Any work of fiction is an investigation of aftermath, borne of the world that has already occurred. Fiction offers readers as well as writers the possibility to explore past transgressions and raise complex ethical and intellectual questions about responsibility—and culpability, guilt, betrayal, and remorse.

Patrick Modiano’s The Occupation Trilogy, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise are three works that dig deeply into these inquiries and grapple with the sins of empire. Each asks: What forces shape the present moment? Who bears responsibility for the suffering and inhumanities of the past?  These works of fiction—which explore the legacy of fascism in France, the wars of empire in Africa, the ongoing displacements precipitated by two warring colonial empires, respectively—ask the reader to bear witness, to dwell with complex moral investigation.

In an interview with Sandra Petrignani, the Italian writer Italo Calvino—who spun fabulous tales out of the horrors of 20th century—has called the imaginative zone literature creates a fantasfera: “[T]here’s always a kind of cloud attached onto the world, a fantasfera, which is an atmosphere created by our images of the world.” This fantasfera, this “cloud,” offers a zone for wrestling with complex intellectual constructions that co-exist with all the images we collect and hold in our minds. At any given moment, we are occupying a world we perceive through our rational senses as well as the fantasfera. There, intellectual concept meets concrete object, sound meets image, sensory experience meets memory—creating, in Calvino’s words, “a world made up of images and thoughts, a ‘multiplied world.’” In this sense, we are always reading the world, with our imagination as companion.

My novel Benefit Street is set in an imaginary, unnamed country, and it follows five women whose lives are disrupted by intertwined global events: civil war, political strife, geographic displacement. And by personal events: infidelity, children growing up, parents aging. Benefit Street came out of the fantasfera I experienced while listening to the experiences of friends and acquaintances whose lives were changed forever after a traumatic geographic displacement. At a Passover Seder, a woman across the table told me about her exodus as a child from Armenia, with only her mother and her brother, and surviving the genocide. The mother of my son’s classmate told me about her life in Tehran and her family’s precipitous, dangerous departure. A long-time friend unexpectedly talked about her father surviving Shoah. All of these stories became woven into the story that became Benefit Street.

Whenever someone asks you to listen, it is a sacred moment. Each of these women had asked me to be a witness to the stories of their lives, lives defined by the societal sins of genocide and ethnic cleansing. After sitting a long time with their experiences, the voice of the narrator for my novel, Şiva, emerged.

In that emerging voice, there was a sense of a deep connectedness with her colleagues and friends, all teachers, who sat around a table in a teahouse once a week for years. These are five women who have known each other since they were adolescents. Sidra with the wild hair; Miri of the blue, blue eyes; Aminah who is always late and buys too many shoes; Ana who peels an orange with a reverential calm. And when their way of life is under assault as war and political repression close in, their conversations continue; as does their dedication to their ideals. Her friends have devoted their lives to not repeating the sins of the past—sectarian wars, the persecution of what is deemed foreign, genocide. Even after the protective shell of idealism has cracked under violent conflict, after Sidra has been imprisoned, after Aminah is killed by an errant missile, after Siva’s husband is tortured: They continue. And in her story, in its aftermath, she—and the reader—can begin to work through its wreckage.

In Benefit Street, Şiva shares with others a collective ethos dedicated to witnessing the sins of the past and to imagining lives that do not repeat these sins. “We read everything we could get our hands on. The holy books with different beliefs … We read the poets of the world.  We hastened.  We tried to know the world,” she says of their shared urgency. “The ancient massacres? We’re not. We’re not. We’re not. Doing this again. And so we believed.” And so, through reading and adding images of past societal transgressions to her own fantasfera, Siva envisions a future without those sins.

 I recognized in Şiva’s voice the language of repetition to bridge gaps. Now where were we?  I came to understand that phrases like this in Şiva’s voice were both an indication of breakage and a source of continuity. Amid the traumatic dispersal and displacement, Siva’s voice offered a way to try to make a unified whole out of the seemingly disjointed fragments of aftermath.

The stories of Benefit Street emerged in fragments, partially formed. The work of writing this novel was largely to understand the way they interconnect. Multiple worlds and cities and histories contained on the book’s pages allow the reader to do the hard work of grappling, of abstracting to something more universal and applying moral or philosophical codes on the transgressions. That same simultaneity provokes universal thinking, away from the utterly singular experience.

