Page 16 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Introduction xv

more precarious position, as they are dependent on government services
that often have rigid eligibility requirements. While offering a variety of
relief services, organizations are often competing with one another over
limited sources of funding. In the jockeying that takes place for position,
individuals slip through the cracks and whole communities are often
underserved or ignored.
Yet, if both mental health professionals and chaplains could agree to
work collaboratively, there would be increased space for deepening relation-
ships across the full range of mental health practitioners and spiritual care
providers. By pooling experience, particularly the data gathered of needs
served and those unmet, each healing profession could work more closely
together to advocate for those they were serving or who they ought to be
serving, to identify gaps and to strategize on how to reach those left out.
In short, an opportunity exists in the growing field of disaster relief ser-
vices to define the relationship between mental health and spiritual care
providers differently than has been typical in the past. Doing so better
serves those in need and offers a model of high-level professional interdis-
ciplinary functioning that others can replicate in other established venues,
such as hospitals, prisons, and the military.
In the partnership established between Dr. Brenner and Chaplain
Bush, along with many others (some of whom are represented in the fol-
lowing chapters), the goal was to provide a framework for healing alien-
ations between mental health providers and spiritual care providers, so
that together we could more effectively provide healing to individuals and
communities injured and fragmented by 9/11. We are working toward fos-
tering a deeper, shared resilience. We believe that practitioners in each
field can draw strength from each other’s expertise and examine differ-
ent approaches, diverse tools, and distinct languages for addressing the
monumental sense of shared loss and rupture.
Because the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an order of magnitude different
from any disaster to previously strike an urban center in the United States,
the situation was already forcing professionals to work together in new and
different ways, to acknowledge limits more readily, and to forge new ways
of responding to the specific challenges at hand. In a real sense, we under-
stood our work was not so much creating something entirely new as much
as attempting to harness existing dynamics, directing them with greater
intentionality, intensity, and effectiveness to achieve the public good.
The need for such collaborative partnerships has only become more
clear and intensified with the tsunami in South Asia and Hurricane
Katrina in the southern United States, among the myriad disasters to