The Impact of a Tragedy

On a very, very personal note, last Friday's attack at the University of Alabama-Huntsville impacted me, as I can see it has impacted others in our class. It was very strange - I was sitting at work and suddenly my phone went off, telling me I had a voicemail, but there was no missed call. The voicemail was from one of my girlfriends from Kansas. She sounded very concerned and asked me if I was okay - she had thought I was going to be in Tuscaloosa this weekend and she had heard there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama (she didn't hear, apparently, that the shooting was not at Bama's main campus in Tuscaloosa but at its satellite campus in Huntsville), and she was worried about me. This voicemail was the first I had heard of any shooting in Alabama, and my heart dropped to the floor. My mind automatically went to someone very, very close to me who is a student at Alabama. I immediately called him and he was, of course, fine - only later did I learn that the shooting was not in Tuscaloosa but at the Huntsville campus. I was shaken up for the rest of the day and all through the night. These feelings came even after I heard that not only was Andrew okay, but the shooting happened three hours from the campus he is on.

I guess the question I will pose in this blog is this - if I felt so shaken up and spit out after absolutely nothing happened to the person I care most about in this world, how would I feel if he had been injured? If he had been severely hurt? Or God forbid, if he had died? How can and how do universities properly handle these types of situations? How do counseling centers handle the aftermath of a tragedy like this - helping to heal those who survived the tragedy, but potentially have a lifetime of healing to repair the wounds inflicted not necessarily by gunshots but by broken hearts?

An excellent resource I found on the topic was offered up by the American School Counselor Association and can be found here: http://www.schoolcounselor.org/content.asp?contentid=524

However, based off of what I read on the website, I started thinking about how I would want to be treated if, God forbid, a tragedy like this were to happen on my campus and I survived.

I would first have to know that the counseling center was available and ready to help me if I should ever need it. The counseling center could benefit from offering group therapy workshops so that a student could attend with a friend if they were uncomfortable seeing a counselor by themselves, or if they were afraid of the stigma seeing a counselor carries (my mom is a therapist by trade, so I know all about that). The counseling center would need to be staffed nearly 24/7 to accomodate all of the students needing assistance. Pamphlets, brochures, and E-mails would need to circulate with helpful tips on how to slowly but surely reel in from a tragedy of this magnitude. Above all else, a counseling center would need to show that they care, that they are there for students, and that they too are reeling from the tragedy - that members of the counseling staff and the students can work through their pain together.

When a shooter commits acts of violence on a college campus - or anywhere - I wonder if they realize how many people they affect. The victims in a school shooting are not able to just be counted by the number of dead bodies left behind. Greer, myself, and anyone who felt any amount of pain or anguish over last Friday's killings are victims of Amy Bishop's rage. In this case, three may be dead, but hundreds of thousands of others are emotionally wounded by her actions. While I'm sure many of my classmates chose to write about what we as college administrators can do to prevent the shooting from happening, I wanted to take a different angle and focus on what we can do after - God forbid - something like this happens. Eventually, with time, a college campus will heal. I believe time heals all wounds. But effective practices by a university's counseling center can only help ease the pain felt by all who were touched, in even the slightest way, by such an unspeakable act of violence.

My thoughts are with UAH in this difficult time.