How Re-Opening is Re-Traumatizing for a 9/11 Survivor
What does therapy for political trauma look like?
I’ve been going through it since last fall when the government and media started pushing re-opening schools based on an economist publishing partial, self-reported, and widely criticized data on the safety of schools. This was months before vaccines were available, while epidemiologists were warning that her data wasn’t conclusive and, in fact, schools could be hotbeds of transmission.
Still, mainstream media landed on her data, as it confirmed what many people wanted to hear about schools. They stuck with the data through the horrific winter surge, which should have proven everyone’s Covid minimization wrong. I’ve been taking all of this re-opening talk personally, as a Covid long-hauler, a year into viral-related illness.
We are still in a place where half of adults aren’t vaccinated; many adults face medical or socio-economic barriers to vaccination; children aren’t vaccinated and are experiencing long-haul Covid symptoms at alarming rates; we don’t have any data on the effects or effectiveness of vaccination on medically vulnerable groups, and we don’t know for how long these vaccines will be effective. But from the way many government leaders and the media discuss Covid, it’s becoming a past-tense issue.
Some people have been writing about the PTSD of emerging out of Covid as if it’s a mental state to overcome. But I also experienced a coordinated premature “safe return” campaign before, and I believe I’ve earned the right to live in continued fear. Our present situation is reminding me too much of what many of us went through then.
“The air is safe to breathe.”
Christine Todd Whitman, 2001
The first week back to the office on Chambers Street in downtown New York City after the Twin Towers in 2001 collapsed was eerie. Not many people were outside, besides men in army fatigues and gas masks. (The gas masks should’ve been a clue.) My falafel spot was closed and covered in soot. I dropped a coffee on my sandaled feet in shock at what I saw, screamed out loud at the burn, and one of the army guys in fatigues looked at and through me. I was on my own here.
“Why are we here?” my coworker in the research department, Ali, asked out loud. We had no internet yet if I recall correctly. I also remember the office being dark. I know some things worked and others didn’t, for a while.
The shock of going to work in a war zone was the third trauma I experienced during those weeks. The first was when I got off the train for work at 9:15 am on September 11, 2001, saw the towers on fire, and then, walking quickly north up Broadway, saw them collapse. That was traumatic by itself, but more so because we didn’t have cell phones or understand what was happening. People walking or running north would gather around cars with open doors to listen to the radio. We heard that the country was being attacked, including D.C. where my parents lived.
As is my tendency, I didn’t really process that trauma. I didn’t “feel my feelings.” I got to safety. A few nights later, I called my father in the middle of the night crying and told him I could see people falling from the building, something I never saw. That was the first and last time I cried for a year.
Then my job subjected me to my second 9/11-related trauma by asking me to come work at the Family Assistance Center and help distribute checks to families. I worked for Safe Horizon, the largest victim service organization in the country. It was one of my first jobs. On a normal day, I wrote about trauma.
I had some teaching experience, but I was supremely unqualified to distribute checks to families still hoping their loved ones were alive under the rubble. They filled out “Missing Persons” and not “Death” claims. I remember a lot of wealthy women in tears getting gigantic checks based on their husband stock-broker’s paychecks, and I learned that it’s very easy for the government to provide big relief checks when it wants. This work brought on a degree of what they call “secondary trauma,” when you take on someone’s trauma that you are helping. I’d written about it for my job, the organization that was subjecting me to it.
I was most affected by the security guards who survived. They wanted illness-related checks, and some of them would exaggerate their coughs to apply for them. There was no money for them otherwise. They were mostly Black contracted workers and out of business. They didn’t qualify for the replacement pay checks. Some of them were undocumented. Some of them had been instructed by their bosses, when the towers were on fire, to stay behind and direct people out of the building, despite no first responder training. Some of them reported coworkers dying.
At some point, I remember hearing from my bosses that the money wouldn’t be given so easily for those illness-related claims. I also heard a couple of social workers complaining about scammers on the bus ride from the center. My secondary trauma was exacerbated by witnessing this brutal systemic injustice so early in the crisis. Safe Horizon didn’t have a name for the secondary trauma of seeing how unfair the world can be.
