Rob Gordon (Alpine Re-Run)
Trauma, Loss, and Disruption: What Really Matters in Recovery
A disaster psychologist explains why social connection matters more than money in long-term recovery.
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Kintsugi Studio
Rob Gordon (Alpine Re-Run)
A disaster psychologist explains why social connection matters more than money in long-term recovery.
Hear this story
Follow the show
Rob Gordon is a disaster psychologist who has spent decades learning from the communities he works with after fires, floods, and other large-scale disasters. He does not have all the answers. What he has is pattern recognition built from listening to hundreds of people rebuild their lives, and willingness to sit with the parts of recovery that most people miss or misunderstand.
When disaster strikes, three things happen at once. Trauma arrives first: not the event itself, but what your mind believes will happen, and the deep reorganisation you do to survive it. Loss comes next, and it is wider than people expect. You lose property, yes, but also the places that steadied you, the routines that held your identity, the friends who step back from your suffering because they are frightened of it. Third comes disruption. Your life becomes consumed by a single massive task, rebuilding, and everything else falls away: time with your partner, your children seeing their friends, the quiet that lets you think. In the rush to fix the physical damage, people abandon the relationships and routines that would actually save them.
Rob's work cuts against the instinct to rebuild fast and alone. He shows what research now confirms: the speed and quality of your recovery depends almost entirely on one thing. Not money. Not infrastructure. Not political will. Social connection. When communities stay together, when people keep showing up to talk, to eat, to laugh, to hold each other's losses as real even when they look different from your own, people come through. When isolation and relative deprivation tear communities apart, people get stuck. Understanding these phases, survival, the long grind, identity crisis, recovery from recovery, gives people a chance to protect what matters most while they rebuild what was lost.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses grief & loss, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au • GriefLine: 1300 845 745 · griefline.org.au
“Trauma is not necessarily what happens. Bad things happen. Trauma the injury is created by what I think is going to happen, because that determines what I get ready for.”
“When you want to rebuild, you suddenly have a massive new task. Your lives are already full. You're going to put aside basically everything that's dispensable: talking to your wife, playing with your kids, visiting your in-laws, going for a run, talking to your friends.”
“A barbecue with the community and eating half-cooked sausages and laughing together, telling jokes, maybe someone playing music or a comedian. That brings them out of the stress. Their brains start to fire up again.”
The hero, today
Trauma is created by what a person believes will happen, not simply by what does happen, and this determines how their mind reorganizes to survive it. People lose far more than objects in disaster: they lose community, environment, mental health resources, and the routines that hold their identities and relationships together. The greatest risk to recovery happens when people stay in high-stress survival mode for months without breaking it, because stress narrows their brain's capacity to think, decide, or connect with others. Social connection and community are not nice-to-haves during recovery, they are the one factor that determines both how fast people rebuild and whether they stay alive. When people preserve the routines and values that mattered before disaster, even small ones like talking with a partner over tea or letting their children see friends, they protect what would otherwise become irreversible loss.
Yes. Rob Gordon (Alpine Re-Run) is a real person who shared their own story in their own words. Kintsugi Heroes is a not-for-profit that shares first-person stories of overcoming adversity, told with the person's consent.
Kintsugi Heroes, a registered Australian not-for-profit. Every story is shared with the hero's own consent and reviewed under Kintsugi Heroes' trauma-informed content standard before it goes public.
Trauma is created by what a person believes will happen, not simply by what does happen, and this determines how their mind reorganizes to survive it.
People lose far more than objects in disaster: they lose community, environment, mental health resources, and the routines that hold their identities and relationships together.
The greatest risk to recovery happens when people stay in high-stress survival mode for months without breaking it, because stress narrows their brain's capacity to think, decide, or connect with others.
