What are the Effects of Trauma? – An Interview with Carolyn Lunsford Mears

In 1999, Carolyn Mears’ son was a student at Columbine High School in Colorado, where a horrifying mass shooting claimed the lives of 12 students and 1 teacher. She now serves as dissertation advisor and adjunct faculty at the University of Denver and is a member of the school’s Advisory Board of the Trauma Certification Program, and has published articles on crisis prevention and trauma recovery. Her latest book, Reclaiming School in the Aftermath of Trauma (Palgrave, 2012), offers advice from survivors of natural disaster, violence, and personal abuse. In the wake of the tragedies at the Aurora movie theater and the Oak Creek Sikh temple, we spoke with Carolyn about trauma from death and its effects on survivors of horrific events.

Liz: How did you get into the field of trauma response and recovery?

Carolyn: It wasn’t something I had ever imagined doing. But then, in 1999, our son was trapped in Columbine High School during the shootings. From the effects of the shootings on him and on his friends and teachers, and on those of us who were parents and loved ones, it became clear that people didn’t really understand what we were experiencing. Unless you’ve come face to face with trauma from death like that yourself, it’s hard to understand the impact.

One of my friends and I used to take walks around the lake behind Columbine High School, and we’d talk about how people would call and offer their well-intentioned advice about what they would do, what we should be doing, and asking, “Are you over it yet?”

We’d always say that people just don’t get it. I’d heard that advice one too many times—just forget it, move on, get over it. It’s such wonderful wishful thinking, and so dear of people who want those of us who are hurting to feel better and “get back to normal,” as they would say. Yet it doesn’t happen that way. Your world has changed; your life has changed.

I decided then that if they don’t get it, it’s because no one ever told them about it. And I said, “I’m going to see what I can do about that.”

I enrolled in the doctorate program at University of Denver so I could conduct research into the aftermath of the shootings and the effects that it had on parents and families, as well as what we felt helped us with recovery and what we felt hurt and impaired recovery. I didn’t want my research to simply be a personal narrative, though, or get dismissed as just the writing of a “Columbine mom.” I wanted to do research that had rigor, that really deserved the respect and attention of decision-makers and policy-makers and folks who might be in a position to help in the future. I wanted to help not only with school shootings, but with any sort of traumatic exposure—yet Columbine was one that I had inside knowledge of, and therefore had access to people who could share their stories and be very truthful with me because they knew I understood.

I got my doctorate and did my dissertation on the experiences of Columbine parents, which won the Outstanding Qualitative Dissertation of the Year award from the American Educational Research Association. I thought after that I would just go on with my life—but it became my life! Few researchers had accessed that level of candor from participants. As a result, I am consulted and asked to help with other tragic death situations.

My book Reclaiming School in the Aftermath of Trauma is written for everyday people, not just scholars or academia. I asked people to contribute their stories, and people shared their stories with me because this was a way they could help others. Thus I’ve been privileged to share not only my own story, but also the stories and insights of others who’ve had trauma experience.

Liz: How do you define “trauma”? Is it different from grief and mourning?

Carolyn: First, I need to say that I am not a psychologist. My degree is in educational leadership and policy. So what I do is I look at experience and see what we can learn that might inform policy-makers and decision-makers about what is needed after trauma.

My operational definition of trauma is basically any experience that is perceived as life-threatening or life-challenging by the individual. It’s almost like a marker in time: there’s before the event, and there’s after. Your perception is that your world has changed by circumstance that you’re powerless to avoid. It’s that sense of sudden change, vulnerability, and powerlessness, of being a victim to circumstance: those factors combined are what cause the biological responses in the brain, which really distinguish trauma from grief.

Trauma can also be experienced vicariously by witnessing the trauma of loved ones, or a catastrophic event in which we identify with the victims.

The Columbine High School Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As for the difference between the two: grief is an extremely complicated emotion and psychological effect, but with trauma there’s also a biological component in the brain. You’ve heard of the fight or flight or freeze response?

Liz: Yes, I have.

