Healing in Chaos

The clouds were still gray as I entered the FEMA tent and took my place behind the table marked, “counselor”.  I had received a call about an hour earlier that several tornadoes had touched down in a local community and there was need of crisis counseling.  I made the forty five minute drive to what looked like the edge of the world.  It was what could only be described as utter devastation.   Outside of spending a week in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, this was one of the worst sights I had ever witnessed. 

With Katrina it was everywhere.  So after a while you lost your sense of perspective.  Every neighborhood saw the devastation, every family was directly touched.  The community pulled together and in the midst of the devastation you saw neighbors helping neighbors, friends weeping with friends, community organizations pulling together with such speed and efficiency it was almost uncanny.  Here though, after the tornadoes had passed only hours before was chaos. 

Crisis counseling is so much different than the counseling done in the office.  Much of the goal is helping provide a very pragmatic stability.  You are dealing with people in shock, and on some occasions you find yourself dealing with your own shock in the midst of it. 

This day however nothing was going as planned, the FEMA tent was full.  There were people just wanting to get out of the rain, and others who had just lost everything to the fierce winds.  I heard crying, yelling, there were emergency responders coming in and out.  It felt like we were all experiencing the disaster together and no one had a clear picture of what helping or responding really looked like.

I found my role becoming that of an advocate for those who seemed lost in the shuffle.  I began to walk up to individuals and ask what they needed.  The needs were all the basic kind that you would need after any disaster; food, water, shelter, and some semblance of safety.  We started unpacking the food boxes as they came, handing them out to countless faces.  Inside the tent it became eerily quiet as for the first time since the storms the community was engaged in some normal activity.

I sat with so many people that afternoon and heard some of the bravest stories of survival:  Fathers risking their lives for their children, families huddling together in prayer and utter desperation hoping that they would make it through the dark night.

I left feeling a sense of urgency.  I had witnessed what truly happens when things fall apart.  I had seen a community whose buildings and homes had been destroyed, but their commitment to one another strengthened.  I don’t know what the town had been like before, or what drama had been on the front burner the day before, but it was gone now.

It made me think of the families and individual’s that I work with.  In a very real way they were all going through their own private tornadoes.  Many had not experienced the compassion of their own community. For some it was because there was no “exterior damage”, nothing that you could assess with the naked eye.  For others it was because they were hiding in the rubble of broken relationships.  I began to realize that much of my experience in counseling wasn’t that different than the work of crisis counseling.  I learned that the underlying factor wasn’t what methodology was the most effective or what intervention gets to the point most quickly.  It was, rather, compassion.  I had gone to help the broken and found that they had helped me.  That instead of heading to disaster I was heading from disaster into a functioning community. 

My guiding rules in my practice of counseling have been very simple since then, counsel in compassion and become a student to everyone.