Coping with Crisis: Finding Strength Through Grief

When the historic tornado struck St. Louis on May 16th of this year, I was in New Orleans at my best friend’s graduation. Due to a miscommunication, I missed the moment he’d walked across. Then I found myself suddenly invited at the last minute to a dinner party hosted by wealthy relatives, where I felt noticeably underdressed. I was trying hard to make up for all the ways I felt I couldn’t fully show up on his big day.

Sitting on an aesthetically pleasing but bafflingly uncomfortable couch, I found myself in a conversation with one of my friend’s relatives about music I barely knew. Then, my phone buzzed from beneath my leg. Politeness kept me from checking it immediately. I smiled and waited for the conversation to wrap up before finally reaching for my phone to see the notification.

I wish I could say that the text message I received felt different from any other—that the buzz had left me with a lingering unease that wouldn’t fade until I addressed the emergency waiting in my phone. But it didn’t. There was no warning feeling that what appeared in my inbox was a photo from my downstairs neighbor of our destroyed house, rather than a simple “hello” from an old friend. Even for those of us who consider ourselves intuitive, what happened on May 16th came as a shock.

The rest of the day was a blur. I made frantic phone calls to every friend who might be able to retrieve my house key from the neighbor watching my cat and get him out of the damaged building. Pictures and videos flooded my phone — trees down, windows shattered, roofs torn off, houses reduced to rubble. I gave shaky explanations to friends and partygoers about what had happened, while receiving reassurances meant to comfort me — but instead, those words became the first memory of feeling utterly misunderstood. In just an hour, this crisis had reached far beyond the state of my home; it had consumed my entire life.

Without a second thought, my brain had switched into action mode, which meant no emotions could reach me. And as my reigns on the circumstances I found myself in tightened, I found myself moving far away from processing my experience and even further away from coping with it.

My experience is only one of myriad ways that the historic tornado affected members of the St. Louis community. Despite the many differing circumstances surrounding the tornado and its disparate impact, a struggle to cope with change that disrupted — or further put a wrench in — people’s ability to progress with their lives is one factor that unifies many. And with so many moving parts to recovery, even as the city slowly heals, people may find themselves feeling suspended in time with nowhere to put down what they experienced. Telling our stories is an important part of beginning to recover from a disaster. What part of your story do you find yourself repeating when telling the story of your crisis? What part of your story do you find yourself withholding?

Crisis Requires Digging Deeper

Recovery from this disaster poses many questions:

• What does it look like to begin to heal when you are still displaced?

• What does healing look like when we pass by changed landscapes and broken buildings every day that remind us precisely of what we lost?

• What does coping look like as the city begins to move on, new news begins to dominate the headlines, and the experience that left — and continues to leave — the lives of so many suspended in midair seems to be getting forgotten?

• How can we cope without looking away?

• And what about those of us who can’t?

Despite a lifetime spent weathering disasters in my home state of Louisiana, I still don’t have the perfect answer. But this time around, I knew an important part of finding it was asking myself the important, yet often unacknowledged questions. How has your experience affected your relationships? Friendships? Your relationship to work, school, your sense of place in your community? How had this impacted your sense of trust in the world, in those around you, or even in yourself?

In truth, the tornado that we experienced impacted not only our homes but also our experience of life itself. Despite grappling with these questions being an integral part of the healing that must occur in order for a sense of stability to be re-established after a trauma, many of these questions are left out of the narrative when considering disaster relief recovery. 

At the same time, these questions can be hard to face when life keeps piling on one demand after another. Yet, in the process of recovering from a crisis, showing up for ourselves — and letting those around us into our experience enough so they can show up for us — becomes more important than ever.

Going through this process, I found that answers for how to heal — or even just how to cope — often lied on the other side of my grief. When I allowed myself to truly hold my grief in one hand, I learned how to hold the tools to mend it in the other.

Coping with what has happened oftentimes means allowing ourselves to come face to face with the most difficult emotions surrounding what has happened to us. And though, in the midst of crisis, this can oftentimes look like plunging ourselves further into despair, this is also where the key to how to dig ourselves out often lies.

Find Support Through Your Grief

Coping with crisis is hard, but healing is possible. Schedule a free consultation with our therapists and take the first step toward recovery.