Carolyn: Your body is hard-wired for survival. What happens in trauma is your body is attempting to survive—to fight back, or to run, or to hide. The body remembers the threat and attempts to learn from it, in order to reclaim the sense of safety that was in place beforehand. So if you’re exposed to, for example, the shooting in Aurora, or an earthquake or wildfire– if your community is threatened, even if in the end no harm comes to it—the danger is perceived as threatening to all life as it was known before. It’s very disturbing and disorienting.

It’s important to remember that, while you can have grief without trauma, you won’t see trauma without accompanying grief, because you are also mourning the loss of what was before. In grief, you don’t always have that biological component, that perception of a significant loss that exists in trauma. You can mourn the loss of a loved one, but the loss may not threaten or significantly change your life.

For example, my mother died at age 91. I still feel it, and I still miss her, and there were situations when she died that were dramatic and unsettling, but they weren’t threatening. It wasn’t a sudden death. I felt grief and mourned, but it wasn’t traumatic.

In psychology, there’s a great phrase: “loss of the assumptive world.” In trauma, you lose the world you assumed you lived in. I assumed it was safe for my son to go to school on April 20, 1999. After the shootings, I could no longer assume that. Yet I needed to continue to send him to school every day, and he needed to go to school and learn. My own life wasn’t threatened—but my son’s was, and I felt I had lost the world I’d lived in.

The Century 16 Theater in Aurora, Colorado where the 2012 Aurora shooting took place, photographed the day after the shooting. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The people who attended the showing of Batman at the theater in Aurora assumed it was a safe thing to do. They didn’t realize they were taking their lives into their hands to go to that showing. Now, for them, those assumptions come into question. Now, adrenaline and anxiety and all those responses can be activated whenever anyone even mentions, “You wanna go to a movie tonight?”

Liz: What are typical responses in individuals who suffer a traumatic experience?

Carolyn: There is no such thing as a typical response. This is important for people to understand, especially friends and family and co-workers. Every individual experiences trauma individually and uniquely, with some people reacting outwardly, others withdrawing inward.

Some people won’t show their traumatic response for years, and they may look absolutely fine until then. They may be at a point where their life seems back in the balance; but then, they may experience a triggering event, see a video clip in a movie, read a textbook on what appears to be an unrelated event, and have their experience retriggered.

Trauma affects all of the senses—that’s part of the biological response. For example, one student at Columbine was hiding in a room where bleach had been spilled. Even now, the smell of bleach can still trigger a trauma response for him. When his life was at risk and he was threatened, it was connected to the smell of bleach.

Though we don’t all react in the same way, there are some commonly experienced traumatic responses. Physical responses include tension, increase of blood pressure, compounded heart issues, and even immune disorders. Mental effects include hypervigilance, loss of memory and ability to attend to detail, anger, confusion, disassociation, survivor’s guilt, as well as the emotional responses of grief and loss and sense of abandonment. There are different spiritual effects as well: some people question how God could let this happen, and others turn to God with gratitude for saving them. It affects everybody differently, often on a different timeframe.

Read the conclusion of this interview next Saturday, when we will discuss how friends, family, organizations, and communities can ease the process for those suffering from trauma.

Liz: What are some of the ways others can help those suffering from trauma—not only family and friends, but also schools, communities, workplaces?

Carolyn: We can all invest a little time in learning about trauma and what to expect—and that’s more than just getting a list of the symptoms of PTSD. We need to understand the overall effect of trauma on the way people live their lives. You might see people acting in a way that attempts to reassert control over their environment. And as I mentioned before, there’s a sense of powerlessness, and so you might also find people becoming very defensive and angry if they don’t get their way. Rather than merely deciding that this person is a real jerk or a rage-filled lunatic, we need to think about why he or she is acting like that; if there’s been trauma, this person may need to have more voice in making decisions. The same goes for those who withdraw from friends and family—avoiding interaction may be a coping strategy.

One of the reasons I wrote my book Reclaiming School in the Aftermath of Trauma is so schools and communities would understand how to work with a child or student living with the effects of trauma. That includes giving the student some choice and voice in what happens to them, and allowing them to participate in decision-making discussions. It’s not to say the student should always get their way by any means, but letting them contribute to the discussion gives them some power back.

