WASHINGTON - The sudden downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over eastern Ukraine brings into sharp focus an issue that many people in our world have to deal with, sudden, traumatic loss. To find out more about how to deal with that kind of loss and what it can do both physically and psychologically, "Now" host David Byrd spoke with Ivonne Miranda, a child and family therapist at the
This airplane crash or downing, however people would like to refer to it is obviously very, very traumatic for the families of those involved. How is a sudden trauma or grief different from someone dying of natural causes, let’s say?
Well the key component and the most significant difference is the preparation or the anticipation you have of a loss. When you anticipate a loss, there’s ways you can prepare for it but you can’t and don’t have the time opportunity to do when there’s a tragic loss or what we call a traumatic loss. Because you don’t have that preparation and therefore you have to deal with the shock of it all -- to try to cope through it and to try to understand what happened. And so the loss is a little bit complicated. It’s what we call, because you have to deal with the event plus all the feelings of the event all of a sudden.
Does it affect people psychologically and neurologically, is there actually a neuro-chemical thing that happens in your brain when you suffer sudden loss like this?
Absolutely. People talk about, you know, traumatic loss as having a huge spectrum of they’re both neurobiological, there’s physical and there are emotional. You know people complain of difficulty sleeping. People complain about headaches and stomach aches. People complain about anxiety attacks, panic attacks, or flashbacks. Images just inundate their minds of loved ones and because they don’t know exactly, they were not with them the moment they passed away, they start imagining what that might look like. Depression and sadness are some of the things that are felt. Anger, a lot of people feel anger or confusion, frustration. Another view that often comes is guilt. People feel guilty like, 'is there something that I could have done to prevent this? Is there something I should have said?' You know, it’s a process and everybody goes through it differently. But it definitely, for everybody, has elements of physical and emotional pain.
Does this kind of grief take longer to recover from than say someone who dies from a disease that you knew was going to kill them?
You know our experience at the Wendt Center, traumatic losses are definitely processed and handled very differently than from what we call uncomplicated grief. I think that when you—when people die of natural causes or die and there’s been anticipation of their death and people get the support that they need and are able to establish the resources necessary to feel accompanied through that process. It’s very different from when the loss is sudden and there’s no anticipation of it. It tends to take a little bit longer and the process is different. Like in this case, you know when there are national disasters or public tragedies; it’s hard to grieve when all this is happening. You’re trying to gather information. You’re trying to know what happened and you need to get to a place where you feel a little more of a sense of closure and that doesn’t happen until you get a little bit more information about what occurred. So closure is important, it tends to be delayed in traumatic loss, so that’s why it takes a little bit longer to heal from this kind of grief.
What about when the grief is so public and a source of public controversy, what will that do to the grieving process?