Once I understood that as her conduit, I simply needed to listen, to inquire, to seek, to remain open, I began to understand the quick unravelling of her beautiful, full, and dedicated life in a beloved city—and the painful remaking of a new one. Şiva became a way to work through the ongoing aftermath of the profound stories I had heard in real life.

Fiction isn’t going to fix the world. It doesn’t provide a roadmap on how, where, or whether to make amends. But in addition to grappling with the sins of our world, what it can do is give us another way to continue thinking about, and living in, the world. It may even show us, as Abdulrazak Gurnah said in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture, “what can be otherwise.”

But writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise . . .

Aftermath cannot be quantified. But by investigating the echoes that reverberate from an event, by dwelling and meandering in the complexities of different conditions, we might discover—and, perhaps, even put into words—evocations that can help us understand better and better imagine futures and a way out of the trappings of the past.

The post Can Fiction Teach Us How to Live in a World Full of Suffering? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The subterranean strata of U.S. wrongdoing run deep—the genocide of Native Americans, the long history of slavery and racism, the effects of xenophobia, the illegal wars of aggression around the world. Today we are faced with the question: As a society, how will we remember and respond to these many past wrongs?

Approaches that take into consideration participants’ histories—along with their experiences of physical and mental trauma, and moral injury—seem to pay off.

For the past 25 years, I have worked as a researcher and practitioner in the field of large-scale psychosocial trauma. My current project, the Moral Injuries of War, seeks to probe the moral anguish experienced by military veterans and war correspondents deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an immersive audio installation, in which we overlay edited audio interviews and ambient sound. Veterans and journalists who are present at the installation provide comment after the 20- to 30-minute piece has ended.

By listening to their testimonies, the larger public can become more aware of the dilemmas faced by those at, and in, war. One goal of the project is to promote dialogue between witnesses of war and the rest of us, to help us work through our nation’s collective trauma—and hopefully begin to heal, as individuals and as a society.

Individual trauma may be understood as the consequences of experiencing an overwhelmingly stressful event or series of events. Collective trauma—what happens when society as a whole experiences shattering events—is, as sociologist Kai Erikson puts it, a “blow to the basic tissues of social life.” Collective trauma leads to a loss of a sense of belonging, decreased morale, social fragmentation, and conflict. Moral injury is an aspect of trauma people experience after participating in or witnessing actions which are morally reprehensible. It also manifests when we feel betrayed by persons acting in positions of authority. Moral injury has been described as a “wound to the soul.”

Addressing these devastating consequences of past societal wrongs is crucial—but it requires us first to determine how to prepare, emotionally and cognitively, for such an encounter. How do we stay grounded enough to integrate remembering into our lives in a meaningful way?

The answer is in what I call an “emotional toolbox,” stocked with four important practices that can help us heal. These include convening with care and purpose; listening with compassion; grounding, reflecting, and responding; and integrating a view or action and moving forward.

Convening with care and purpose

The most important thing is to create a supportive social environment with sustained respect. Who will remember with each other? Will it be just victims and their advocates; or conversation between victims and perpetrators, and their descendants?

A fruitful context for remembering has a clear aim. It helps to explicitly state the benefits. South Africa enacted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help rebuild after apartheid, and to bring about justice and accountability. In the U.S., the organization 400 Years of Inequality has worked to right the wrongs of slavery and the history of African American inequality while other endeavors aim to establish the truth about wrongs, as in investigations into forced adoptions and genocide of Native Americans. American remembering also seeks to prevent continued perpetration of wrongs in the future, as we are currently witnessing with the congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Thoughtful convening includes processes for remembering and for forgetting; we may need to forget some aspects of the past to remain focused on what is important moving ahead. Collective remembering can be an organic process—one memory jolting another—a continuous linear narrative, or a patchwork of different perspectives. Whatever shape it takes, all in the community should have the opportunity to join in.

“Moral Injuries 3459,” oil on paper, 2018. Painting by author.

