Crisis Management International - Carolina Psychotherapist Helps Attack Survivors, Victims' Families

Carolina Psychotherapist Helps Attack Survivors, Victims' Families

The company had leased space in a hotel to help those who had survived the attack on the World Trade Center and the families of those who had not. The scene that confronted Eileen Blum Nardin when she arrived there was pretty much what she expected.

The president was at a loss. The people in human resources kept breaking down. Those who had come for help stood huddled in groups, crying, hugging one another, sharing posters picturing their loved ones, some carrying the toothbrushes and razors they'd need later for DNA samples.

The Apex psychotherapist's assignment was to make order out of chaos, help people break through their shock so the grieving process could begin and, ultimately, help the company -- which she declined to name -- get going again.

Theirs was a mid-sized firm on one of the tower's top floors. Everyone who was at the office that morning had disappeared. Some of the people roaming the hotel lobby were their loved ones. The rest were the survivors.

Nardin was one of 100 mental health workers dispatched to New York by Crisis Management International, an Atlanta-based company that specializes in the human side of workplace disasters. CMI is using a hotel to house its therapists and is helping about 200 companies, about 80 of which had offices in the twin towers.

Workers had been sent in from satellite offices, others were volunteers. Nardin's first task -- less than 48 hours after the buildings collapsed -- was to get everyone organized and then perform psychological triage for the victims.

"I walk into a situation like that and try to let everyone know, `I know what to do,'" Nardin said. "Even if I don't."

But in this case, she did. She has trained in crisis and trauma counseling, working on contract with CMI for the past three years on disasters ranging from the Hurricane Floyd floods to massive layoffs.

The day after the terror attacks, she headed north. What was usually a 12-hour drive took more than 16 as she tried to find a way into the city she grew up in. By Thursday morning, the Lincoln Tunnel had reopened, and she reported to work.

Some workers she encountered were too distraught to work. A woman in human resources had been two blocks from her office when the first tower collapsed. She saw the fire. She saw people jumping out of windows. Now she was at the support center, where she planned to spend every waking moment helping others, often well past 10 p.m.

"I asked her if someone from her family could come in," Nardin said, "and her parents came. They made ribbon pins, and just being there helped her do her job."

Nardin spent four days working 10 to 12 hours at a time with the victims, many of whom came accompanied by family or friends. Nardin or another counselor would see if they could "debrief" -- tell what had been going on from the moment they heard the news of the attack to the present. Whether people spoke in the past or the present tense helped signal where they were in the grieving stages, or whether they'd even started.

"Often, just telling the story, getting it out, is the first step," Nardin said. "And to have someone say it's OK. It's OK to have these thoughts. Let them happen. Help them understand their personal experience is a universal response."

People needed to know that their headaches and chest pains, their aching muscles, were a normal reaction to traumatic stress. Others needed to be reminded to sleep and to eat. And everyone had to be told that this pain, one day, would dull. That the grieving process might take them from numbness to anger, from guilt to depression, from loneliness to hope.

"The goal of the program is to get people back to prior functioning," she said. "In this case, anyone going through this is never going to be the same. We want them to be high-functioning people again."

Bruce Blythe, chief executive of CMI, said part of CMI's job is telling people what to expect.

"What we do is we educate people about what traumatic stress is," he said. "It's similar to having the flu. The best thing to do with the flu is to let it flow. With traumatic stress, you're not going crazy. You have to let it run its course. It's going to resolve. It will be a new normal."

But unlike the flu, the mourners will never fully recover.

"A parent who's lost a child, you don't get over that ever. You integrate it. You learn to live with it, and some learn to live with it better than others."

Throughout the week, the company's president comforted every mourner, every employee.

Many felt a disorienting mix of grief and guilt. "Everyone who did something wrong that day lived," Nardin said. "Everyone who was late. Someone was late because they were home, icing a cake."

Because the hours were long, the work intense, nearly everyone referred to their coworkers as their second family. Many were in their 20s and 30s, with young children or babies on the way.

One of the last couples she saw had lost their eldest daughter. They were angry, and had tried to see Nardin several times. Hoping to help them move forward, Nardin asked what their greatest fear was. They told her they had come from out of town, they didn't want to be left out when they went home. The president assured them they would not be forgotten.

But it didn't help.

"They were still stuck," Nardin said. She told them she wasn't leaving until she figured out what else was going on. And then the mother told her she'd had a feeling, months ago, that something horrible was going to happen. "And I discussed it with my husband and he said he was having the same feeling," she said. So the parents turned their attention to helping their younger daughter, who was having problems. Her older sister -- in her 20s -- they didn't worry about because she was successful, working at a top firm at the World Trade Center.

"I can't believe we were focusing on the wrong daughter," the mother said.

"And I said, `No, I think you may be wrong,'" Nardin said. "'Something horrible has happened to your youngest daughter.'"

And that was when they were able to cry.



		Blindsided is the authoritative guide to crisis management. This "how to" handbook gives essential advice that every manager needs to know when a crisis hits. Written by CMI Founder/CEO Bruce Blythe, it's a fascinating, easy-to-read guide that draws on Blythe's 20+ years of experience as a pioneer in crisis management.