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.
Hear this story
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
“Trauma, the injury is created by what I think is going to happen because that determines what I get ready for.”
“The number one predictor of both the speed and adequacy of recovery is not the amount of money that's spent, the amount of uh infrastructure that's built or the political connections. It's what they call social capital, which is the relationships you have with people.”
“Go to a barbecue with the community and eat half-cooked sausages and laugh together... That brings them out of the stress. Their brains start to fire up again.”
The hero, today
The number one protective factor for mental and physical health after disaster is good social support, yet this is often the time when people's familiar networks fall away because others feel frightened of emotion and suffering. When people are in high stress during recovery, their brains go into survival mode and they lose access to higher mental functions like planning and problem-solving, which makes their recovery stall until they can step out of stress through community connection or rest. Loss during disaster is far wider than property loss: people lose environments that held their mental health, family routines that carried their values, friendships that couldn't survive the strain, and parts of their identity they didn't know they'd tied to what was destroyed. Recovery takes years, not months, because people don't realize their assumptions about time don't fit what will actually unfold, a tree on the bathroom is different from an entire community rebuilding at once, with regulations and materials shortages they never anticipated. The most effective learning about disaster recovery happens through personal contact: people who have been through it before coming to talk to communities now going through it, not through formal education or videos alone. If people can protect the quality of their relationships, the routines that embody their values, and their involvement in community during the long grind of recovery, they often emerge changed but intact, and many say they would not undo the experience because of what it taught them about what matters.
Yes. Rob Gordon 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.
The number one protective factor for mental and physical health after disaster is good social support, yet this is often the time when people's familiar networks fall away because others feel frightened of emotion and suffering.
When people are in high stress during recovery, their brains go into survival mode and they lose access to higher mental functions like planning and problem-solving, which makes their recovery stall until they can step out of stress through community connection or rest.
Loss during disaster is far wider than property loss: people lose environments that held their mental health, family routines that carried their values, friendships that couldn't survive the strain, and parts of their identity they didn't know they'd tied to what was destroyed.
John Milham (Host) · 00:00
Kintsugi Heroes brings you the following River Murray flood recovery story, jointly funded by the Commonwealth and South Australian governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements. To find out more about this podcast, head to kintsugiheroes.com.au. The 2022 River Murray floods in South Australia were caused by record water inflows from the Murray-Darling Basin due to heavy upstream rainfall. The slowly rising floodwaters inundated homes, businesses, and farmland, causing widespread displacement, infrastructure damage, and agricultural losses. The disaster significantly impacted local economies, communities, and led to the region's long-term recovery. In this special limited series of Kintsugi Heroes, John Millum sits down with members of the Riverlands community and gives them space to share their experiences of their personal adversity and community resilience. It's only through connection and empathy that there can be a path to recovery. In this episode, we are featuring a conversation that Aveline Clarke had with Dr. Rob Gordon. This was originally featured in the Kintsugi Heroes Alpine series. Rob is a psychotherapist who specialises in recovery from trauma caused by disasters. He gives us a powerful and detailed explanation on how trauma is caused by disasters and describes strategies for recovery. He is warm and compassionate, and his examples, which all come from his experience over many years, illustrate the complexity of the human response to tragic events and explain why it can take many years to recover. Rob emphasizes that the most important ingredient for healing from this type of trauma is to have strong support and social networks. Enjoy this conversation with Rob Gordon. I'm here with Rob Gordon today. Welcome, Rob.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 02:00
Thanks, Eveline. Good to be here.
John Milham (Host) · 02:02
More stories
This site is part of Kintsugi Heroes. Visit the main site for the full podcast. If any of these stories hit close to home, support is out there, you don't have to sit with it alone.
Read how we handle these stories ↗
Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗
Recovery takes years, not months, because people don't realize their assumptions about time don't fit what will actually unfold, a tree on the bathroom is different from an entire community rebuilding at once, with regulations and materials shortages they never anticipated.
