Aftershocks

Floods. Queensland, Australia, January 2011

Rain. Raining. Rained. This hard-baked, dry-cracked earth; drenched, sodden, saturated. Waters rising, rise. Risen. Rivers warning, threatening, rushing, damning. Dams break. Waters break. First slow, then sudden. Creeks rise, streams swamp, massive bodies of water move inevitably higher, faster, stronger. Flash flooding, downing, drowning, farms, towns, cattle, people.

I watch from the safety of my new sofa, in my new home, in my new country. Floods to the north, to the south, to the west. In the east, the ocean takes on a new, and vaguely threatening, hue.

Brisbane, an hour away, is under water. Cars float in underground car parks. People are evacuated. Homes are inundated, ravaged by the new-found strength of the resident river. Two horses swim. Straining. Panicked. Exhausted. Their great heads rest on wreckage, resigned. They float past the city in a tide of brown, rescue efforts hampered by the force of the floodwaters.

News reports tell us the statistics, the stories. The river peaked at 5 a.m. local time, at a height of about 4.65 meters. More than 115,000 people are without power. Thousands of people have been evacuated. Over 11,900 homes inundated, an additional 14,500 partially affected, 5,000 businesses. Thirteen people dead, 50 missing. Three quarters of the state declared a disaster zone: an area the size of Germany and France combined is under water.

The rain has stopped, and the sun shines on.

Cyclone Yasi. Northern Queensland, Australia, February 3, 2011

“Beautiful one day, perfect the next.” It’s a holidaying hot spot: eerily empty on evacuation orders, as a Category 5 tropical cyclone tracks westward in the direction of tropical Northern Queensland. There’s rain. More rain. Furious, torrential. Wind, whipping, bending. Palm trees bending, breaking. Leaves flying, trees flying. Rain, more rain. Horizontal, heavy, heavier. Roaring, pounding, thundering. Bending, breaking windows, doors, roofs, tiles.

I watch from the safety of my new couch in my new country.

Toppled trees and power lines. Flooding. Farms, orchards, plantations are flattened. Lives? No. But livelihoods? Bending, bruised, broken. The state’s food bowl, the tourist’s paradise, left mocked and mangled.

Earthquake. Christchurch, New Zealand, February 22, 2011

Concrete crumpled. Cracks yawn in familiar sidewalks, made unfamiliar. Twisted iron arms of broken buildings lie dusted in destruction. Brick-strewn squares and tumbled steeple of the city’s iconic Cathedral—there’s no peace in this house of God. There’s heartless destruction in this heartland of my homeland. The line blurred between masonry and weaponry. Buildings and bodies lie broken; multistoried corporate quarters pancaked in scenes of devastation. Souls lost. Lost souls walk ruined streets. Fear and fragility writ large on the faces of victims and heroes. The clocks have stopped in these shaky isles. My shaky isles. New Zealand. Godzone. God’s own. God’s. Alone.

News reports tell us statistics and stories: 182 dead, many still missing. The central city is cordoned. Triage tents operate from Hagley Park. Emergency amputations take place amidst the rubble. Amputations. The death toll keeps rising. Search and rescue efforts continue.

I watch from the comfort of my couch in my other country.

My disaster is mediated. My meaning mediated and moderated. It comes in a series of words and images, subtitled with a ticker-tape parade of moment-by-moment updates. I find myself at once strangely distanced and distant, despite the images of unparalleled horror that stain my screen, the stories that scar my soul. I cringe at the intrusion on personal tragedy, yet simultaneously am drawn to watch, to read, to listen to these stories that construct individual and collective Flood/Cyclone/Earthquake Disaster Experience. All three.

Compelled and repelled. Implicit in this dialectical tension are tangled desires for information and confirmation, of validation and obligation. I’m torn between too much information and not enough. These disasters, all three, strike close to the heart. To my home. Close in a way that I haven’t experienced before. Close in geography, proximity. Close in a way that hurts.

Yet I watch from the comfort of my couch.