kugi Heroes brings you the following flood resilience stories in partnership with Singleton neighborhood center and grant funding from the hunter New England and Central Coast Primary Health Network to find out more about this podcast head to kugi heroes.com [Music] Au on July 6th 2022 the worst flood in 70 years hit the town of broke and the surrounding Hunter Valley region the community is still recovering from the trauma the floods brought destroying their homes and their livelihoods in this special limited series of kugi Heroes John Millum sits down with the community who suffered as a result of the floods and gives them space to share their adversity resilience and compassion it's only through connection and empathy that there can be a path to recovery these are stories of trauma and can be confronting if you find they have a triggering effect please reach out to someone who can help keep you safe now listen in as John takes you beyond the Deluge with kuki [Music] Heroes this episode is with Rob Gordon it's an extract from a previous series we've done on the Alpine bushfires from 2019 to 2020 that had a huge impact on areas of myrtleford and the Alpine region in the state of Victoria Rob Gordon is an expert in dealing with the trauma that comes after natural disaster and we thought this episode was particularly relevant for what the broke Community experienced as a result of the floods you've heard a lot of interviews so far and as you listen to this episode you'll realize what the broke Community got right what they've been doing that's facilitated such a strong Community Connection and being still early in the recovery process the things that they should prepare for enjoy this one with Rob Gordon hello and welcome it is another special episode of Kuka Heroes for the Alpine bush fires project and I'm here with Rob Gordon today welcome Rob thanks aene good to be here thank you so whereabouts are you uh obviously I'm assuming you're in Victoria yes I'm I live in the Yara Valley so unfortunate I have a bit of nature around me I have a practice down in Hill and now Eastern suburbs but uh this This Disaster work takes me all over not not just the state all over the country which it's very interesting to meet people all over the place wonderful well I'm really Keen to hear from you today and learn about the recovery I think specifically I mean given that you've worked with the government and with people for so many years you've seen a lot of bush fires you've seen a lot of disasters um you know tapping into your knowledge and experience so you know take us back you know where do we start well uh we could start with uh me being part of a Royal Children's Hospital team working in the Ash Wednesday bars in the Madan area and realizing that nobody much knew what we should be trying to do with people uh that were involved in disasters of this sort that only just in ented the term post-traumatic stress disorder but what I gradually realized that there's a whole range of other problems that occur to people one of the biggest ones is the disaster is an unprecedented event most people have not been through one or if they have they never sort of comprehended it and so it doesn't really help them with the next one unless it was you know a minor scare that gives some good experience and so I realized that uh it was very important to really just listen to people and find out what's going on for them without making assumptions over the years gradually I've seen patterns emerging and one of the things I want to emphasize is because uh it's a social event our definition of disaster affects a a a a community or a group of people or a or an area so everyone in that Community is in some way affected so there's a social Dimension to it that we're not used to seeing in normal mental health stress and so forth if a tragedy occurs they occur all the time tragic Road accident or criminal event there are specific number of people affected and the people around them aren't uh primarily affected so they're often available to uh become supporters but in the disaster there's a whole range of of problems I can remember working with um people after the cambera fires uh a woman telling me how devastated she was that virtually all the houses in her street burnt and hers didn't and for years she's living there having lived in a warm uh supportive closeit Comm Community she's there with completely blank blocks around her and it it takes years to rebuild people never expect that this is part of the problem that people go into they go into with a range of expectations they might have build a house before or they probably haven't but they would have the time frame measured around how long it takes to build a house when you choose to do it you've got the money and you've gone through all the preliminaries and so on but if everyone in the community is trying to rebuild a house of course it's completely different there's a sort of a a very tangible graphic experience in the initial stage and that includes three elements that I think a most important trauma which is basically the word we use for a psychological injury and that that comes from having an experience which is beyond my previous experience exceeds my assumptions expectations often is associated with strong feelings of helplessness and involves a very serious threat to myself or others and what I've learned is that what is traumatic is not necessarily what happens if bad things happen that is traumatic but trauma the injury is created by what I think is going to happen because that determines what I get ready for so there will be a lot of people in any natural disaster environment who go through experiences where they think they might be killed or their loved ones might have died or uh other terrible things have happened that stimulates a deep-seated reorganization of yourself to try and accept and take it on and deal with it but you don't understand what you've done and those adjustments often remain in place place until a person digs down realizes what they did and undo it very simple example is um I remember in Ash Wednesday people were on the reserve in Mount midan and they wouldn't do this now but a blackened fire crew comes in daggers off their truck they've all been traumatized goes around and says to people your house is all right yours is gone yours is gone yours is okay we don't know about yours and this woman who was telling me uh said they spent the