Retraumatizing America

[nolabear]

While remembrance is vital, respectful, and educational, I for one will choose very carefully what I watch and don't watch (and which DU discussions I will participate in). The brain responds to triggers with the same chemical mixture it was bathed in during the original trauma. Healing involves metabolizing, making meaning, forming affiliations that support and create both security and growth.

If you find yourself reexperiencing the kind of shock, rage, despair, helplessness, and desire to blame and seek revenge on someone that we all felt on that day, I strongly recommend that you do something else--not that you ignore this anniversary, but that you find some way to feel empowered, contained, and strengthened in your convictions and your life.

We are on this little blue ball together, and will always be, as long as we exist. My own mantra today is the old song, "Let There be Peace on Earth, and Let it Begin With Me."

Take care of one another, DU. We are needed.

[progressivebydesign]

1. Yes! The media has no compunction about triggering PTSD in thousands of people again.

They're doing it for ratings and for political reasons. It's reprehensible. They can honor the people who were lost, but they don't need to show the footage over and over again. Apparently, thousands and thousands of people who witnessed it on TV also suffer from PTSD from the event, as well as America had a surge in anxiety and depression and other illnesses, because of the non stop TV replaying of the attacks.

[Odin2005]

2. 9/11 has become the yearly 2-Minute Hate...

...to keep us scared and willing to give up our rights.

[historylovr]

4. Bingo! nt

[JanetLovesObama]

3. I turned on MSNBC when I got up this morning

and quickly (20 seconds) turned the teevee OFF. I find it reprehensible for MSNBC to re-live every damned second of this tragedy on each anniversary.

[Alduin]

6. My FB and Twitter feeds are littered with "We Will Never Forget."

Good gods. We'll never forget because it's people like them who keep reminding us every goddamn year with that stupid phrase.

It makes me want to kick a bunny.

[nolabear]

7. I think people conflate remembrance and petrification sometimes.

It's okay to let things evolve. It doesn't mean they don't matter or that it wasn't important. In therapist speak we call it "complicated mourning" when people keep wounds open and raw, sometimes out of a fear that if they don't then they will be left with nothing, which is profoundlt not true.

And as people have said upthread, there are many in the media who keep those wounds raw because the next step is to get you to buy something from them that might, just might, help. It doesn't, and they don't want it to.