I have friends who have lost everything: their homes, possessions—lost in Brisbane’s floods. (For the record, Australian mud stains cannot be washed clean.) I have friends who have lost everything: their homes, possessions, friends—lost in the Christchurch earthquake. (The family cat so traumatized by constant earth trembling that he’s since emigrated to Australia.)

Yet I write from the comfort of my couch.

I am conflicted.

A few months ago a colleague and I joked, that what we needed was a natural disaster. “Nothing huge.” “Just something we can centre our research on.” Our words, our laughter, echo in my head.

Floods, cyclones, earthquakes, bushfires, tsunami, tornados. Saying something makes it so.

Hash. Rehash. Mish-Mash. I mess with my words as they mess with my head.

My left-brained, statistically trained, rational, objective, functional self prevails.

In previous work, I’ve been interested in the ways in which we repeat ourselves in communication, under the guise of what I call “verbal rumination” (Henson, 2003, 2009). Verbal rumination, the translation of ruminative thought to an interpersonal verbal behavior: a repetitive communication of content that is potentially aversive to both an individual and his or her relational partner (Henson, 2003). In a past life, much of this research was quantitative, and there was evidence to suggest that negative verbal rumination is predictive of depression (I know, fun stuff) .

More recently though, I’ve begun to think of verbal rumination as a form of narrative. A compulsion to communicative action: an, often repetitive, dialogue that drives us, and reflects an attempt (at least in part) to “story [and restory] some sense into our lives . . .” (Poulos, 2009, p. 27). Except when it doesn’t.

Lauded as a constructive process for posttraumatic repair and growth (e.g., Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004), more rarely is the potential for more problematic outcomes resulting from the interactive narrative process acknowledged. Outcomes that reflect the darker side of interpersonal experience; the dysfunctional, distasteful, the disruptive, and transgressive (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998). Those aspects of the interpersonal that encompass the moments—and sometimes “lifetimes of quiet struggle, dissatisfaction, and sense of frustration, anger, and despair that result from merely suboptimal forms of human endeavor in our significant (and even mundane) relationships with others” (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998, p. xvii). After all, as Poulos (2009) observes, “A story told is a powerful thing that can unleash all sorts of grief” (p. 39).

To Neimeyer (2004), the “disorganized” self-narrative both disables and enables posttraumatic growth. A form of narrative disruption, the disorganized narrative reflects an individual’s inability to reconcile a posttrauma self-narrative about the traumatic event with his or her broader life narrative. The inconsistency of the micro- and macro-narratives precipitates processes of narrative revision that attempt to restore coherence in the wake of trauma. The complexities inherent in this process of narrative revision are the very processes that potentiate meaning-making, and consequently, “meaning-made” (Neimeyer, 2004, 2005; Park, 2010; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). Meaning made: a resolution, a recovery—that leprechaun’s pot of gold. The disorganized narrative is said to be most closely associated with posttraumatic growth (Neimeyer, 2004).

Speaking of disorganized narratives. . . . My right-brained, feminine, feminist, subjective, relative, post–postmodern self travails.

I recently woke at 4 a.m. in the morning convinced that I needed to organize my family’s disaster response. (“How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.”). Sleep was elusive. Tangled in the sheets, I channeled my inner control freak and in a militaristic fashion I tasked various family members with their various responsibilities. We had, they were advised, only 10 minutes to pack up before we were to flee for higher ground.

One familial minion was to load bottled water and anything drinkable into the boot of the car; another requisitioned to pull medications, canned food, batteries, and anything first-aid-related from the depths of the pantry and the bathroom cupboard; my husband was to catch the cat and fetch the gas bottle from the barbeque. That left me to collect important documents, personal mementos, and the like—and oversee proceedings. I considered acquiring a whistle for my bedside table, though on reflection, that probably wouldn’t help with the cat’s cooperation in a crisis.

Irrational and relational, I argued—as one does, as two do, with my strangely nonresponsive husband (he, after all, was asleep). It seemed perfectly reasonable to note that in the event of an evacuation, chances are, the petrol gauge in his car would be sitting on empty. Not ideal. Not helpful. But bloody typical.