Listening with compassion

One must feel connected with a group to be ready to encounter heavy material. Clearly establishing intention builds trust. Creators or facilitators should explain why a difficult exploration is important for them. In the Moral Injuries of War project, we tell participants how we created the project: It came out of my clinical experiences working with war correspondents and veterans, who described their moral anguish to me during therapy. It became clear to me that witnesses and participants in conflicts could overcome their social isolation by breaking silences and sharing their stories with the public. Explaining this helps participants engage fully.

It is important to explain that participants may experience physical discomfort when they listen to witnesses. It is helpful to attend to that discomfort in their bodies, recognize where it is, take three deep breaths, and then return to listening with compassion to the person speaking.  People should have the permission to stand up and walk around, or to leave the room for some time.

Grounding, reflecting, and responding

People confronted with disturbing material in the Moral Injuries of War project sometimes experience “shattered world assumptions,” where their previous views of the world, morality, history, and even their own identities may be disrupted.

To help mitigate this reaction, a useful exercise is to have each person engage with another person in the group to name their physical and emotional responses to the material. This helps ground the participants to one another, and enables them to respond to what they witnessed as a shared experience. Hearing a range of responses and perspectives within a bonded group helps participants engage in a conversation about what moved them or resonated with their own experiences, and what they have learned about themselves.

Once feeling grounded and having reflected on one’s personal response, witnesses and members of the public may thoughtfully engage in difficult conversation. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh knew the potential transformative power such a conversation can have. “Veterans,” he said, “are the light at the tip of the candle, illuminating the way for the whole nation. If veterans can achieve awareness, transformation, understanding, and peace, they can share with the rest of society the realities of war.”

“Moral Injuries 3354,” Oil on paper, 2018. Painting by author.

Integrating a view or action moving forward

As we go through deliberate processes of bearing witness to societies’ past wrongs, it is important that people walk away feeling resourced not depleted—touched not triggered. Remembering, done right, can instill a desire to make society better. One way to bring that about is to engage participants in small group discussions. What would they like to take with them from such an experience? What would they like to leave behind?

In the Moral Injuries of War project, we ask participants how they want to respond to the testimony they heard. Some have said they would like to find new ways to engage with veterans to learn more about their experiences. Some have told us they want to reach out to family members who fought in battle. Others were inspired to help refugees, especially of recent wars.

We follow talk with action, asking each person in our small groups to describe their intended response in one word or phrase, and then demonstrate that action in a gesture to the others.

For example, somebody who wanted to reach out to veterans described their action as “dialogue,” and then motioned their hands to indicate give and take. We play music and lead the group in dance. Each person shouts their word and expresses their gesture and the group reflects the words and gestures back. Participants leave feeling an element of hope, rather than being weighed down by the difficult material. Embodying the desirable action increases the likelihood that one will carry it out in the future.

Participants of the Moral Injuries of War project convene in Woodstock, New York. Courtesy of author.

The author James Baldwin once wrote, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” when perpetrators view themselves as innocent. A society cannot mature if it cannot move beyond its perceived innocence—especially when there are so many sins to remember.

Engaging responsibly with the suffering of others is an important step in the process, and is deeply humanizing. It develops our capacity for empathy, strengthens our connections to others and ourselves, and ultimately makes society better. My hope is that the emotional toolbox helps facilitate this.

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The level of stress we feel can be harder to cut than a Butterball turkey: Not only are we homing in on the family dinner table where so much that has determined us has happened, but this Diwali or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas feast is a kind of recurring dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). We may not be thinking about it, but we are keeping the dead alive with each family reunion and culinary tradition. We are keeping customs so longstanding that we barely know their origins.

No wonder we feel a little crazy around the holidays.

And we continue to celebrate the pull of family ties even as they unravel, sometimes quite noticeably, all around us. It may seem as if our family identities are experiencing a forced reboot where preferred pronouns, critical race theory debates, and a million other powder kegs threaten to blow up the system—even before the turkey gets carved. We feel our present moment is especially fraught, even though our predecessors sometimes literally stepped through minefields to make their way home to hearth and family, even when it meant sitting across from John Birchers, segregationists, religious bigots, and worse.

Still, this year’s feast may seem like the last straw. Was it ever thus, or have we finally come to the family tipping point? Will this be our last supper before the great cancelling? Knowing the carnage to come, should we even come home at all? Are the ties that bind stronger than the tribalistic othering of our extended family’s persecutions?

