Page 197 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

166 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

presented other ways to link disaster resilience and common practices,
such as: “What would it be like to have a peaceful meal (and any preced-
ing prayer) infused with the explicit intention of building resilience vis-à-
vis a disaster?” In teaching systematic, intentional relaxation, I suggested
that people adopt a regular activity or technique that has resilience as its
central purpose. This is in contrast to practices like “vegging” in front of
a television or exercising or napping that are passively relaxing for some
people.
January 1st, on the request of other voluntary agencies, I was asked to
travel to Nagapattinam, the region of India most devastated—in lives lost,
witnesses and survivors, and infrastructure destroyed. There I taught PFA
to workers from NGOs and promoted PFA at a meeting coordinating gov-
ernment and NGO activities.
In the villages of Nagapattinam, I was asked repeatedly whether I
wanted to get groups of survivors together in order to discuss what hap-
pened during the tsunami. In my assessment, this was a problematic way
to proceed. First, this would resemble a critical incident stress debriefing
(CISD), and although CISD may be beneficial for first responders, such as
firefighters who have been trained to use CISD after tragedies, the research
evidence shows that convening CISD-naïve groups of survivors to discuss
a tragedy in the acute phase of horror is likely to be nonbeneficial or harm-
ful (Gist & Devilly, 2002; Rose, Bisson, & Wessely, 2006; van Emmerik,
Kamphuis, Hulsbosch, & Emmelkamp, 2002). Second, in the villages to
which I would have exposure, survivors were milling about or parts of
fluid groups; any group that we wished to repeat the next day would be
made up of different people. Thus, the stability of the group composition
would be compromised, and I as an outsider “swooping in” for a few ses-
sions and “swooping out” may add another layer of disruption, abandon-
ment, and “disaster tourism.”*
On two occasions, when the request came from the victims them-
selves, I did agree to conduct PFA groups with primarily affected peo-
ple. We would start with two to three people, and then others would
drift over in what appeared to be either curiosity or emotional need.

* Disaster tourism is driven by curiosity and not any relief objective. Swooping in/out has a relief
objective but with a transitory quality. Swooping in/out may bring benefits, but it must be counter-
balanced with any harm accrued by disaster victims having to repeat their stories and grieve the
loss of a caring presence. As disaster-related phenomenon that well-intentioned people participate
in, disaster tourism and swooping in/out have not been adequately discussed in the literature. The
ethics (dilemmas, line-drawing, harms, recommendations) of such phenomena require deeper
treatment elsewhere.