This conversation includes the ash wednesday fires and a question nobody could answer, why the worst moment isn't the trauma, the woman who lost her place to think, the shed full of her mother's things, friends who stop calling and the one thing that predicts whether people recover.
Thank you. So whereabouts are you? Uh, you're obviously— I'm assuming you're in Victoria.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 02:07
Yes, I'm— I live in the Yarra Valley, so I'm fortunate I have a bit of nature around me. I have a practice down in Box Hill in the outer eastern suburbs, but, uh, this, this disaster work takes me all over one another, not just the state but all over the country, which is very interesting to meet people all over the place.
John Milham (Host) · 02:29
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 bushfires, you've seen a lot of disasters, um, you know, tapping into your knowledge and experience is one thing, but also for our listeners who potentially have been through a bushfire, I'm really hopeful that what they hear from you today will help them in their journey of recovery. So, you know, take us back. You know, where do we start?
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 03:07
Well, we could start with me being part of a Royal Children's Hospital team working in the Ash Wednesday fires in the Macedon area and realizing that nobody much knew what we should be trying to do with people that were involved in disasters of this sort. They'd only just invented the term post-traumatic stress disorder, but what I gradually realized that there's a whole range of other problems that occur to people, and 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 them 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 I suppose one of the things I want to emphasize is because it's a social event, by definition, a disaster affects a community or a group of people 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, and they occur all the time, tragic road accident or criminal event, there are a specific number of people affected and the people around them aren't. Primarily affected. So they're often available to become supporters. But in the disaster, there's a whole range of problems. I can remember working with people after the Canberra fires and 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, supportive, close-knit community, she's there with completely blank blocks around her and it takes years to rebuild. People never expect that. This is part of the problem that people go into. They go into it with a range of expectations. They might have built a house before, or they probably haven't. But they would have the timeframe 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 very tangible graphic experience in the initial stage And that includes the 3 elements that I think are 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 other terrible things have happened. And 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 until a person digs down, realises what they did, and undoes it. A very simple example is, I remember in Ash Wednesday, people were on the reserve in Mount Macedon, and they wouldn't do this now, but a blackened fire crew comes in, staggers off their truck, they've all been traumatised, goes around and says to people, "Your house is alright, yours is gone, yours is gone, yours is okay, we don't know about yours." And this woman who was telling me said they spent the rest of the night grieving 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 that's a really important thing to recognize. Disappointment. And we know, you know, stories of Second World War when people got a message about their loved ones, probably just a telegram in those days, that your husband is missing in action, presumed dead. And then 3 years later, he knocks on the door. Of course, there was no mobile phones. And I'm alive, dear, I'm coming. And they just rock out. And of course, those marriages often didn't last, and the kids didn't recognize the fathers and stuff. So it's this deep reorganization that goes on at an unconscious level because we're not normally operating. So that trauma is a really important issue. It's varied. We can have all sorts of different traumas. So 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 were learning experiences for me. A few years into the recovery in Mount Macedon, a woman said, there used to be a beautiful place on the mountain, Mount Macedon, that had a beautiful view and lovely nature all around it, a little bit of creek running through it. And that's whenever I was sad, that's where I would go and I would sit there and I'd 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 Canberra. Loss of community, loss of environment, loss of property, loss of things that ultimately mean something and therefore part of me. So one of the big challenges is how do I still feel myself when I've lost everything that's part of my history? 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 Rose Bagh, a woman sitting there with a very sad face. And after a time she put up her hand and said, excuse me, 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. She said, well, actually we were affected. 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 to her, but I imagine that she had lost everything. And 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? She 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? Unless they talked. But of course, as soon as you say that, everyone's going to say, oh gee, that's pretty tough. So there is 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 and see poor old Rob, he's lost everything. Or, uh, no, don't worry about Evelyn, she's only lost this, that, and the other. It's Rob as the problem. Um, 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, 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 contract into a tight, I call it the state of fusion, tight, strong, supportive, emotionally resilient sort of group. And they all rush around and help each other in the early days.. But 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 warning communication, so I didn't take any notice 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. A lot of stories like that come out. And 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 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's often a period of social turmoil, of conflict, sometimes very bitter and destructive comment. And we know now with social media, you can say whatever you like and have everybody know it. And some very emotional, thoughtless things are said, which are very, very wounding. And I know that 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, 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 area 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, it wasn't a real name, Mary, I said, you're a very gregarious person, you must have had a lot of friends in that area. Oh yes, she said, I knew everybody, I'd grown up there. How many friends have you got in that community now were in your network before the fire? And literally her jaw dropped open.