The same goes for an institution, a business, or a community where you may have public service workers like police and fire personnel who have been intimately involved in a traumatic situation. It’s important to allow time for processing, give people time off as is possible and needed, and provide opportunities for job-sharing if it’s a large-scale trauma. A gradual re-entry into a routine is really, really helpful. Some people may need longer than others to return to a regular 40-hour work week.

Then there’s individual trauma—for example, physical assault, surviving a fatal traffic accident, or discovering the suicide of a loved one. These are very traumatic situations, and yet they won’t hit the papers and gain the support and awareness that a mass shooting or an earthquake or other disaster would. So it’s important to see trauma as a universal experience. It’s not just the big disasters we hear on the news. Trauma lives within our own lives, in the unexpected situations that we’re powerless in. We all need to learn more about trauma and find ways to accommodate for its effects.

For those working with people with trauma, understand that trauma brings a special need. It’s not to say that we need to enable or encourage people to stay where they are, instead of moving forward, but it needs to be considered in the same way that other special needs are.

Liz: You mentioned in your Guardian blog piece that Columbine High School took measures to reduce trauma triggers for students after the shootings—for example, building a new library, removing the food that was served that day from the menu, banning balloons (which sound like gunfire when popped). Do you feel these types of measures are valuable?

Carolyn: Yes, I really do. I think it’s important to consider such changes, and to talk to or listen to survivors and people who are affected by the event and ask them what they recommend. What do they see as problematic? Where do they see attention needs to be given? That’s the first step in empowering them toward reclaiming life.

After the shootings at Columbine, the kids could not go into the library. They couldn’t even go into libraries at other schools, because the associations with that place were so intense. It triggered biological responses, like anxiety attacks; and you can’t learn in a situation like that. So school leaders listened to the kids, the teachers, the parents, and then they made some of the necessary changes. They couldn’t do everything—they couldn’t tear down all the school buildings—but it was something. For those affected, you could say, “I may not have gotten everything I needed, but I got some things, and this will make it better.”

Hope Columbine Memorial Library at Columbine High School. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That’s also true for things like the food and the sound of popping balloons. We went with our son to a funeral for two of the children who were killed. As we were leaving the church, the police motorcade had just started, and the police hit the siren on their patrol car to clear the street. My son went stiff as a board. He turned totally white and just sobbed—I reached over to hug him, and I thought he was going to break me in half. He was just so tense. It was the sound of the siren that immediately triggered that response.

There needs to be awareness that traumatic events happen, and they cause responses that have to be addressed. It has to be part of policy, decision-making, and basic planning.

Liz: Lastly, what advice do you have for family, friends, loved ones of a person who has had a traumatic experience?

Carolyn: Don’t encourage people to just get over it, or say, “It’ll be okay.” These are trite little aphorisms that we tend to say to people. It will never be okay that this happened. You will be able to move on and live a happy, meaningful life, but it will never be okay. Listen with love, but don’t offer platitudes—really think about the words that you use when talking with folks experiencing traumatic loss, and allow people time to come to terms with what has happened. Don’t expect people to go back to that old “normal” from before. A new normal can be built—trauma is part of our permanent memory, and our memories and life experience all add to what and who we are.

But, if you see any behavior or actions that appear threatening, either to that person or to others—get help immediately. Do not be in denial to the point where you miss really important clues. It’s important for people suffering from trauma to get the help they need. What they are experiencing is a natural outcome of the trauma, and denial or downplaying won’t make it go away.

We can all invest a little time in learning about trauma and what to expect—and that’s more than just getting a list of the symptoms of PTSD. We need to understand the overall effect of trauma on the way people live their lives.

I would say that one thing that helped many of us was finding renewed purpose. Gerda Weissmann Klein had survived horrible, dreadful loss in World War II, when her entire family was killed by the Nazis. After the shootings, she came to Columbine to help, and she told students that they could put their experience to use. “Pain should never be wasted,” she told them.

So one of the things that helped a lot of the kids and teachers and staff was finding a way to share, to help others, and to put their painful experience to use. It’s not going to happen immediately, but working for the benefit of others can be very therapeutic and helpful.

Lastly, find a way to share the stories of the experience with a trusted loved one. Don’t bottle it up; find a trusted friend to speak with. It helps to talk with someone who cares.

Liz: Wonderful advice. Thanks so much for speaking with us about this important topic, Carolyn.