SelfWork: Special Edition: In The Face Of Senseless Tragedy
The SelfWork Podcast
Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2022
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Warning: This episode could act as a trigger due to its topic. Please listen with caution.
The murders in Uvalde, Texas this week may pull for many different reactions to such senseless violence. And the unbelievable but very real fact that children were once again targeted makes it even more devasting.
I humbly offer these suggestions to you to help you make sense and give direction to your own swirling emotions as well as the way to talk to your children about how they might be feeling.
- Look around you and do something you have control over.
- Talk to your children. Allow them to share and work through their feelings and guide them to focus on an act of kindness toward others.
- Journal your own feelings but couple that expression with a plan, no matter how simple.
- Ask for help if you need it.
- Use your anger or anguish not as a weapon, but as motivation.
- This is trauma. Know that you are being affected. And that the only healing direction is through the feelings that you have.
- And as always, take very good care. Of yourself, your loved ones, and your community.
You can hear more about mental health and many other topics by listening to my podcast, SelfWork with Dr. Margaret Rutherford. Subscribe to my websiteand receive one weekly newsletter including my weekly blog post and podcast! If you’d like to join my FaceBook closed group, then click here and answer the membership questions! Welcome!
My new book entitled Perfectly Hidden Depression has arrived and you can order here! Its message is specifically for those with a struggle with strong perfectionism which acts to mask underlying emotional pain. But the many self-help techniques described can be used by everyone who chooses to begin to address emotions long hidden away that are clouding and sabotaging your current life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a special edition of Self-Work. I'm Dr. Marker Brotherford. |
| 0:13.0 | Please know that this episode could trigger you due to its topic, so please listen with caution. |
| 0:20.0 | I remember exactly where I was in 1995 when I heard that a mother had strapped her two very young children into their car seats |
| 0:28.0 | and watched as her car rolled in into a lake in South Carolina. Her name was Susan Smith, and she's still in prison for those deaths. |
| 0:37.0 | I couldn't get their murder out of my head. I was pulled to read reports about it as a psychologist I wondered if she were a true sociopath, |
| 0:46.0 | whether she'd been psychotic and been told by voices in her head to kill them, or she'd had some motive or crazy belief that had kidnapped her mind into acting on murderous impulses. |
| 0:57.0 | How could she turn off an entire aspect of her being, or had feelings of maternal protection and immense love never existed in the first place for her? |
| 1:07.0 | I was attending a conference away from home. I found myself unable to stop crying until I realized why this couldn't be another story of senseless horror. |
| 1:17.0 | I had an almost two-year-old son, and that one fact inherently pulled me into confusing and overpowering set of emotions, fear, anger, sadness, hopelessness. |
| 1:30.0 | You may be there now. |
| 1:32.0 | The killings in a Walde, Texas, tragically stand as another testament to the destructiveness and horror that one human being can create. |
| 1:40.0 | What you tell yourself is the reason it happened or what could have prevented it will vary dependent on your beliefs and values. |
| 1:48.0 | But the inconceivable heartache of those parents, families, friends, and community is very real, no matter what you believe. |
| 1:57.0 | And you may be wanting to lash out, or you could be paralyzed with your own fear, wanting to hold your children even closer. |
| 2:06.0 | But what can you do to help your swirling emotions have some sense of direction? |
| 2:12.0 | I humbly try to give you some ideas. |
| 2:15.0 | Look around you to do something about what you do have control over right now in this moment. |
| 2:21.0 | Even if it seems to not have anything to do with the actual tragedy, calm yourself by creating some kind of order, turn to your faith or familiar ritual that can act to center you and ground you. |
| 2:35.0 | That could be a walk, that could be a rosary, that could be a prayer, that could be a meditation, whatever works for you. |
| 2:45.0 | Talk to your children, remind them of the principle of their own school, of the teachers that care for them, about how you are there to keep them safe. |
| 2:55.0 | Let them talk about their feelings, guide them to focus on something they can do as an act of kindness toward others. |
| 3:03.0 | Journal, or somehow express your own feelings, but couple that expression with a plan no matter how simple it might seem. |
... |
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