rest of the night breathing their house and then when things settled down maybe the next day or so they slowly went out carefully in their car as they came around the house corner there was their house untouched and she said I'm ashamed to say it but I felt a Pang of disappointment and and that's a really important thing to recognize disappointment we know you know story of second world war when uh uh people uh got a message about their loved ones probably just Telegram in those days that your your husband is missing an action presumed dead and then 3 years later he knocks on the door of course there was no mobile phones and I'm I'm I'm alive here I'm coming and no they just rock up and of course those marriages often didn't last but the kids didn't recognized and fathers and so so it's this deep reorganization that goes on at an unconscious level because we're not normally operating so that's that's that trauma is a really important issue it's varied we can have all sorts of different traumas the the first problem is trauma the second problem is loss and loss causes grief but there can be all sorts of losses again I remember these are these were learning experiences for me a few years into the recovery in Mount Mass a woman said there used to be a beautiful place on the mountain Mount Madan that had a beautiful view and lovely nature all around it little bit of Creek Ro running through it and that's whenever I was sad that's where I would go and I would sit there I look over the mountain for a couple of hours and I would feel better but that's all burnt now it's all gone so I've lost she's really lost her Mental Health Resource and she really felt that now you know that's very hard to talk about when somebody's lost everything they own this woman didn't actually lose her house and so what you start to get is once the loss comes in it could be loss of friends think of the woman in canra loss of community loss of environment loss of property lot of uh lot of things that ultimately mean something and therefore part of me so one of the big challenges how do I still feel myself when I've lost everything that's part of my history history the the the wide spectrum of losses means that it's very hard for people to understand each other another story that comes to mind talking to a flooded community in central Victoria and there were rows of chairs and I was giving a bit of a talk about the sorts of things people might go through and how they can look after themselves and I noticed a couple of rows back a woman sitting there with a very sad face and after a time she put up her hand and say excuse me he is it possible that people who weren't affected could also feel upset and I said yes of course and I spoke about some of these things she said oh thank you he said well actually we were affected uh our shed was flooded and there was a woman sitting behind her who also looked pretty upset and I imagine I never got to speak her but I imagine that uh she had lost everything and this when this woman said we were affected my shed was flooded the woman behind her literally rolled her eyes as if to say oh you poor thing your shed is I'm so sorry for you and I saw this and I was looking at her sadness and I thought what can I say and I just said what do you keep in your shed he said all the effects from my mother's estate she died a month or so before the flood how would anyone understand her sadness and that she's entitled to absorb recovery support uh unless they talked but as soon as you say that everyone's going to say oh gee that's pretty tough there is a um an effect a social effect that I first read about in a book published in the 1960s in America by a very famous sociologist in America called Robert Merton and he was probably one of the first people to actually start scientifically studying disasters and he noticed that there was a tendency for people to kind of Benchmark their impact against the most severe tragic impact in the community and if they didn't have anything like that they didn't feel entitled to ask for help don't worry about me go see poor old Rob his lost everything now don't worry about aene she's only lost this at the other it's Rob is the problem and now he called that relative deprivation and what's behind that is that in normal life we constantly make sense of our experience by uh drawing comparisons with the people around us after all the whole notion of normality is based on that comparison if everybody I know gets upset about this if I'm not crazy I'm just normal and so there's a process whereby to begin with everyone's gone through this huge experience and they they contract into a tight I call it the state of fusion tight strong supportive uh emotionally uh resilient sort of group and they all rush around and help each other in the early days as time passes these differences start to emerge and that's often when people sort of lock into their perspective the differences might also be around who did what and when did the emergency services do what I expected them to do without knowing whether you know I didn't really listen to their wanning communication so I didn't take any Noti of that so when it happened I didn't follow their advice so they weren't where I was and so on and so forth there a lot of stories like that come out and be that's that's part of the disaster being an unprecedented experience it's very hard to get people involved in preparedness activities because that's just disasters we're too busy you know I've got things on this weekend and so you get these tensions begin to emerge and so one of the problems of the recovery period is there often a period of social turmoil of conflict sometimes very bitter uh and destructive comment and we know now with social media you can say whatever you like and have everybody know it uh and and some very emotional thoughtless things are said which are very very w wounding I've met people I met a woman who I worked with again in Ash Wednesday these were all the learning experiences some years later uh you know she was part of the recovery system there and she had lived there all her life and other members of her family lived in the era and were affected and I came across her in a sort of professional situation some years later and I was starting to think about these social effects and I said uh it wasn't a real name Mary I said you're a very gregarious person you must have had a lot of friends in in that area oh yes