How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.

Research on social sharing has found evidence that exposure to a social sharing situation (i.e., as the recipient of an emotional narrative) is in itself emotion inducing (Harber & Cohen, 2005). Consequently, it seems that exposure to the sharing of intense emotional episodes frequently leads to repetitive, secondary, and even tertiary, social sharing—in which “people who listen to a narrative concerning another’s experience feel the urge to share in turn their experience of listening” (Curci & Bellelli, 2004, p. 881). You story, I story my story of your story—and so the story goes . . .

A friend of mine, a colleague, was moving this summer.

A week between the end of one lease and the beginning of another, she did what we (they don’t call us the boomerang generation for nothing) naturally do.

She moved back home to her parents. In Brisbane.

With all her worldly possessions.

Three days before the flood.

Australian mud stains cannot be washed clean.

A student in my methods class disappeared this summer.

To Christchurch.

Emotion before reason, she couldn’t contact her family that fateful day, and so she boarded a plane and flew home.

Home to find her family.

Home to the destruction of her hometown.

Home to her traumatized cat.

The cat has since emigrated to Australia.

These stories. Their stories. My stories. Our story.

Despite the persuasiveness of work touting the benefits of posttraumatic event disclosure (e.g., Neimeyer, 2004), recent research conveys the view that emotional sharing in fact does little to alleviate event-related negative effects (Zech & Rimé, 2005). At this point then, the distinction between outcome and meaning arguably becomes an important one insofar as we are interested in the end to the narrative means.

Baumeister (1991) presents meaning as a “mental representation of possible relationships among things, events, and relationships. Thus, meaning connects things” (p. 15).

Meaning making is a messy business. We cognate, ruminate, agitate some sense into our messy lives. And rarely, it seems, do we do this alone. Social creatures, we are driven by the compulsion to share, to communicate. “Meaning connects things.”

And so, your disaster story is mine. Your story—your meaning—connects you to me.

You with your flooded home.

Your loss of worldly possessions.

The sewage seeping through the fault line of your life.

Your family’s close call.

Your traumatized cat.

Your traumatized self.

You become my cautionary tale. My wealth of advice. My disorganized narrative. My point of comparison (there’s nothing like your disaster to put my life in perspective). You mess with your words and they mess with my head.

Our “collective story overcomes some of the isolation and alienation of contemporary life” (Richardson, 1997, . 33). And so, communicatively our collective posttraumatic narrative constructs support, empathy, compassion, connection, information. Warm fuzzies.

Except when it doesn’t.

Instead of information, affirmation, confirmation, validation, we sometimes encounter—we create—invalidation, disconfirmation, negation. Those cold and prickly “suboptimal forms of human endeavor” that shadow and sever our storied connection. Those suboptimal moments of human existence that show us to be all too human.

Despite these hazards, we remain compelled, however, to share, to vent, to verbally ruminate, to story and restory sense back into our lives. Bound to somehow validate and retrospectively explain our own experience—even when it’s your experience—through interaction. To live life forward but understand it backwards (Christensen, 2006). Strangely obliged to make sense of the nonsensical, to organize the disorganized (Neimeyer, 2004).

Except when we can’t or we don’t.

When this story—this definition of some moment in our life refuses to create or relate its way into existence.

Or when it does, and this manifest fragment of reality

Transforms, reforms,

Conflates, recreates,

Sanitizes, or fictionalizes actuality.

Your story. My story. Our story.

Seismic repetition, radiating from the epicenter of our own disaster. Tremors, rippling in waves of newfound violence, enacted on hearts, minds, and lives. These aftershocks that break and remake our hearts, our selves, in newfound configurations that leave us barely recognizable.

These consequences, these shadows of disaster that linger and remind us of the centrality of our trauma. Interactional accidents of proximity that label us as witness and witnessed, as story and storyteller. Conversations, that through words and silence are temporarily consolatory or alternatively concreted in the consciousness in shades of light and dark. Communication that remembers, that resurrects, that blurs the line between you and me, that shows the permeability of our parenthetical lives.

