Contrary to popular notions about what is normal or
healthy, new research has found that it is OK not to
express one's thoughts and feelings after experiencing
a collective trauma, such as a school shooting or terrorist
attack.
In fact, people who choose not to express their feelings
after such an event may be better off than those who
do talk about their feelings, said University at Buffalo
psychologist Mark Seery, lead author of the study detailed
in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology.
Seery investigated the mental and physical effects
of collective traumas on people who are exposed to a
tragedy but who do not experience a direct loss of a
friend or family member. He focused on people's
responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"To the extent that other collective traumas
are similar to 9/11 in that many people are exposed
though intense media coverage, even if they do not experience
direct loss, there is reason to think these results
could generalize to other events," Seery told LiveScience.
The findings have implications for expectations of
how people should respond in the face of a collective
trauma affecting a whole community or even an entire
nation.
Seery says the results should not be interpreted to
mean that expressing one's thoughts and feelings
is harmful or that if someone wants to express their
emotions they should not do so.
"It's important to remember that not everyone
copes with events in the same way, and in the immediate
aftermath of a collective trauma, it is perfectly healthy
to not want to express one's thoughts and feelings,"
he said.
Assumption that talking is better
Seery points out that immediately after last year's
tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University there were
many "talking head" psychiatrists in the media
describing how important it was to get the students
expressing their feelings.
"This perfectly exemplifies the assumption in
popular culture, and even in clinical practice, that
people need to talk in order to overcome a collective
trauma," Seery said.
"Instead, we should be telling people there is
likely nothing wrong if they do not want to express
their thoughts and feelings after experiencing a collective
trauma," he said. "In fact, they can cope
quite successfully and, according to our results, are
likely to be better off than someone who does want to
express his or her feelings."
Surprise on who was better off
Seery and co-researchers tested people's responses
to the terrorist attacks, beginning immediately after
the event and continuing for the following two years.
Respondents were given the chance to express their thoughts
and feelings on that day and a few days afterward. The
analysis drew in part from 1,559 responses to an open-ended
question about one's "thoughts on the shocking
events of today" emailed on Sept. 11, 2001, to
a large randomly generated national sample,
The researchers then compared people who chose to
express their thoughts and feelings versus those who
chose not to express, focusing on such measures as whether
they had any post-traumatic stress symptoms, their physical
health and generalized distress.
If the assumption about the necessity of expression
is correct — that failing to express one's
feelings indicates some harmful repression or other
pathology — then people who chose not to express
should have been more likely to experience negative
mental and physical health symptoms over time, the researchers
said.
"However, we found exactly the opposite: people
who chose not to express were better off than people
who did choose to express," Seery said.
Moreover, when the researchers looked only at people
who chose to express their thoughts and feelings, and
tested the length of their responses, they found a similar
pattern. People who expressed more were worse off than
people who expressed less.
"We assessed various alternative explanations
in secondary analyses, but nothing else accounts for
this effect," Seery said.
The research project was funded by the National Science
Foundation and Roxane Cohen Silver.
