River Murray Recovery Stories
Rob Gordon · 55 min
A leading disaster psychotherapist draws on four decades of frontline experience to reveal why recovery from natural disaster is far more complex — and far more social — than rebuilding houses.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Rob Gordon is a psychotherapist who has spent four decades working with people affected by natural disaster. After the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, he realised mental health professionals had no framework for understanding what disaster does to people. Four decades later, he has learned that recovery is far more complex than rebuilding houses. It is shaped by what happens in the social fabric of a community.
Trauma, Rob explains, is not created by what actually happens but by what a person thinks will happen. A woman told him she spent the night grieving her house after being told it had burned, only to discover the next day that it was still standing. Loss during disaster extends far beyond property: people lose the environments where they healed themselves when sad, the relationships that couldn't survive the strain, the family routines that carried their values, and the friendships that fell away precisely when they were needed most. At the very time people need their support networks most, those networks often collapse.
What determines whether people recover well is not money or infrastructure, but social capital: the relationships they have. When people are in high stress, their brains go into survival mode and they lose access to planning, problem-solving, and long-term thinking. Their recovery stalls. But a barbecue, a conversation, time away to rest, community connection: these bring them out of that stress state. The most effective learning happens through personal contact, when someone who has been through disaster before comes to a community now going through it and shares what to watch for.
Rob's core insight is that recovery takes years, not months, and that what holds it all together is not the physical rebuild but the preservation of relationships, the routines that embody what people value, and their involvement in community. When people protect these, they come through changed but intact.
⚠️ 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
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