she said I knew everybody I'm growing up there how many friends have you got in that Community now that were in your network before the fire and literally her jaw dropped up none none none of her old friends now I immediately thought that there had been researched since the 1950s on Health which showed the number one protective factor for mental and physical health is good social support So at the very time you want to maximize the stability of your familiar support system it falls away I have another story of a man who told me I met him um probably about five or six years ago after a flood and he told me he came up and said I was in Ash Wednesday uh with my young family they all grown up now but he said um I'd grown up with my cousin who was about the same age we were best friends we all families went on holidays together we uh got girlfriends and went out together uh we got married at the same time uh We've shared Our Lives completely together and then we lived in different communities but uh the house burnt down and uh of course everything was in termo with me but uh uh some you know few days later my cousin rang up and said oh you weren't affected by that terrible fire were you uh and I said yeah we lost everything he said oh oh my goodness uh I'm so sorry to hear it you'll be all right though won't you yeah yeah we'll be all right and he said from that day to this he's never heard from him again so it's a it's a very dramatic story but there are a lot of people who feel frightened of emotion frightened of suffering of trauma uh and they shy away from it and we know and there's now been wonderful research from the United States that that does great big statistical studies that shows the number one predictor of both the speed and adequacy of recovery is not the amount of money that's spent the amount of infrastructure structure that's built or the political connections it's what they call Social Capital which is the relationships you have with people and there are various sorts of relationships that you need but but uh these relationships they found studying things in in Japan don't just predict the recovery from all the different communities after the Fukushima earthquake but they also predicted the death rate because in the communities that have high social capital and good relationships they didn't wait for the authorities to warn them that tsunami coming anyone that saw them contacted everybody and they had Arrangements where people jumped over the fence picked up the old fell next door put him on their shoulders and and went up the nearest Hill uh and and so this leads me to uh a a really important experience that if you think about it when the disaster occurs it always involves physical events it's a little bit different when you have a shooting and I've worked on a number of those bus crashes you know those sorts of things where there's often very high traumatic experience deaths injuries but the physical damage is not significant and so you've got a kind of focus on the psychological experience but when the physical situation is totally demolished the focus comes in on the physical situation even if uh people have died if you've lost loved ones but your house has gone you've got to get going on your house soon as you can therefore there is a tendency for everybody from the the cabinet ministers until they've been educated uh and if you have people who uh you know politicians decision makers who've had some experience that's very very helpful they've they've sort of learned things but the initial instinct is everybody thinks this is all about rebuilding the houses um and yet people have had uh life-changing experiences and so it's like a rupture to the flow of their life and I've said that we've got three factors we got trauma which is the injury loss which is leading to grief and what we lose is not just an object it's part of me part of my identity but the third one which took me 10 years or so to start to understand and I've had to do a lot of reading in all sorts of areas to kind of make sense of it and that is the fact that people lives are disrupted so trauma loss and disruption you know one of the big risks is that that you you lose your physical infrastructure you then suddenly have a massive new task you know I often say to people uh when I'm doing training imagine you go home tonight and find a very large trees falling on your bathroom completely demolished it have you got time to go through the insurance and the builders and the planning and the local government and then to choose the tiles or are your lives already full they're already full all okay but you're going to have to do that aren't you or you won't be have a shower so uh what are you going to put aside well I can't stop going to work I won't have the money to pay for the bathroom so you're going to put aside basically everything that's dispensable so it seems talking to your wife for instance uh playing with your kids visiting your in-laws going for a run talking to your friends you haven't got time for any of that stuff for a few months uh and so what what actually happens is that people's lives become reor reorganized around the priority of getting the job done and that's what healthy competent capable people do they focus on what has to be done but they can't do it fast enough because their assumptions about how long it's going to take a based on you know a tree fell on their bathroom and it wasn't it's a different and of course when we had this terrible storm in in Victoria where huge numbers of trees thousands and thousands of trees fell down on lots of houses that that was a different disaster but I'm just talking about the oneof the assumptions that they have um don't fit what's going to unfold what happens is they start to encounter the fact that when they want to rebuild let's not even worry about insurance premiums insurance policies that don't quite cover some things uh but but what about the encounter has happened after Black Saturday that suddenly the Bushfire regulations have been changed on a national basis and now there's a whole lot of new regulations and it's going to cost them an extra $100,000 but why are those regulations been changed they've been changed so that when new houses are built they'll be saf not so many people will die but that's not what the people in Black Saturday were thinking about they was thinking about uh I have $100,000 I haven't got enough anyway for you can't