Reflections on the Effects of My Psychotherapeutic Work at Ground Zero After 9/11

There are times when I find it hard to believe that eight years have passed since the tumultuous events of that September 11^th morning when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came tumbling down like a poorly supported Lego construction. Whenever I am driving into Manhattan from the Queensborough Bridge, I still automatically scan the landscape in search of the Twin Towers, despite knowing that they no longer occupy a place in the skyline.

Within 24 hours of the terrorist attack, I became involved with offering counseling to those who were employed in and around the Twin Towers. For nearly six months subsequent to 9/11, I traveled down to the area within blocks of “Ground Zero,” working with employees who had witnessed the buildings collapsing as well as those who had seen people jumping out of windows in their futile attempts to escape the flames. At that time, I was also working with private patients at my office, many of whom lived downtown. They were struggling to cope with the contaminated air, ongoing smell of smoldering debris, and burned bodies emanating from Ground Zero.

In the days immediately following the attack, with my focus on helping my new patients, I thought very little about what all of this exposure to such overwhelming trauma was doing to me both physically and mentally. When I first trav-

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eled to Ground Zero, I was told by the authorities that I did not need to wear a facemask and that everything was safe. As a result, I did not wear a mask until I heard in the news in late September that it would be advisable to use a facemask when going to downtown Manhattan. Similarly, I was not mindful of the emotional toll all of this was having on me. Between doing therapy with the survivors and my private patients, I was continuously listening to traumatic narratives.

By early January 2002, I stopped working at Ground Zero. I had developed an eye infection of unknown origin and I was completely “burned out.” During the time that I was at Ground Zero, I did not deal with my own traumatization by the events nor was I aware that I was being continuously re-traumatized every time I listened to a patient’s Ground Zero story.

For the rest of 2002, I attended several trainings on trauma and took part in a therapist support group. I found these activities extremely supportive and validating. I realized that my prior training as a therapist had not given me the skills that were needed to deal with an event of such magnitude. I had been trained to work within my own office where clients came to me. When I saw survivors, I went to their work situations, in large corporate offices contained within skyscrapers.

My experiences at Ground Zero changed the way that I see trauma and its treatment. First of all, any therapist working in the field of trauma needs to be involved in some sort of ongoing peer support system that would help her or him deal with continuous exposure to trauma and its resultant burn-out and/or compassion fatigue. Also, the events of September 11^th have taught me that we need to be trained in therapeutic models that encompass an understanding of traumatic grief, multiple losses, physical exposure to toxic materials, delayed mourning due to missing bodies, loss of hous-

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ing and work settings, and the continuous experience of imminent threat or danger.

I am still questioning how to best deal with trauma. Do we deal with trauma as a diagnostic category that needs a cure or as a wounding that requires a healing through meaning-making and integration? Do we “treat” those who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as patients with a mental illness of intrapsychic origin or as victims of horrendous acts of political and social violence? An author on the subject states that after September 11^th, “mental health professionals will have to continuously re-define and re-classify existing disorders, develop new categories, and generate new treatments.” She goes on to encourage therapists “to enlarge their roles and sense of social responsibility” and that clinicians consider “abandoning their traditional stance of clinical anonymity…[and that] they may choose to testify that sociopolitical violence engenders widespread psychological casualties” (Karen M. Seeley, After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists, and Mental Health, 2008, pp. 195-196).

Over these eight years since that fateful September morning, I have asked myself many times just how my work as a psychotherapist helped those who sat across from me in those corporate offices turned into makeshift therapy rooms. My immediate response: “I bore witness to their story.” By writing this short essay, the reader is now a witness to my story and the story of all those I have written about. Herein, I believe, is the key to the healing of trauma: bearing witness to individual stories and their place within history.

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