The poet Wislawa Szymborska (1993) writes: “Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through” (p. 48). These concluding lines are drawn from her poem “Love at First Sight,” and in reference to the titled subject matter, she gives the reader cause to question the framing of our own lives—our own book of events. To recognize overture as entr’acte adds a dimension of structure to existence that highlights antecedence and consequence. This vision of story is one that arguably foreshadows a sense of orchestration in our lives. That aside, to view initiation or interruption as sequential is to contextualize the new, and traumatic as a passing plotline in the broader story of our lives.

If only it were so easy.

Instead, the ripples and repetitions of our trauma echo in the space between then and now and rupture their way into being. Our being. The reverberations created through the social storying of our experience; unavoidable infractions on our natural sense of self.

On occasion, these conversational ruminations add to the mythic understanding of a stressful event at the societal-cultural level (Neimeyer, 2004; Your story, my story, our story). Other times, our narrative murmurings drift on the wind, unheard, only to return on eddies of distress and despair. Sometimes it seems repetition distances us from our disaster through emotional disengagement or recovery. Other times, the same narrative ruminating serves only to heighten the salience of the stressor (Holland, Currier, Coleman, & Neimeyer, 2010). In the case of the latter, the restorying of the traumatic event may assert the narrative dominance of the trauma in problematic ways—storying the life outside that event in ways that are only referential to the traumatic landmark. (Before the floods; after the earthquake . . . ).

Perhaps we are, as Sophie Tamas (2011) suggests, just storying and restorying until “we find narratives we can live with.” The permutations of our ruminations akin to the pick-a-path novels of an 80s childhood, whereby we “choose our own adventure.” (In one youthful half-remembered horror, if you took a wrong turn on page whatever, “you” ended up invisible and unheard in your own home. I’m still scarred). Avoiding the wrong turns in our own disaster narratives seems to be the hard part. Becoming invisible in our own stories, just one hazard among many.

There is something paradoxical in the writing of this. Faced as I am with the literature on disaster, trauma, rumination, and recovery, perhaps I should know better. Quite what “better” is remains unclear. Better might be recovery—the organization of the disorganized. Or maybe the relegation of the rumination to the depths of the subconscious. Narrative coherence? Narrative distraction? Still . . . better might be found in the margins of this story. In the silences, the spaces, outside the dominant account. Better may not be mine for the taking. Better lies in the fractured lines, the dust, the mud, the liquefaction of the lives of others to whom I am only witness. This “recovery effect” (Zech & Rimé, 2005), does it lie in the government buyback of quake-ruined housing? Does it ride on the back of a mass exodus from this tortured city? Is it evident in the lush new foliage on cyclone-ravaged landscapes? Will it creep in on the defiant construction of bigger, better, stronger. . . . Will it?

Will. It.

And perhaps therein lies the power of the rumination. Power to create, to narrate something into being. As to whether that creation is light or dark, well, that’s fodder for a different story—a story about our decisions to use our “power for good . . . or for evil” (as the framed retro image on my office wall reminds me on a daily basis).

The horror of being witness to the tragedy of others lies principally in the recognition of one’s own helplessness. Help-less-ness. Inability to help, and more—the bone-tingling knowledge of one’s own fragility should the finger of disaster point in our direction. That’s what keeps us awake at night. Bearing witness. (That and making disaster-readiness plans . . . ). Perhaps that further explains our compulsion to revelation, our connectedness to the disaster of others: a futile effort to assist—as if through simply seeing and hearing the experience of others we can serve to help bear the weight of their tragedy. Perhaps that too explains the contagion effect, social sharing, whereby we share the stories of others (Harber & Cohen, 2005). Baring witness. A story shared is a story halved? A disaster halved? If only. Still . . . better this communication, this connection, than sitting divorced and distant on a comfortable couch. Right? And better this story than no story? And better . . . Better.

Saying something makes it so.

And sometimes a conclusion is just what happens when you’re done thinking.