rebuild here because it's in flame Zone uh and so on and so forth so they encounter one regulation after another that seems to just be an obstruction and so if they're not careful they go into this rage and this conflict which now we've done research in Victoria which shows that anything that creates high emotion in people during this time means that their brains go into that stress Zone as sort of survival oriented stress Zone and they become incapable of using their higher mental faculties prioritizing strategic planning long-term judgments problem solving and they go into sort of I got to get this done now which often means they get angry and get upset and go into conflict and don't achieve things and they often can't even then when they're in that very stress State even get on with their uh processes what that means is that their recovery stalls and people will often say I haven't been able to do anything this month and if they stay in this stress I I can tell another story I talk about this St that in this state of stress you can't make decisions you can't even remember things I know I've hit the mark when I say uh L you're you'll know in your stress because you'll be going up to the bedroom to get something by the time you get there you can't remember what it is so you go back to your study and and and you realize you can't read your computer screen so you go back to look for your glasses and then you can't find them anywhere and you spend half an hour doing that and as you walk back down the the corridor once again to see if they're on your desk you pass a mirror which shows them they're sitting up here you know this is that sort of disorganization we all get into the the real thing is that their recovery stores what would they need to get out of that go to a barbecue with the community and eat half cook sausages and laugh together tell jokes maybe have someone come along and play some music or a comedian or something laugh together that brings them out of the stress their brains start to fire up again and the next day and I was talking about this uh in a a a black Saturday very badly affected town I told this story these stories and uh I went back there about 6 months later and did the followup story and the L who ran the local Caravan Park came up to me and he said I heard you last time and I realized you were talking about me I couldn't get anything done so I talked to my wife and we actually took the family to Barley for two or 3 weeks he said literally when I came back I achieved more in three days than i' achieved in 3 weeks what people don't realize is that when we disrupt Our Lives we disrupt all the patterns we've achieved to kind of make our life manageable to uh keep ourselves on the ball to balance Recreation and so and what's really lost there is is routines we lose routines and they go into a state of improvising daily life improvising it now if you're in routines you don't have to think about what you're doing if you can be processing all sorts of things you can get up and have breakfast and get dress and go to work and drive to work for half an hour L of people said they miss that that commute because it's their time of mulling and processing and if we don't do that we can't get things into perspective we can't pull in the various bits and hold them all together but we do that without thinking in normal life so we don't realize we've lost it because basically we're focused as stress produces this Tunnel Vision on our problems and so we with all the resources we need are falling away and so I started really analyzing routines and I realized that we form routines around what's important to us the example like give is maybe a a couple uh want to be good parents so they fall into a routine that uh when the kids go off and do their homework after dinner and the parents tidy up the kitchen they start talking about how they're going to manage the weekend and deal with problems at school and so maybe they have a cup of tea together for a few minutes half an hour and they coordinate their parenting and then they put the kids to bed pay the bills and go to bed and and they fall end up happing where they'll do that probably a few times a week and if they don't do it after dinner they'll do it on Saturday afternoon when the kids are playing sport or something that's a routine where they coordinate their parenting now all you need for them to lose that completely is to Plum the family in a caravan for 18 months they haven't got the space they haven't got a routine they're squabbling over everything all the time and what you get is a 10-year-old girl who tells the parents to stop stop arguing I've got a test tomorrow dad you sit down there Mom you sit down there and just be quiet I've got this homework to do and the parents do it CU they want the kids have the homework this 10-year-old girl is actually running the family isn't she the parents have lost this self-awareness of their stress state so then when they do move into their new house she's now 12 30 uh she's not doing what she's told because she's been running the family with his immature parents who been you've lost the plot and you see so the loss of routines means we lose the values that the routines have being framed around that that the values that have been embodied in the routines of life and so I think this is a major era of loss and the loss often occurs in the second and third years when people's lives are getting very Tatty and I think this brings us to uh a very simple idea that the losses that occur in the fire are broadly speaking reversible eventually after a number of years they'll have a house again they'll be living somewhere most people won't end up living under a bridge it may never be as good a house and their lives might never have the same structure as they had before but they will be living somewhere so I call that a reversible loss so they'll have that frame of life but if during that time as one woman told me when she looked back 7 years later they haven't actually paid attention to the family relationships they might say like this woman my husband and I are still together but we're just good friends so they've lost the intimacy of their marriage and they don't know where it went because they were so busy all the time and they just drifted apart this couple were still together but I've had others who have separated because they didn't know and why just didn't seem to be working but uh she's