Former Resiliency Agency Leader Pens Community Response Guide
Mass shootings are becoming so frequent in the US, their aftermaths follow a mostly predictable pattern for the public-at-large.
But nothing could be further from the truth in impacted communities like Newtown where, in the days, weeks, and months following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, everyone from grief-stricken victims’ friends and families to first responders and doctors, local clergy members, and community leaders were thrown into uncharted territory.
This unwanted and sometimes exacerbating phenomenon inspired the former coordinator of Newtown’s Newtown Recovery and Resiliency Team (NRRT) — now the Newtown Center for Support & Wellness — to pen what could be the first-ever response handbook for newly affected communities to reach for when or if they become involved in a mass casualty tragedy.
In her recently released book, Healing A Community: Lessons For Recovery After Large-Scale Trauma, Melissa Glaser, MS LPC, delivers a practical and much-needed guide for local officials, emergency workers, mental health professionals, and anyone else dealing with the daunting task of supporting and healing a community after tragedy and trauma.
“This is really a ‘how-to’ guide based on my experiences and the work we did here in Newtown,” Ms Glaser said as she sat for a brief interview March 8 with The Newtown Bee. “It’s the model of recovery that we developed here that I did not want to disappear once we stepped away from our immediate work. It documents what we really believe is a successful model for community recovery, that other communities can access now as a road map.”
Written from a “clinical perspective,” Ms Glaser said her book “incorporates lessons learned when you step into this kind of situation, and unfortunately, we are seeing there is no shortage of need given the many tragedies we’ve seen leading up to and since Sandy Hook.”
College & Colleague Consumers
While Healing A Community has only been available for a few weeks, Ms Glaser is already seeing orders coming in from universities that want to make it part of their required reading list for students going into fields where they may someday be involved with one or more mass casualty incidents, as well as from individual practitioners who have been immersed in similar experiences, like in Las Vegas and Boston.
“They are either using it themselves or sharing it with colleagues,” she said. “I’m hearing back that they appreciate the book because it offers them an idea about ‘where do we start,’ and the most important things to focus on from day one.”
Among some important initial exercises, as described in the book, are data collection, accessing and identifying the affected community, groups, or persons, and where funds may be available. Ms Glaser said the book also covers the politics involved in initial and long-term fundraising to underwrite the often expansive, long-term crisis, trauma, and mental health intervention.
In addition, from a more clinical angle, she said it includes information “on the neurobiology of trauma and complicated grief.”
She offers best practice treatment modalities based on what Ms Glaser saw were working and not working here in Newtown. She also references “others who have done groundbreaking work in the areas of trauma and treatment.”
Ms Glaser said she came to Newtown about 18 months following the December 2012 mass shooting, bringing existing and extensive training in community-based behavioral health work, and being well-versed as a clinician in trauma treatment.
”Even with that knowledge, coming into this community when I did, I realized that I had to throw away a lot of preconceived ideas about what I thought I knew,” she confessed. “We had to bring in some real experts to help reeducate us.”
Talk Therapy Ineffective
As a trained cognitive therapist, Ms Glaser quickly discovered because of the depth and intensity of the trauma Newtown was grappling with, “talk therapy for many of those affected was not going to be effective.”
“We needed to develop more mind-body strategies to regulate people and get them stabilized to the point where they could begin to benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy work,” she said.
Thankfully, along with professionals like Ms Glaser, the Sandy Hook shooting drew a number of early stage innovators to Newtown who helped initiate responsive programs like tapping, brain spotting, Somatic Experiencing (SE), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) — an integrative psychotherapy approach that has been extensively researched and proven effective for the treatment of trauma.
Learn more about 'tapping' as trauma therapy in this 2013 Bee feature
“These innovators came here following the tragedy,” she said. “A lot of these strategies were not being widely embraced yet. One of my hopes through the book is to familiarize people first-hand about how these modalities benefited people here in Sandy Hook and Newtown. Unfortunately, Sandy Hook was a tragedy that was so magnified, now with so many others, these practices and many more that have evolved since 12/14 are being used now.”
When Ms Glaser arrived in Newtown post 12/14, she said there was no framework or clinical language or directive for how to make up a response team.
“There was no discussion of outcomes or what could be learned and what we hoped to achieve through our work,” she said. “There was also little idea of the challenges based on an entire community becoming a victim of this mass casualty tragedy. Even the Department of Justice grant I was writing was a first-of-its-kind in terms of addressing an entire community’s needs and recovery interventions.”
Healing A Community also explains the effect that sudden media attention and an abundance of well-meaning outsiders have on recovery efforts.
According to the author, following 12/14, it became clear that communities must have some documented guidance to plan and implement long-term mental health strategies to deal with mass violence and environmental catastrophe.
Given her immersion and perspectives gained through Ms Glaser and her team’s experience in Newtown, she hopes and believes that Healing A Community: Lessons For Recovery After Large-Scale Trauma offers a starting point for anyone needing to developing a plan to address a constellation of needs after a large-scale trauma.
The book, published by Central Recovery Press, is available in print and as a electronic download — click here to order.