As is my tendency, I didn’t process the secondary trauma either. I knew I felt uneasy, but I had no idea where to begin. I hadn’t even done therapy to deal with my own personal traumas yet, besides an inappropriate psychiatrist that misdiagnosed and mis-medicated me after college, turning me off the profession. My job, for the professional trauma experts, offered us nothing in training or support.
Still, I loved working in the Family Assistance Center. It was a safe place filled with the spirit of help. There were massages and free food for workers. Unfortunately, after two weeks, my job said they needed me back in the office because they needed someone to write the proposals for funding. The money was pouring in.
The smell was also pouring in, right through the window next to my desk—the smell of burning steel, asbestos, toxins, and bodies from down the street. Not long into sitting in darkish offices, typing up requests for millions of dollars, I began to feel worse than my usual fall allergies. I often could not find my breath, and a rash broke out over my chest. I had to stop wearing bras because of the irritation. According to my allergists, I was hardly alone.
As is my tendency, I tried not to process the physical trauma either. I even took a walk over towards the towers after work one day to buy shoes at Century City out of a desire for normalcy. I had to turn around at some point. I hit a zone where my body screamed loudly enough at my brain that it finally listened. Something told me I wasn’t safe.
It took a major effort to compartmentalize my brain to get through that job. I wrote about programs for trauma survivors that I wasn’t invited to attend but needed. It caused me stress to cut my brain off from even its sense of irony about that situation. I had a foggy brain also from whatever I was breathing.
There is a lot to say about what happened to my coworkers and me that year. The long story short, for me, is that I got sicker and sicker and requested to work from home but was denied. My boss offered me an office in Downtown Brooklyn instead, which added a half-hour to my commute and was also in the pathway of the smoke plume from Ground Zero. I took it. I was so young and a nonprofit do-gooder. I didn’t want to let anyone down.
Meanwhile, my boss kept reminding me that the EPA, under Christine Todd Whitman, said the air was safe, which we now know, conclusively, was a lie. Mayor Rudy Giuliani also kept singing the refrain of “return to normalcy” for downtown New York. “New Yorkers are strong, fight back, don’t let terrorists win,” and so on.
I felt the pressure from my boss and started back in my office before I was ready. (Part 2 of this story is about how my boss got caught committing fraud shortly after.)
I threw myself into my work and did my best to ignore the persistent smell and my body’s warning signs until I no longer could. By late summer 2002, I wasn’t breathing without hourly Albuterol and the rash had spread to my entire body, even the corners of my ear and the spaces between my toes. I could not eat most food or use any products. My doctor tried course after course of steroids, which weakened my immune system, and finally, I had to leave New York City.
I’m now part of a 20-year health study filled with over 100,000 people who did not recover from that air well, but at least we didn’t die. Many did. My doctors today theorize that my rare mast cell disease, which has made much of my adult life difficult, was triggered by my exposure to 9/11 air, with childhood asthma setting the conditions for that to happen. Ironically, there are workplaces that I cannot be in for more than a few hours now.
They didn’t give a name to what we suffered, like Gulf War syndrome. They don’t give a name, generally, when it happens to groups that aren’t veterans of war. They don’t give a name to the specific suffering of farm workers over-exposed to unsafe pesticides. They don’t give a name to communities poisoned by unsafe lead, mold, and water. They don’t want us taking action.
In 2002, I returned to work before it was safe for me, due to political pressure. From 2020, we now know that I could have always worked from home. I wrote documents for Safe Horizon. I could’ve come in once a week or so for the ones that needed to be mailed. I could’ve been doing this for my entire career, which would’ve also made me more productive.