this woman said my 14-year-old daughter at the time she's all right she's now at University but we don't see her much she's gone into a friendship Network so that this girl teenage girl went into her peer group and so the peer group took over some of the family functions she said the one I feel sorry for is my seven-year-old son at the time he's now 14 he was a happy outgoing boy with Friends School enjoying learning now he's the lonely Isel who's uh you know got no friends and hates school you can see how uh these are you could say irreversible no they're not irreversible but they are unnecessary problems and there's a whole story we can give around processing trauma and and surviving loss what's going to hold it all together is to preserve the quality of life the structure of your life the values that it's pinned on and to hold that together with your community what I've noticed is that when you think about trauma there are probably in a natural disaster the research shows us somewhere between about five and 20% of people who have a serious trauma that might need professional help but everyone else has a bad experience and most of them will muddle through if they've got a good social network and they can talk together over a few years and that you'll the whole Community will move together through this maybe it'd be good to get a talk from somebody who can give them some understanding of these things from time to time but they don't all need uh clinical session therefore the the fissures and cleavages and ruptures in the community are damaging the structure that they need to allow this communication of experience and with that communication of experience becomes Comes This sort of oh I didn't realize that was happening for you oh you poor thing and everyone moves out of the egocentric state that we have in stress because stress is a mechanism for me and my problems and so when we come to the idea of resilience I think those people seem to do it better who have an instinctive sense that I've lost everything I'm going to have a big long difficult time but I've got to hang on to what's important got to hang on to my relationships I've got to hang on to the quality I've got to make sure my kids continue to see their friends and have good experiences we've got to hold on to recreational suits and the things that give gave our lives meaning you know I think the essence of resilience and what enables us to adjust to trauma and this is been supported by research in the United States is two things is to actually be clear about the values that are important in our life the qualitative features of our life and secondly to preserve social networks none of us will do it alone without costing something really dear to us and uh you know for some people it'll be physical health for some people it'll be mental health some people it'll be the loss of Direction in their lives and to sort of draw that together I'd say that what you see is a sort of a natural process that goes like this people go into an initial survival State when the impact occurs and they rush around trying to survive and then they they're not careful they keep rushing rushing rushing rushing for about six months if they're not careful they've utterly exhausted themselves they will stop when they've got sort of temporary Arrangements that are stable they've got somewhere to live and out what their insurance problems are so on and making plans and then they go into this long ruling enduring stress situation of the whole recovery process which will take years they don't think so but it will gradually Take Years the regulations that are there I call them enabling that enable our community to live together in a safe and harmonious way suddenly become disabled because I hit them all at once and they just stop me trying to do what I want to do I'm not thinking in the broader perspective that the planners had when they made them there's this turmoil this emotional turmoil when people are very exhausted and this is the time when people's lives really are at risk and where the one thing that I would emphasize is stay involved in your community even if you didn't normally go along to the community events encourage the community leaders uh they're often affected too but any uh agencies that come and help run social events entertainments opportunities to talk about their problems to engage in collective bargaining with governments and and so on just work together work together and always produce food and have uh a comfortable environment where they can hang around and talk or come early this is where neighborhood centers and community centers absolutely crucial but not everyone goes everyone that does go will do better and then when they finally got things rebuilt that's when they take stock because you can't really stop and think until you've moved into your new house but people have a problem attaching to the new house their friends say from outside the area oh aren't you like new house I wish I had a new house I didn't want this new house I don't like living here it feels like a motel I loved my old house and so they don't invite them again do they and so what really happens is that the the meaning of the experience starts to come to the four when I'm no longer rushing around trying to fix everything up and I call this the identity crisis period who am I are my life plans still relevant are the goals I had for my life still relevant or am I changed and people sometimes change and often we talk about post-traumatic growth shows a shift towards more intangible qualitative values in life valuing relationships and and uh experience of that sort and if people can do this identity crisis stuff and and work out wo we've got a slightly different plan and we changed the various things and I'm now clear that I'm not going to work three jobs and try and get a very expensive car on to speed B I'm just going to spend that time valuing my family because we're all still alive and that's wonderful you know once they've got that and they settle in after another couple of years it's very surprising they often go through a period of profound emotional exhaustion I don't feel like going any where I don't feel like doing anything and I say well that's not surprising because you've been working very hard in survival mode then you worked very hard for a number of years in rebuilding and getting everything going and now you've been working hard psychologically to