John Milham (Host) · 16:46
None.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 16:48
None. None of her old friends. Now, I immediately thought that there'd been research since the 1950s on mental 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 5 or 6 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're 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 got girlfriends and went out together. We got married at the same time. We've shared our lives completely together. And then we lived in different communities, but the house burnt down. And of course, everything was in turmoil with me. But some, you know, a few days later, my cousin rang up and said, 'Oh, you weren't affected by that terrible fire, were you?' And I said, 'Yeah, we lost everything.' He said, 'Oh, oh my goodness. 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 very dramatic story, but there are a lot of people who feel frightened of emotion, frightened of suffering, of trauma, and they shy away from it. And we know, and there's now been wonderful research from the United States 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 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 these relationships, they found studying things 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 there's tsunami coming. Anyone that saw them contacted everybody and they had arrangements where people jumped over the fence, picked up the old fella next door, put him on their shoulders and went up the nearest hill. And so this leads me to 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 people have died, if you've lost loved ones, but your house is gone, you've you've got to get going on your house as soon as you can. Therefore, there is a tendency for everybody from the cabinet ministers until they've been educated, and if you have people who, you know, politicians, decision makers, who've had some experience, that's very, very helpful. They've sort of learned things. But the initial instinct is everybody thinks This is all about rebuilding the houses. And yet people have had life-changing experiences. And so it's like a rupture to the flow of their life. And I've said that we've got 3 factors. We've got trauma, which is the injury loss, which is leading to grief. And what we lose is not just an object, but 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's lives are disrupted. So trauma, loss, and disruption. You know, one of the big risks is that you lose your physical infrastructure, you then suddenly have a massive new task. I often say to people when I'm doing training, imagine you go home tonight and find a very large tree's fallen on your bathroom and 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. Okay, but you're going to have to do that, aren't you? Or you won't be able to 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. And so what actually happens is that people's lives become 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 are based on You know, if a tree fell on their bathroom and it wasn't, it's different of course when we had this terrible storm in Victoria where huge numbers of trees, thousands and thousands of trees fell down on lots of houses. That was a different disaster, but I'm just talking about the one-off. The assumptions that they have 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, but what about they encounter, as 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 have those regulations been changed? They've been changed so that when new houses are built, they'll be safer, not so many people will die. But that's not what the people on Black Saturday were thinking about. They were thinking about, uh, I have to pay $100,000, I haven't got enough anyway. Or 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, that 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've 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 stressed state, even get on with their 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 can tell another story. I talk about this, 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 linear, You'll know when you're stressed 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 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, and people drive themselves mad. Sorry for the interruption. This is Ian Westmoreland, the founder of Katsuki Heroes, and thank you for listening to this story from one of our amazing heroes. Our mission is for these stories to provide hope and inspiration to people experiencing life challenges and to also educate the broader community on how best to provide support. If you would like to help us to continue to produce more hero stories and cover more adversity themes, we would welcome all donations. These can be made via our website, kintsugiheroes.com.au. The donate function is at the bottom of the homepage. We'd also welcome any feedback. You can email me direct using ian@kintsugiheroes.com.au. Now let's get back to the story. And but the, the real thing is that they're recovery stalls. What would they need to get out of that? Go to a barbecue with the community and eat half-cooked 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 Black Saturday, very badly affected town, and I told this story, these stories, and, uh, I went back there about 6 months later and did the follow-up story, and the bloke 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 Bali for 2 or 3 weeks. He said, literally, when I came back, I achieved more in 3 days than I achieved in 3 weeks. It's because 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 keep ourselves on the ball, to balance recreation and so on. And what's really lost there 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 dressed and go to work and drive to work for half an hour. A lot of people said they missed 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. Stress produces this tunnel vision on our problems. And so 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 I give is maybe a couple want to be good parents, so they fall into a routine that 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 on. 