Has coming home for the holidays become the definition of craziness?

We are likely to never know our whole family story, and we are probably lucky that we don’t—but it’s all still there underneath the silt of Time, affecting our actions and relationships through the sediment in unexpected ways. We are related to and loved by individuals who have survived wars and other global catastrophes just to get here, who have made choices and espoused beliefs antithetical to everything we care about, who may barely condone our life choices, and yet who share our blood. This is the primordial ooze that glazes our table’s honey-baked ham.

Indeed, we are indentured to family; it’s in the word itself—family. The Latin famulus is a servant or slave, and the historical idea of family goes beyond lineage to estate, property, and the collective value of a domestic household. We may adhere to it or rebel from it, but we will always have its mark on us.

The faddish interest in family trees and finding our roots makes sense, not only in trying to get beyond what we already know of parents and grandparents, but in helping us determine a narrative thread amid what is otherwise a tangle of opposing family values. Sepia photos seem less controversial than the talking heads on Fox or MSNBC. Perhaps genetic ancestry can bring us all together and off the firing line.

DNA may not lie—but what does it all really tell us? What meanings can we cobble together from racial and ethnic percentages on pie charts? What does a ship’s manifest really say about the long-lost antecedent emigrating from pogrom or famine? Perhaps it connects us to world history writ large enough to read in the dark. But the family mystery remains: Who were they really? Would they have understood me? Sure, we’re family, but might we have been friends? And beneath the old-world fashions and foreign names, what secret madness were they hiding?

Out of this fundament of doubt arises the family play. Of course, the genre exists also on film and in novels, but on stage the family play has grown roots so deep that they intertwine with the electrics and the plumbing and threaten to raise the floorboards. It would seem that the theater was made for teasing out the knots of ancestry one sin at a time.

We Americans are particularly good at dramatizing such narrative threads, but we certainly don’t own the rights. The Mahabharata, the immense Sanskrit epic about cousins who go to war over politics, sexism, and immorality penned by Srila Vyasadeva and Ganesha, recounts events from more than 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years before Oedipus Rex appeared. In the intervening millennia we have been inundated with families misbehaving in ways we can’t unsee. But you don’t have to carve your own eyes out of your head to get the underlying point: The families on stage are extreme versions of the ones we go home to.

In this moment of trigger warnings, let it be said that all family plays are triggers and that good plays trigger with intent. They zero in on past trauma and make it present and immediate. They cause a very specific kind of emotional distress: The audience, transported by memory, may find itself unable to remain present in the moment—yet it cannot look away, it cannot press pause.

Birthrights, grudges, feuds, illicit unions, and deeply buried secrets keep us watching even when we don’t want to. According to my mother, my own father sat watching all four acts of Eugene O’Neill’s great mid-century play Long Day’s Journey into Night while obsessively gnawing the skin off the cuticle of his thumb. Did he recognize his own mother in the doomed Mary Tyrone? Did Mary’s doomed son Edmund’s psychic stress reflect his own love/hate relationship to a family torn apart by the American Depression?

I wish I could have asked him. But when I am gnawing at my own thumb while writing my own versions of the family play, I realize that writers are, in a way, cannibals when we attempt to tell the tale of those who came before, tearing at themselves in the piteous search for the narrative thread. Mary Tyrone was not my father’s mother, nor was Edmund my father. Yet somehow, they trod the same narrative path with my father over the same Donner Pass in the dead of bleak midwinter. And watching it made him chew his own flesh.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that. In 1931, Thornton Wilder wrote The Long Christmas Dinner, a play where 90 years go by without a pause in the action. This is a narrative thread on an epic scale yet told in just a few scant minutes. Life courses come and go without fanfare but with love. Characters enter from a portal decorated with fruit and flowers and exit through another hung with black velvet. They age in front of us with little or no physical alteration, and the audience must examine a life span all at once.

The result is funny and tragic, often at the same time. Although no specific dialogue presages the specific rancor of our political tribalism, we get the sense that the holiday table is a place where family unloads upon one another their frustrations and fears—same as it ever was. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” remarks the unofficial family historian of the play and the character most aware of Time passing, Young Genevieve, not knowing that her mother observed the same thing years before, and that her daughter-in-law will make the same remark years from now at the same table. But, thanks to the telescoped nature of the piece, the audience remembers. They can’t forget, and they wouldn’t want to.