work out all this new stuff you deserve a rest and I call that stage recovery from recovery it's important to do that to actually follow those cues I just don't want to do anything for a while tell your friends I'm just going to I'm just going to have a night for a little while I love you all but I'll be back but just I just need time to myself I remember one woman who used to was very well connected in her country Community who actually got to the point where she would hide in her wardrobe because her friends would come around to visit worried about her of course in the mornings after all family go off to work in school and they'd see a car in the in the it's just living in the country the car in the garage and they'd knock and she wouldn't be there and theyd walk around knocking on the windows and doors asking where she was they're a bit worried about it and she said all I could do was shut myself in in the wardrobe until I went away uh it's better to to understand that this is a stage and uh to really say look I'm just going to uh incubate for a while but I'll see you later isn't it better if you actually start breaking up the these phases and start uh resting and and processing in the first phase and you do the the long grind a bit slower and take more time you go to Queensland every now and again or spend time just enjoying yourself and value being with your family and so you can actually that'll be working and you go to community events and talk about life you'll be doing the identity work so you can kind of have these all these stages start to merge into one and uh you don't allow it to be sidetracked by all the external things are saying it's all about physical infrastructure when you do that people come out the end and they actually say I'm a very different person than I was before never wanted to go through it and this is where I think the kuki idea you've uh you've got beautiful golden metallic fillings in the cracks and it's very strong again and I think the more people understand that Journey the better they can do it when it actually does arise Rob you've said so much there and I personally can relate a lot of it uh number of things that you said and other things was totally surprising for me and and I can see how valuable it would be for people whove been through the bush fires or any kind of disaster and I was putting myself in the shoes of someone who went through the 2019 2020 fires and if they were listening to you what could they do to learn those phases and help themselves because they might be like so they're 2 three years on maybe they've got a new house or they're about to move into a new house and they're keep hearing this and they go wow I can relate to all of those things but how do I know what phase I'm in it's partly time it's partly um recognizing the the symptoms of it it's very hard to get people's attention when they're in the first phase they too buy to come to meetings um but I've also had the experience of you know going to particular communities Black Saturday was fairly close to the city and I would go quite often i' would go you know maybe every few months to places and uh I remember in the fourth year I went to one community that I've visited a number of times and before the meeting a woman came up to me and said oh look I'm so pleased to finally get to one of your meetings this is four years later never managed to get there before because there always turn me other things on but many of the things that people have told me have been an honestly help you helpful thank you very much so you realize that in the in these closet communities people transmit information to each other it becomes a process of collective learning and so um when that happens you you get a a filtering out of information so that uh people actually draw on a collective understanding and that can come from someone like me who's spent years sort of following it through but it also comes from people telling their stories from other disasters you know often the most helpful thing is that people from the the last disaster come along to the next one you know when they're out out the other side and come and share their experience and and say out for this don't do this and so on we learned that um and and there are I think there are a number of organizations that are uh very good at doing that nothing can replace that um and and uh and of course you can have uh there are organizations that provide education sessions uh to groups and so on but that's the main thing and of course reading stories or looking at videos or so I know that there're about 60 videos of of me telling this stuff on on YouTube uh I just think i' just say the same thing over and over again for decades but everyone tells me that uh it's different because I'm probably learning things all the time but but uh you know any and talk to talk to other people who've been through it um you know and ask them questions get them to come along to a community meeting it's it's it's through the personal contact that the most effective learning will happen and it's you can see as you said yourself once you give words to something that connects to a person's experience they say ah yes that's it I understand it and then they can make good decisions look after themselves that's F fabulous Rob um one one Insight that just came to me as you've been talking is this whole process is that these people are going through a metamorphosis and it's not one that they chose but it's one that has to happen but it's it's happening whether they like it or not you know and we all go through these times it's part of life isn't it life happens and it how we respond and there most of the life we can't control yes again a factor of resilience and and it plays into trauma has to do with the assumptions we have about life assumptions are formed by the repeated experiences of things being the same and I often illustrate that when I'm talking to groups and saying did any of you consider whether this building you're in this built to earthquake standards if we have an earthquake in 15 minutes and they never have unless they come from Christ Church because they don't happen here well they do and they could but they haven't so if we haven't experiences it's not part of our assumptions what's part of our assumptions is I don't have to think about the building so when it does happen I think a a trauma is an experience that violates the assumptions we had about