a dream. He suggests that as they begin to talk, we organize our listening by prefacing what we hear with the words “I dreamt that…” (“Transformations in Dreaming and Characters in the Psychoanalytic Field,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 2009, 90: pp. 209-230). This approach is often very useful in guiding a discussion to examine the unconscious structuring of experience, especially in the middle of a crisis.

I had a “dream” that I was in a hurricane that tore down trees and homes. It caused massive damage and reminded us of how powerless we can be. The world felt like something apocalyptic had occurred. But in that dream, I was surrounded by people I love and we all took care of each other. We leaned closer to each other, reaffirmed that we could count on each other. We became more deeply connected.

My “dream” tells the story of a childhood in which I felt pretty safe, but I was surrounded by images and stories of more painful lives. I always felt like I should do what I can to help. The dream also tells the story of how grateful I am, and how lucky I feel to have come through the storm ultimately feeling enriched by the experience. I know that many suffered destruction and loss. I hope that they too get to experience the support of community and a sense of regaining power after a storm.

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