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 they fall into a pattern 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 plonk 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 arguing, I've got a test tomorrow. Dad, you sit down there. Mum, you sit down there. Just be quiet. I've got this homework to do. And the parents do it because they want their kids to have the homework. Now, this 10-year-old girl is actually running the family, isn't she? The parents have lost this self-awareness of their stress state. And so then when they do move into their new house, she's now 12, 13, she's not doing what she's told because she's been running the family with these immature parents who've lost the plot. And you see, so the loss of routines means we lose the values that the routines have been framed around, that the values that have been embodied in the routines of life. And so I think this is a major area 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 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. They won't have the heirlooms and, you know, the lady lost her mother's stuff, she'll never get that back. 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, uh, 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 was still together, but I've had others who have separated because They didn't know why, it just didn't seem to be working. But 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 7-year-old son at the time, who's now 14. He was a happy, outgoing boy with friends at school, enjoying learning. Now he's a lonely isolate who's got no friends and hates school. You can see how 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 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, is somewhere between about 5% 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 see 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 a clinical session. And therefore 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 of life. 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 pursuits and the things that give— gave our lives meaning. And, uh, 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, 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 I think 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 6 months. And 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 I'm making plans. And then they go into this long, grueling 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 disabling 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. This is turmoil, this emotional turmoil when people are very exhausted. 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. They're often affected too, but any agencies that come in, help run social events, entertainments, opportunities to talk about their problems, to engage in collective bargaining with governments and so on. Just work together, work together, and always produce food and have a comfortable environment where they can hang around and talk or come early. This is where neighbourhood centres and community centres are absolutely crucial, but not everyone goes. Everyone that does go will do better. And then when they've 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 lucky with the 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 meaning of the experience starts to come to the fore. When I'm no longer rushing around trying to fix everything up. And I call this the identity crisis period. Who am I? Uh, 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 the— we talk about post-traumatic growth— shows a shift towards more intangible qualitative values in life and valuing relationships and experience of that sort. And if people can do this identity crisis stuff and work out, okay, we've got a slightly different plan and we've changed the various things and I'm now clear that I'm not going to work 3 jobs and try and get a very expensive car and a speedboat, I'm just going I'm 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 anywhere. I don't feel like doing anything. And I say, well, that's not surprising because you've been working very hard in that survival mode. Then you've 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. And 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 hibernate for a little while. I love you all, but I'll be back. But 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 the family had gone off to work and school. And they'd see her car 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 they'd walk around knocking on the windows and doors asking where she was. They were a bit worried about it. And she said, all I could do was shut myself in the wardrobe until they went away. It's better to understand that this is a stage and to really say, look, I'm just going to incubate for a while, but I'll see you later. So isn't it better if you actually start breaking up these phases and start resting and processing in the first phase, and you do the long grind a bit slower and take more time, and you go to Queensland every now and again or spend time just enjoying yourself and value being with your family and so on, 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 you don't allow it to be sidetracked by all the external things that are saying it's all about the 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." This is where I think the Kintsugi idea, 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.
John Milham (Host) · 43:42
Rob, you've said so much there, and I personally can relate to a lot of it, uh, a 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 who've been through the bushfires or any kind of disaster. And I was just 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, 3 years on, maybe they've got a new house or they're about to move into a new house and they're hearing this and they go, wow, I can relate to all of those things. But how do I know what phase I'm in?
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 44:27
It's partly time, but it's partly recognizing the symptoms of it. It's very hard to get people's attention when they're in the first phase. They're too busy to come to meetings. 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'd go, you know, maybe every few months to places. And I remember in the fourth year I went to one community that I 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's always too many other things on. But many of the things that people have told me have been enormously helpful.