We are all the crazy children of parents too difficult to forget. Nature, nurture, love, damage: It’s all there at the family dinner table, somewhere between the rice and peas and the alcohol, and sometimes it might seem like it’s just too much to bear—especially when the narrative thread gets frayed.

Plays are both prompts and provocations. They point to the madness of our ancestors to help us understand the instabilities of our own lives, tendrils of triggering hostilities growing deep down just under the festive tablecloth. We differ more by degree than kind; we may share DNA or the scars of war, but at least we have perspective, as Shakespeare tells us, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Whether in the hands of Sophocles, O’Neill, Wilder, or the scores of other playwrights, the family play helps us see that aside from the birthing and the dying, our experiences are not all that different from each other’s. We are all a little crazy and a lot unforgettable. It is quite literally all in the family. The madness is both intrafamilial and interfamilial. Whatever madness awaits you at home for the holidays, not only will you get through it, but you’ll likely see—or have already seen—aspects of it on stage at some point. Perhaps your reflection will help you get through the next meal amongst those who made you what you are.

The post Theater Understands Your Holiday Dinner Angst appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Positive psychology involves a complex mixture of Eastern religions, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, international comparisons, and implications for public policy. But above all, it represents a shift among psychologists from mental illness to mental health; from anxiety and depression to subjective well-being.

Ironically, positive psychology was born in misery and war—long before the current version, with its emphasis on scientific study of positive human functioning and resilience, emerged with self-consciousness and institutional heft in the 1990s.

Among its most influential findings was the notion that people benefitted from severely stressful experiences. More than anyone else, psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl provided the evidence for and the philosophy of what was first known as posttraumatic growth.

Starting in September 1942, Frankl spent two and a half years in Nazi concentration camps. Soon after his liberation, he began work on a book, published in German in 1946, with a title that translated as “Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything.” In 1959, it was published in the United States and eventually titled Man’s Search for Meaning. Having returned to Vienna after the war, Frankl responded to the horrible events he had experienced by asserting that the most horrendous circumstances provided the seedbed of well-being.

If Frankl experienced loss under extreme conditions, John Bowlby did so through the lens of a privileged man who faced a series of less dramatic disruptions than Frankl. As a child, Bowlby rarely saw his parents, which spurred him to a lifetime focused on the importance of personal connections. In his 1951 report, Maternal Care and Mental Health, based on a study of millions of children left homeless as a result of World War II, he developed attachment theory. Extended and elaborated on by others, attachment theory underscored the significance of social connections more generally to human happiness.

The momentous traumas World War II veterans experienced also shaped the work of Aaron Beck, the author of an influential book on depression and a founder of cognitive behavioral therapy. In some of his first published papers, he reported on how soldiers reacted to accidentally killing their buddies. Beck developed ways of measuring and treating a host of mental illnesses that originated in such traumatic experiences. Central to cognitive behavioral therapy was teaching patients how to posit alternative explanations, develop realistic goals, learn to see reactions objectively, and practice “neutralizing ‘automatic thoughts.’” If not happiness, a word Beck did not deploy, then at least a less depressive and more realistic approach to the world resulted.

Another key figure is Abraham Maslow, whose optimistic, humanistic psychology emerged from personal and social adversity. The son of a miserably unhappy mother, as a youth he encountered anti-Semitism, and as a young professional came to know many of the émigré psychologists the Nazis had driven into exile. These experiences impelled Maslow to develop a holistic and positive theory of motivation, one that celebrated how individual humans might aspire to self-realization. He focused on healthy and fulfilled people, concentrating on a psychology of normality, not abnormality. Maslow’s vision found its most influential expression in his 1954 Motivation and Personality, where he offered a full statement of his philosophy of self-realization, one based on the notion of the hierarchy of needs, at the top of which stood peak, intense experiences.

If Frankl, Bowlby, and Maslow articulated one approach to happiness, neuroscientists offered another. A key discovery became publicly known in 1956 when James Olds published “Pleasure Centers in the Brain.” Writing in Scientific American, Olds announced that his findings, from experiments in which stimulating the brains of rats led them to pursue pleasure, contradicted the notion that brain stimulation meant punishment. He expressed hope that future studies might locate nerve cells whose stimulation by electrodes or drugs could satisfy other basic drives, such as the quest for hunger and sex.