ourselves nature the world other people Seasons anything and it's like they get ripped they get torn and they have to be rebuilt now post-traumatic stress is to rebuild the assumptions around the fact that this is going to happen and so I can never relax I never feel safe but I'm always waiting for it to happen again but the the proper healing is to rebuild the assumption that says these things can happen it may never happen to me again it can happen so I need to live with just that background understanding that uh there can be emergencies of all sorts and a bit of knowledge of what I should do to keep myself and my loved on safe and in that way we can normalize now I read uh as part of my research and I read a some diaries about the Blitz in London there was a project there of asking people throughout the community to keep their Diaries and you see if you read those stories they would be you know full of the bombing raids oh it was terrible bombing last night Mrs blogs died around around the corner and these house were broken how can these germanists do this to us so on and so forth but after a while uh it was normalized and the diary entry says was a terrible night last night but I've been talking to Mrs Smith around the corner who's got a wonderful recipe for making birthday cakes out of s Oil and Beeswax uh and I'm going to try it for my little boy's birthday you know and this sort of things so they were I'm making a joke but uh uh you know they they they were all about the how to innovate their domestic routines around uh rationing and privations and so the these women are holding their families together and that was the task they were working on um and the blitz just became the background situation of course if they got their own house destroyed or lost people it it be focused but we all have this capacity and I think we are in the stage where we have to reset our assumptions around climate reset them that we can't make assumptions that we have to be I I think of it as in a state of poise you know when you're poised standing in a train for instance I used to travel into the hospital by train for years and years and I found that if I stood with my my feet slightly apart my knees slightly flexed in the train when I didn't get a seat you could actually just sit stand there in a poised way and read a book because otherwise it very boring that's before we had my phones uh but uh uh you know Poise that's Poise is to be ready for for movement to be able to respond and I think we can live our lives with poise in that way uh but we've got to we've got to just keep uh just on the board and I think Community is currently struggling with that and a lot of people don't want to let go their assumptions they don't don't agree with climate change and so on and other people are jumping ahead and uh and so this is I think a process of transition as a community that's what you've just said in the last five minutes is just really profoundly um big and and for me I'm just going to keep processing that you know how how trauma is is the ri assumption right RI being ripped apart and then the healing repairing that acceptance that yes it might happen again but it might not and being able to you know deal with it if it does um and I know there's people who will listen to this who have been through more than one bushire uh I've spoken to them and you know those people have gone through all of the phases or the journey that you talked of and they're still here telling their story that's a resilient person yes yes who has you know transformed their life more than once yes yeah and and like you say with the climate change and the future I can see you looking at that and and just using the learnings of these natural disasters there will be others there'll be other natural disasters we might have more Bloods earthquakes bush fires and anything else Mother Mother Earth yeah we can't control her and uh Mother Earth is going to have to find a new uh New Normal and it'll be uh disruptive in the process and and we need to be willing to go with it otherwise we just get thank you rob you you've you've provided so much Insight today and I I'm so grateful for you and for everything that you're doing and for those listeners who want to like learn more like you said you've you've got lots of videos on YouTube If you Google Rob Gordon disaster psychologist and ignore the uh the shanky real estate agent and the second grade actor and I think there a go called Rob Gordon there's a couple of other psychologists called Rock said got to put disaster in uh you come up with a whole lot of YouTube on all sorts of different disasters that people tend to put them up uh and uh you know feel free to use any of the information that I present in any way that's helpful wonderful well leave it there and I just want to thank you for your time I'm so grateful you're welcome okay it was [Music] pleasure thank you for listening to this week's episode of beyond the Deluge about the 2022 floods in broke and the hunter Valley if anything in this conversation has had a triggering effect please seek support and find someone who can help keep you safe please share the show to your friends family and colleagues so we can help more people with their recovery from natural disaster if you'd like to find out more about kugi heroes and our other podcasts please head to kugi heroes.com Au our theme song was provided by Colin Lily thanks to Matthew Bliss for editing and production and to John Millum for hosting the conversations and most of all thank you to the community of broke and the hunter Valley for sharing their lived experience with us we'll see you next week and Beyond the [Music] Deluge only when it's broken only when it's broken when it hits you in the middle of the night and the truth Burns so bright only when it's broken only when it's broken take pride in those cries it's only for T night and then you rise only when you're broken only when you're broken only when you broken [Music]
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Social connection and community are not nice-to-haves during recovery, they are the one factor that determines both how fast people rebuild and whether they stay alive.
This conversation includes starting with ash wednesday, what trauma really is, the woman whose house didn't burn, loss is not one thing, the woman and her shed and community fusion and fissure.
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