Support Networks: The Value Of Sharing Experiences In Difficult Situations

At midmorning on March 11, Antonia – a middle-aged woman from Madrid – receives terrible news: an attack has just turned the “until afternoon” with which her teenage daughter said goodbye into a final goodbye. Antonia travels with her husband to several hospitals until she reaches a center authorized by the Government to report on the crisis. There they confirm that his daughter is one of the deceased.

From that moment on, the memories of Antonia and her husband are confused with a background of overwhelm created by some young people – who have identified themselves as psychologists – who urge them to cry, express their pain, drink linden, notify their relatives … Another group of psychologists in that interminable night encourages them not to feel guilt, affirming their conviction in the transitory nature of the pain. Antonia and her husband explained much later both their surprise at this attribution of guilt and their disbelief on the topic of waning pain over time: they felt that their lives were definitely ruined.

What option did they have to cope with a crisis of these tragic characteristics? In situations of severe stress, traditional bonds, networks of people, can help cushion the pain.

Transform nonsense into solidarity

The professor of psychiatry Enrique Baca Baldomero suggested in an article the need to doubt the topic that gives health benefits to sending psychologists every time a catastrophe occurs.

Already in 2006, the Dutch professor Marit Sijbrandij found that there is no evidence that debriefing (crisis intervention techniques) is therapeutic and there is some data that can lead to suspect iatrogenic effects of these interventions. This author states that debriefing can accentuate rather than eliminate the anxious response since it standardizes the expression of grief to a universal script that ignores the specific grief rituals of each culture.

An example is what happened to the families of some fishermen drowned on the Galician Costa da Morte in 2007: they fled the town hall and the psychologists sent by the authority to go to pray and drink marc to a place where the sea traditionally returned the corpses of the castaways. There they were joined by practically the entire neighborhood, repeating what had always been done.

If professional help can be counterproductive in situations of severe stress, what alternative is there in modern societies, where the traditional bonds that cushion pain have largely disappeared?

An answer can be found in the book From Inside , edited by Amador Savater, which narrates the experience of a Citizen Network that, after 11M, worked to rescue the pain of the victims, both from the intimacy that isolated them in each house and from the professionalism that standardized it, to return it to the collective memory.

The network, formed spontaneously without state or professional help, tried to face death from the ordinary, recreating the social plots that once accompanied misfortune.

In a text, articulated like a palimpsest, the different participating authors of the Citizen Network tell each other and tell us how they face the desolation and defenselessness that the attack brought.

They refer how, upon feeling the pain of the victims, some good people began to suffer with their relatives, emerging informal ties and transforming nonsense into solidarity. Faced with the death of so many, something awoke in the collective subjectivity that provided a kind of affective transfusion to the survivors that protected them from despair.

Natural help to overcome trauma

The stories collected by Amador Savater confront the real of the consolation that flowed from the meetings of a Network endowed with common knowledge, with the experience of the artificial professional help of the Mental Health Centers.

In front of the office of the psychologist who affirmed his empathy but never had time out of the 30-minute appointment and disappeared for vacations, in the meetings of the Citizen Network the time was elastic, the speaking spaces combined the assembly with outings to the field or to the corner. The groups grew or decreased according to the needs and moods of the people.

Responses to misfortune such as those referred to question the claim of technical omnipotence and reveal its limitations to contain grief or suffering derived from adverse life circumstances, and encourage the reconstruction of the art of consoling or alleviating pain preserved in the old community.

An algodicea that, far from finding the meaning of death in theodicy or the divine plan, circulates pain through friendly dialogues to, from that condolence, recreate a community that death or misfortune threatens to destroy.

In a meeting of the Network after the 11M, several members wondered how to keep getting up every morning or how to cross a street after feeling that a bomb cancels the entire future in a second. They answer themselves: by getting together, because by sharing the pain, the collective memory of the living picks up the quote that the dead left and, by making their voices reverberate or their projects continue, they ensure that the living do not abandon themselves to the dejection.

And if this communion of people helps in extreme situations, it is equally or more useful in less tragic vicissitudes, such as facing the future without work, facing an illness or rebuilding life after a family breakdown.

As a culmination it should be said that Antonia and her husband, far from participating in these networks, followed the therapeutic protocol designed by the public health system to limit the damage of the attack. Years later, the couple continued to use antidepressants and anxiolytics continuously .

The families of the fishermen who escaped from the psychologists, instead, resorted to the common knowledge deposited in the community traditions. Their neighbors, unlike the psychologists, did not disappear when the bodies appeared and the crisis evolved. Families and neighbors continued together after the wake with masses and curses against the sea.

At the “end of the year” celebration, the testimony of one of the widows made it clear that she had felt her shared sorrow “because when the bell rang for the dead, everyone felt it was for one of their own”. The networks that Amador Savater writes about achieved that environment of community solidarity that still leads them to go on excursions together to comfort and console themselves for their absences.