In the 1950s, scientists discovered that not only electrical stimulation but also pills could make people happy. During the 1950s, some prescription drugs, known as “Happy Pills,” made it possible to produce if not bliss then at least lower levels of anxiety. Perhaps “the elixir of happiness has been found,” wrote an observer in a Canadian medical journal in 1958.

Miltown was the first in a series of moderately powerful tranquilizers that promised relief from social, medical, and psychological misery. The story of its development reveals how Frank Berger, a research scientist who fled Nazi-occupied Prague and was imprisoned as a homeless man in London, became a bacteriologist in a government laboratory. In 1950 he and an associate synthesized a compound commercially known as Miltown, which turned vicious monkeys into calm, friendly, and alert ones. After a slow start, it became the nation’s first blockbuster psychotropic drug.

A very different connection between science and happiness came in the first sustained social science studies of people’s sense of well-being—studies that originated out of concerns about mental illness but soon led to the exploration of well-being. The authors of Americans View Their Mental Health: A Nationwide Interview Survey (1960) reported on interviews in which Americans were asked how well or badly adjusted they considered themselves to be and whether they were “happy or unhappy, worried or unworried, optimistic or pessimistic” in their outlook. Focused on professional help and not self-help, the researchers aimed to determine how people felt about their lives and, if they had problems, whether and from whom they would seek help. Overall, they concluded, about 90 percent of Americans reported that they were very or pretty happy.

Five years later came a study that more clearly shifted the focus of social surveys from mental health to subjective well-being. In Reports on Happiness, social psychologist Norman M. Bradburn and sociologist David Caplovitz broke fresh ground by focusing on the mental well-being of what they called “normal” people and urged researchers to pay more attention to “positive satisfactions” and less to mental problems.

The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s bequeathed new kinds of studies on happiness, new experimentation with drugs, an interest in Eastern religions, the practice of meditation, a commitment to humanistic psychology, and a belief that experiences, especially intense ones, provided more pleasure than commercial goods. Before the 1960s, these elements had come together in the life and writings of Alan Watts, a central figure in Americans’ romance with turning to Asian religions for solutions and inspirations they felt their own world did not provide.

Watts’ commitment to Zen Buddhism and Taoism stood in unresolved tension with a life that was far from peaceful and harmonious. Seeking transcendence, he abused alcohol to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Though he espoused simplicity, he had to support a wife, ex-wives, and seven children. Achieving happiness, he wrote in 1961, involved reconnecting what modern life disconnected—not only man with nature but also “the individual” with “the unknown Self, the unconscious, inner universe.” In his immensely popular The Way of Zen (1957), he described meditation as “simply a quiet awareness, without comment, of whatever happens to be here and now. Initially skeptical of the use of drugs, by 1962 he hailed LSD as an entry point to a “Joyous Cosmology.”

Though many building blocks of positive psychology originated in misery, there is one important exception: Norman Vincent Peale’s enormously influential The Power of Positive Thinking. Published in 1952, it became the most widely-read precursor of positive psychology (though positive psychology’s practitioners would try to keep their distance from the book). Peale offered a reassuring message in which the exercise of a therapeutic, Protestant version of mind control promised peace, happiness, and well-being. His vision was highly individualistic, though at moments he offered examples of the benefit of helping others on a one-on-one basis.

In his 1998 address as president of the American Psychological Association, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin P. Seligman announced the launching of Positive Psychology, although by then most of the components of this scientific field were already in place. Positive psychologists would draw on what came before, often in ways their predecessors could not have anticipated and would not have approved of. Nonetheless, what emerged eventually was a powerful field, grounded in science and transformative in the lives of millions of people.

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I am a researcher who studies how people cope with trauma, with a special focus on the first weeks after a traumatic event. I’ve worked with many people who have experienced trauma—from incest survivors to people affected by the 1993 firestorms in Laguna Beach and Malibu. One symptom of acute and post-traumatic stress (PTS) is flashing back to the event—intrusive thoughts and images that pop into your head and cause you to re-experience the trauma. With images of the attacks on the Twin Towers replaying in my mind, I decided I had to study how Americans were coping with 9/11.

