In one of the many heartbreaking images left by the fire in Valencia, two young people embrace in front of a burning building. They didn’t seem to need words, which don’t always help in cases like this. “When we are with someone in a terrible situation, it is so painful to see them that empathy creates anxiety and we try to calm the person in front of us. And many times it’s better not to say anything,” explains Jesús Linares, director of the master’s program in crisis psychology at the European University.
The impact in these first moments can overwhelm the ability of many to manage their emotions. And in such a situation, the task of specialists is not necessarily to speak. “No need to say anything. From the non-verbal, you can do a lot with the body, you can transfer a lot, interfere a lot. Not saying no means not doing; Silence is very important in our work, it’s about letting the victim speak so they can build their own narrative about what happened,” adds Edurne Crespo, a member of the Madrid Society of Clinical Psychology and an expert on emergencies.
By letting people talk, many times disabled people’s needs are clarified without having to directly ask what they need, something that may not even be very clear to them in the first moments. For example, talking about the children and realizing that there is no one to pick them up from school.
There is nothing wrong with the huge wave of solidarity that has been unleashed since the fire. The donations were helpful for some of those who left with virtually nothing on their backs, even semi-clothes or pyjamas. However, the tragedy caused such a movement of empathy that it became exaggerated: for example, the huge number of donated blankets, considering that the victims were already accommodated in hotels the first night.
In any case, there are no unique recipes, because each person can experience such a tragedy in a very different way, and none is good or bad. Experts are used to seeing anxiety, anger, rage, denial, even disorientation: those who want to go home the next day as if nothing happened, which at first glance, if it does not get worse, is not even strange. not even disturbing.
“Even the same person can react differently depending on the moment,” says María Abengózar, head of the Red Cross psychosocial care emergency response teams. “So the answer depends not so much on the type of event as on these personal differences. The wide variety of emotional responses they can have is so wide that any type of response is natural in these first moments. People usually expect them to be very anxious, and they often are, but other people show a capacity for brutal tolerance, even calmness and the ability to think,” he adds.
When the building was burning, Marcos and his wife decided to go to Corte Inglés to buy clothes. Dressed in one of the suits he had bought, he explained in the hall of the Valencia Palace the day after the accident that he believed he would respond after talking to his insurance company. “Everything that has been lost is material,” he explains. They know there are things they won’t bring back, like the first edition Alice in Wonderland which he gave to his wife, whose name is Alicia. “If we were to buy another one, it would remind us of what happened,” he continues.
However, this loss of material things can be very painful. Although the personal is logically the most tragic, Crespo advises not to compare and judge pain, but to legitimize it, wherever it comes from: “It will depend a lot on the importance we attach to things. You may inherit a piece of furniture from your grandmother, and for you it is almost as if you have lost your grandmother again. Each person experiences loss as they can based on their own life history. “Just as it can also be very painful and very difficult to lose a pet because the sentimental bond with them is very strong.”
José Luis Mas, a 67-year-old retired emergency physician, says that when he took the stairs out of the building, he met several people who did as well (and convinced some of them not to use the elevators, six of which the building had), because of the risk stopping flames). “But there was even one that went up. I told him, ‘Don’t go up, there’s a lot of smoke.’ And he said to me, ‘Cats, I have to catch cats.’
Three years ago, Mas bought an apartment for 226,000 euros with money he received from the sale of the house he lived in with his previous wife and from the inheritance he received due to the death of his mother. .. “It’s a lot of money, I don’t have enough money to buy another apartment right now, not even close to it,” he says. He liked the apartment he had now lost, but on the other hand, he was always drawn to country life. The real estate agency that sold him the apartment knew this, which is why one of its employees contacted him just two months ago. “He told me: ‘There is a person from Madrid who is interested in buying your apartment. Now they’re offering you 300,000 euros for your hand.” I talked about it with Ángela, my wife, but we thought: where do we go now, you’re too old to move again… And look: Not 200,000 or 300 000, zero.”
These thoughts are part of a very common reaction, which is to find one’s own fault. “It has to do with one of the pillars on which our psyche is based and gives us stability on a psychological level, which is control. I think I’m in more control than I am that I could have avoided it if I had done this or that,” Crespo says.
It is also about finding the causes of what happened. “The problem can be when a person becomes very stuck in it after a while because it may not allow them to connect with the pain and the loss. Although this is very normal at first, over time it would be important to work on releasing the guilt, the connection with the pain and assuming that something like this could not have been avoided,” continues this psychologist.
But medium or long-term therapy is usually not necessary. Although the three consulted experts believe that it is more than appropriate to make psychological help available to those affected in the first moments so that they are better able to cope with a wound that is difficult to even believe at first, the professional literature shows that the vast majority of people can overcome these obstacles , without them developing pathologies. Post-traumatic stress disorder, the most characteristic, is suffered by only a small percentage of people. They must have the psychological resources to overcome it after the first moments of tragedy.
What to do with children
If it is difficult to handle such a situation with an adult, it can be much more difficult for untrained people to do it with children who are involved in accidents like the one in Valencia. To protect them, there are people who try to let them know as little as possible, which according to Jesús Linares is a mistake.
“Just as you don’t have to make them lose, you don’t have to pretend that everything is fine. We have to somehow naturalize the situation, show them that it’s okay to cry, that it can be normal to have nightmares, ask them how they feel, maybe start telling them that we’re sad,” he continues.
According to Linares, if possible, someone important to the child should tell them what happened, the little ones should not be forced to return to their normal routine, and it is good to try to accompany them at all times. And above all, he insists, don’t lie to them. “Sooner or later they’ll find out what happened, and it’s better to make it natural and controlled so they don’t feel cheated later,” he concludes.
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