Page 173 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

142 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

Work With the Children

The children saw that we were engaging their parents emotionally around
issues that had to do with the deceased parent. In that way, we were tem-
porarily, for the child, replacing the dead parent emotionally. This kind of
stepping in freed the children to play, feeling that for the moment we were
taking care of their parents’ grief. The children felt during the retreat as
if they temporarily had regained a lost or important connection with the
deceased parent, as we engaged the surviving parent and also the children.
We also encouraged the children to engage each other because these chil-
dren had parents who had worked together in the same company and had
not survived the disaster. This offered a respite from the burden of mourn-
ing through a different kind of connection over grief. In fact, after the
weekend retreats, some of the children had periods of agitation, because
of having to give up that temporarily regained connection.
We organized children’s workshops according to age, with meetings
for both the younger children and the older children. We used draw-
ing, mutual storytelling, social dreams, and discussion to break the ice
and allow expression of feeling and memory. The parents of the younger
children’s group watched in the background. They were impressed and
sometimes surprised at how expressive their children were in their draw-
ings and stories. We felt the same way. The imaginative stories were full
of themes of children getting lost, relying on other people for help to find
their way, finding ways to help themselves, and making friends and meet-
ing enemies along the way. The children were engaged and on occasion
embellished each other’s stories. None left after the break in the middle
of the session. They took to the drawing exercises readily, using facial
expressions and weather images to depict the sadness they felt after their
mothers or fathers were killed. References to the lost parent or to his or
her death were expressed in private symbols or in obvious symbols (like a
rescue helicopter hovering over a big building). One 4-year-old’s picture of
her family’s tension after 9/11 was of a monster. Another little girl’s picture
of running shoes opened up a memory from the day of the attack: yelling
to her father over the phone to run away from the burning building, but
realizing that he had left his running shoes at home.
We had children tell their dreams, one after the other, and heard many
anxious ones. This kind of exercise, called social dreaming, was easy for
younger children (ages 3 to 7) but harder for older children. The older chil-
dren and teens were more guarded, having come to rely on the repression