Just as in 2001, the impulse today to push everyone back to the absurd circumstances of in-person employment during a persistent pandemic is not about productivity or even mental health. It is about power, control, wealth, and ableism. There is an understandable yearn-to-return among many able-bodied people who do not see Covid as a serious threat or who recovered easily from it. They want to impose that on the entire country for the same reason that kids make fun of the kid who can’t run on the playground: they don’t care about or believe the ones that suffer. They say things like, “Well then you can just stay home,” as if our economy gives vulnerable people that option. If Covid hasn’t opened your eyes to how ableism pervades consciousness in the U.S., nothing will.
In any case, my fear response system probably will not let me step foot in an office for a long while. I had a better gauge on safety than the government in 2001, and I still believe I do now.
“According to the CDC…”
You will pardon me please if I am still too deep into Covid-related PTSD to embrace restaurants, movie theaters, and offices, based on confusing messages from scientists who work for the CDC and seem to change their minds a lot. There were scientists at the EPA in 2001 also.
What is more, I caught Covid following every CDC rule, going to a doctor’s office and keeping my mask on the entire time, while I was seen in a waiting room and nobody else was in the office. I either caught it from that visit or from a food delivery that day. We don’t know everything about Covid. And, a year later, I still have long-haul illness, which the government is doing nothing to address.
You will pardon me too please if I was vaccine-hesitant, given that it wasn’t tested on people like me, though I finally got it. And you will pardon me if I am not sure that a vaccine-only approach is going to control this virus. You will also pardon me if I do think it matters that the Johnson & Johnson company, up to the top, continued to sell ovarian cancer-causing baby powder long after knowing its risks and maybe shouldn’t be trusted with our public health. The company is still trying to evade responsibility for this, as we speak! You will pardon my fears of a government and companies that have not historically had our best interests in mind.
What does therapy for political trauma look like?
My job at Safe Horizon had me doing research and writing about mental health services to “survivors of war trauma,” who were refugees. The organization provided group therapy and art therapy, with the goal of not retraumatizing the survivors. The organization also provided debrief counseling sessions for Wall Street employees after 9/11, which apparently did not involve drawing pictures.
In retrospect, a lot of Safe Horizon’s models of help were patronizing and elitist, divorced from the political conditions that created the need and often part of the problem. NYPD was a major partner for many of its programs, as were some anti-sex trafficking organizations that don’t support sex workers. At a big fundraiser, our very white Director of Communications gave a speech about her experience of sexual assault: a man masturbated on the train towards her. Were they afraid that one of our war trauma survivors or one of the women of color in our domestic violence shelters would have alienated donors? Safe Horizon’s hero at the time was Board Member Linda Fairstein, who is now notorious as the prosecutor that wrongfully imprisoned the Central Park 5. I’ve been speaking lately with a former Safe Horizon colleague and friend from that time, who dealt with profound racism at the job, about how much trauma our agency and its supporters actively caused.
Safe Horizon’s model of help reminds me of my experience seeking therapy over the years for PTSD and having that quest often trigger more PTSD. I’ve often hit a limit with therapists around my physical illness and neuro-divergence. They don’t understand them, and they say offensive things. Ableism, like a toxic fume, is in the air.
Most of the therapy models I’ve experienced center around figuring out the source of emotional reactions and working on improving the negative ones. What is the appropriate therapy model for addressing ongoing political trauma? I could use some support. I have a recurring nightmare of finding myself trapped in maskless crowds.
My past experience with therapists makes me reluctant to even begin to look for one to deal with my Covid-related mental health issues, considering that ableism is a primary trigger of depression for me and something I’m exposed to almost every day. I don’t want to risk a therapist suggesting that I work on my fear of other human bodies when bodies still present an enormous risk. I don’t want someone to ask, “What does this remind you of from your childhood?” when the answer is that it reminds me of when I was unsafe as a child but also when I was unsafe as an adult because the government lied to me.
I am still going through it, and I probably will go through it until there really is no more pandemic. Around that time, I imagine, we will start learning about exactly when and how we were lied to about Covid. I’m not sure my PTSD isn’t appropriate to the moment. It feels rational to me.