John Milham (Host) · 45:18
Helpful.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 45:19
Thank you very much. So you realize that in these close-knit communities, people transmit information to each other. It becomes a process of collective learning. And so when that happens, you get a filtering out of information so that people actually draw on a collective understanding. And that can come from someone like me who's spent many 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 last disaster come along to the next one, you know, when they're out the other side and come and share their experience of and say, "Watch out for this and don't do this," and so on. We learned that. And there are, I think there are a number of organizations that are very good at doing that. Nothing can replace that. And of course, you can have— there are organizations that provide education sessions 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 are about 60 videos of me telling this stuff on YouTube. I just think I just say the same thing over and over again for decades, but everyone tells me that it's different because I'm probably learning things all the time. But, but, you know, any— and talk to, talk to other people who've been through it, you know, and ask them questions, get them to come along to a community meeting. 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.
John Milham (Host) · 47:32
That's 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's about how we respond. And most of life we can't control.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 48:06
Yes. Again, a factor of resilience, 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 is built to earthquake standards if we have an earthquake in 15 minutes? And they never have unless they come from Christchurch. Uh, because they don't happen here. Well, they do and they could, but they haven't. So If we haven't experienced this, 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 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 proper healing is to rebuild the assumption that says these things can happen. It may never happen to me again, but it can happen. So I need to live with with just that background understanding that there can be emergencies of all sorts and a bit of knowledge of what I should do to keep myself and my loved ones safe. And in that way, we can normalize. Now, I read, as part of my research, I read 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 diaries, they would be full of the bombing raids. Oh, it was terrible bombing last night and poor old Mrs. Bloggs died around the corner and these houses were broken. How can these Germans do this to us? And so on and so forth. But after a while, it was normalized. And the diary entry says it 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 sump oil and beeswax, and I'm going to try it for my little boy's birthday.' This sort of thing. I'm making a joke, but they were all about how to innovate the domestic routines around rationing and probations and so on. These women are holding their families together. And that was the task they were working on. And the Blitz just became the background situation. Of course, if they got their own house destroyed or lost people, it would be their focus. But we all have this capacity. And I think we are in a stage where we have to reset our assumptions around climate. Reset them that we can't make assumptions, that we have to be— 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 feet slightly apart and my knees slightly flexed, in the train when I didn't get a seat, you could actually just sit and stand there in a poised way and read a book because otherwise it's very boring. That's before we had mobile phones. But, you know, poise, poise is to be ready for movements, to be able to respond. And I think we can live our lives with poise in that way. But we've got to just keep just on the ball. And I think the community is currently struggling with that, and a lot of people don't want to let go of their assumptions, that they don't agree with climate change and so on. And other people are jumping ahead, and so this is, I think, a process of transition as a community.
John Milham (Host) · 52:38
That's— what you've just said in the last 5 minutes is just really profoundly big, and for me, I'm just going to keep processing that, you know, how our trauma is, is the ripped assumptions, right? Being ripped apart. And then the healing of 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 bushfire. 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.
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 53:25
Yes, yes.
John Milham (Host) · 53:28
Who has, you know, transformed their life more than once. Uh, yes. Yeah. And, and like you say, with the climate change and the future, like you say, it's an ins— it's like I can see you looking at that and just, I guess, using the learnings of these natural disasters. There will be others, there'll be other natural disasters. We might have more floods, earthquakes, bushfires, and anything else. Mother—
Rob Gordon (R) (Guest) · 54:01
Mother Earth, you know, 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 burnt out.
John Milham (Host) · 54:22
That's right. Thank you, Rob. You, you've, you've provided so much insight today, and I, I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Riverland Recovery Stories. If anything in this conversation has had a triggering effect, please seek support and reach out to someone who can help keep you safe. If you found this conversation interesting or helpful, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues so we can help more people with their recovery from natural disasters. To find out more about Kintsugi Heroes and our other projects, head to kintsugiheroes.com.au. Thank you to our production team, Kintsugi Heroes volunteers, and most importantly, the Riverland community for sharing their lived experience.
Subscribe
Spotify
Apple