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Healing the Hurts of the Trade Center and Pentagon Tragedy

by Gerald Jampolsky, M.D. and Diane V. Cirincione, Ph.D.

We, as are millions of people all over the world, have been in a state of shock, bewilderment and dismay, the depth of sadness, grief, and anger that anything this outrageous could ever happen. We, our nation, and the world is sharing a grief process that has such magnitude that it defies description.

Part of the grief process has to do with getting in touch with all of our feelings and to be able to share them with others. Anger is often a part of the grief process. We, as people who have worked in the death and dying and grief areas through Attitudinal Healing for over 25 years, feel that it is important to be aware of our anger and to share our feelings without attacking others with our anger. Grief is a process that for most of us takes time.

Sometimes some of us become attached to our anger and we want to retaliate immediately. We want to make other people hurt as we have been hurt.   Perhaps the time during grief is not the time to make decisions for revenge and retaliation.

Perhaps it is a time for a Spiritual Awakening where we call on a Loving God, a Higher Power, to help us find a creative solution to the injustice, anger and fear that many of us find ourselves in.  It is not sign of weakness to be compassionate not only to the victims and their families of this calamity, but to all the people in the world who are suffering.

Is it not possible for us to have a gigantic heart full of compassion and love rather than a big stick that wants revenge_

Is it possible that retaliation might not help the healing process of ourselves or the world but might make it worse_

Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela did not bring hate, anger and retaliation for all the tragedy and deaths that had occurred to their people.  Rather than concentrating on the problem, they concentrated on the solution by bringing the Power of God, a Higher Power, into the equation.  They felt the power of Peace and Love and eventually Forgiveness to be fundamental to the healing process for all the pain and grief that had been endured.

It is, hopefully, a time for prayers and asking for help to be a vehicle for bringing Light into a world that seems at the moment to be suffering from a darkness that we never have seen before.  It is a time to ask for God's help to bring more love and compassion into the world through our own lives.  It is a time to look at our own
relationships and to heal those relationships, where we are still holding on to anger and rage.  It is a time to be patient as we learn to find more creative and loving, rather than destructive, solutions to the difficult problems that we in the world face.

We have the greatest of countries with more freedom than any country in the world. Yet we are not perfect, and perhaps part of the solution is to look at our nation’s and our personal mistakes of the past, correct them, and forgive our past.

Let us join together and not get stuck in anger and hate, of who is the strongest.  Let us instead get stuck in who is the most compassionate, the most caring, the most loving and the most peaceful.

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