Trauma Counselors to the Rescue
Just me on my soapbox again, feel free to skip this one
Thursday afternoon in a small city about an hour north of here, a domestic argument turned ugly. Apparently the husband followed his wife to the parking lot of their children�s school. Their 4th grade son tried to intervene in the fight and this man, this husband and father, shot his son to death and critically injured his wife while a younger child looked on.
You can read about it here if you want to.
And by the way, did you know that a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 calculated that having a gun in the home increased a woman's risk of becoming a homicide victim threefold.
Meanwhile, I belong to this volunteer organization of on-call trauma counselors. Weird shit happens and we get the call to put on our cape and tights, go to the school or office and slap an emotional bandage on the event so everybody else can get back to life as usual. I don�t get a lot of these calls, but I have been to a few schools where classmates have been killed in motor vehicle accidents or murdered and once I was called to an apartment house fire.
As you can imagine, September 11th kept us busy for weeks. I made the rounds of the grade schools, reminding the children that they were safe. Mommy and Daddy love you and will keep you safe. The bad people are far, far away. New York and Washington are far, far away. President Bush, the policemen and the firemen know what they are doing. Ok, I lied about Bush, but it is a benevolent lie. Then the kids and I painted a giant American flags, dipping our hands in white paint to make the stars. United we stand. That was the healing process.
It helped me anyway
I�m not the Alpha counselor on this school shooting mission nor am I a child psychologist. I am more than willing to take direction from a venerable and well published local child psychologist He's a good man and I am honered just to sit as his feet and learn. The school where the shooting occurred is a Catholic school, so the Priest wants to put his spin on what we say to his students. He�s going for the �God has picked another little rosebud for his garden� angle. Their classmate has gone to heaven. Fine with me; just give me the script because telling these children that they are safe in their school in a small Midwestern town isn�t going to fly. Telling them that Mommy and Daddy love them and the bad people are far, far away isn�t going to work either. Not this time. Not when the bad person is Daddy.
I don�t know why this man shot his wife and son. Maybe she burned the toast that morning, or maxed out the credit cards. Maybe she was getting ready to leave him, or he has a brain tumor and thinks he is receiving murderous brain waves from Venus. I do know a schoolful of little Catholic kids and their anxious parents expect a better answer than �bad things sometimes happen, but you get to go to heaven and be with Jesus�
I don�t have an answer, my learned colleagues don't have an answer either, although they do have good advice for the parents about supporting their children.
One thing I do know,there are too many freakin guns in this country and judging from the results of the last election, we like it this way.
I better keep my cape and tights by the door.