Within weeks, I launched a national study with my colleagues from University of California, Irvine and the University of Denver. We designed an online survey to measure how a national sample of more than 2,700 people—who lived in every state and were representative of the U.S. population—were coping with the terrorist attacks. A few weeks after 9/11, we asked people all kinds of questions about their stress levels, social relationships, and fears of future terrorism. We conducted follow-up surveys six times over the next three years so we could track their responses over time.

One of the most surprising findings from our study was that people who watched four or more hours of daily 9/11-related TV in the week following the attacks experienced increases in PTS symptoms over the next three years. Even watching one to three hours of daily 9/11-related coverage put a person at higher risk of experiencing the hallmark PTS symptoms: flashbacks, feeling on edge and hyper-vigilant, and avoidance of anything that reminds one of the trauma.

These findings, and those of other post-9/11 studies, suggest that media exposure may spread the impact of a traumatic event beyond the directly affected area. This goes against what many experts suggest—that indirect media-based exposure to trauma is not clinically relevant for the general public. Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association definition of post-traumatic stress makes clear that only individuals who directly experienced trauma—or whose close loved ones directly experienced trauma—are considered to have been “exposed” to trauma. Without this “exposure,” the acute stress or PTS symptoms experienced by an individual are not considered particularly meaningful for overall well-being. While there have been studies examining how therapists and emergency response workers are impacted by indirect exposure to trauma through their professional duties, there has been little interest in studying whether mass media coverage of a major collective trauma unintentionally spreads the negative impacts beyond the directly affected communities.

The relevance of indirect media exposure became apparent again after last April’s Boston Marathon. In the days following the bombings, my colleagues and I decided to replicate our 9/11 study using media exposure to the Boston Marathon bombings. This time, we wanted to look at all types of media: how much TV people watched, their exposure to disaster-related radio, print, and online news, and their use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo in the week following the bombings. We were interested in how social media may have blurred the line between fiction and reality. Unlike traditional media that warns us about the gruesome nature of an image before showing it to us, social media typically display such images without warning.

We also wanted to compare the direct exposure of the bombings to indirect exposure through the media—did these different ways of being “exposed” lead to more or less acute stress? Two weeks after the bombings, we launched another web-based study with more than 4,600 people from all over the country—including nearly 850 people who were in Boston on the day of the bombing.

We expected both groups (people with direct and indirect exposure) to report acute stress symptoms. Surprisingly, the people who consumed significant bombing-related media in the week after the bombings (six or more hours per day) were six times more likely to report high levels of acute stress symptoms than those who were at the Boston Marathon that day. That is, they reported experiencing a wider range of acute stress-related symptoms—flashbacks, feeling anxious, wanting to avoid reminders of the bombings, and feeling like it had not really happened or was a bad dream—than people who were there when the bombs exploded. Even when we accounted for those who might be especially susceptible—for example, people with pre-existing mental illness or people who already watched a lot of TV (and might be drawn to and more distressed by media coverage)—our findings did not change.

What explains this? I suspect that the repetitive nature of media coverage of traumatic events may keep the event (and the feelings associated with it) alive for some people. In contrast, when a person is directly exposed to an event, there can be a sense of closure and relief once the bombs stop exploding and the acute threat has ended. Seeing the same disturbing images over and over on television (or on social media), may repeatedly trigger fears and worrying in some people and make it difficult for them to mentally process the event.

It is important to point out that not everyone responds this way to media coverage. There is a lot of variation in response to trauma. Only some people who consumed lots of media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings developed acute stress symptoms. So I am now studying who is most vulnerable to direct and indirect exposure to traumatic events. If we identify those people who are most affected, we can reach out to them early and try to prevent them from developing problems.

Right after the bombings, the Red Cross put signs up in Boston urging people to limit their exposure to television coverage of the bombings. I think that’s good advice for all of us—we should be safe from harm as we follow what’s happening in the world. We are just beginning to understand the role of the media in shaping our early responses to collective trauma and spreading acute stress beyond the affected area. More research is needed to figure how best to protect people who might be vulnerable to the negative impact of media exposure in the aftermath of disasters.

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