?Dr. David Flomenhaft has practiced in behavioral health for over twenty years. He is the director of a large mental health clinic in Nassau County, New York.? He is also a private practitioner in psychotherapy.? Dr. Flomenhaft recently completed a doctoral research study examining the grief experience of adult siblings who lost a brother or sister in the world trade center attacks.? This study stems from his clinical experience with the 9/11 family community as well as critical incident response work with trauma victims.? Dr. Flomenhaft was raised in a family of social workers. His parents and his younger sister all have advanced degrees in the field

David Flomenhaft:? Eighty adult siblings:? brothers and sisters who lost their brothers and sisters in the 9/11 catastrophe. This is a population that the research identified as the forgotten ones.? They were the ones who when queried by family and friends in how were they doing, it wasn’t how are they doing, how are their parents doing?? So their loss was not recognized.? They were not seen by the community, by the media, by their own family friends as primary mourners.? So this recognition that we were able to provide was very affirming and what we ended up doing is creating a group for brothers and sisters to find community again from brothers and sisters who knew directly about the loss experience.

David Flomenhaft:? They were angry.? They were overlooked, unacknowledged.? Siblings also were as you might expect preoccupied with caring for their own parents.? Their grieving mothers and fathers retreated and isolated and they felt that the siblings couldn’t attend to their own grief while they saw their parents were paralyzed with grief.

David Flomenhaft:? The loss of family due to terrorism is sudden loss.? It appeared to lead to protracted grief.? Protracted in elongated kind of grief.? It was just so unexpected.? So over the top.? The exposure to media, because people couldn’t turn off their TV sets.? They didn’t know what happened to their loved ones for several days after the event.?

David Flomenhaft:? When we have loss we need to attend to the whole family.

David Flomenhaft:? One of the most interesting aspects of the loss of the sibling was that there was this lost opportunity to kind of grow old with that sibling.? You know Betty Davies, who you also had on your show, talked about siblings as life’s longest relationship.? So the inability to kind of raise your kids and see your nieces and nephews and hang out with your brother over the course of your life for many was just kind of a tremendous loss.? Lot of melancholy around that.

David Flomenhaft:? I believe that active remembrance is perhaps the healthiest way to cope with loss.? That if you engage with others, that you begin to rewrite some of that script by participating in an active engagement with others that creates that new life script.? Engage in activities also that help you memorialize your lost siblings.? Find some way to give to others.?

David Flomenhaft:? The assembling of photo albums.? Wearing the memorial bracelets.? Collecting news clippings.? That’s an important part of telling the story because that’s in many ways telling your own story, and many of the people that I talked to got out the photo albums and shared those stories with me.? One even had a tape of his brother’s recorded music that gave her a lot of solace so keeping that a part and telling other family members keeps that person alive in their lives.

David Flomenhaft:? The siblings that I met with had difficulty finding a balance between attending to their parents’ needs, taking care of their own, being present for their children, and attending to their spouse.

David Flomenhaft:? It’s a lot to juggle, so I think getting support.? I would always advocate at least a support group, sibling support group, if you can find it.? Compassionate Friends is a great resource.? Getting therapy.? Most of the people delayed therapy, and if you find you can’t get back on your feet after a reasonable period of time, I’ll let you be the judge of that, and get some support.? Give somebody the opportunity to give you a context to understand your loss.

David Flomenhaft:? You’ve got to take a look at your functioning.? If there’s an impairment in your ability to attend to the usual things that you do, simple biological things.? If your sleep is interrupted.? If your appetite is interrupted.? If your ability to attend to work, to family.? The ability to even find pleasure in any way that you previously found pleasure.? Then there’s an interference in your functioning and if it goes on longer than a couple of weeks to a couple of months, I mean, grief.? Nobody says that there’s a beginning and end of grief but there ought to be a time when somebody gives you the feedback if you can’t do it for yourself and say it’s time to reach out for help.? You know, there are criteria around what makes a diagnosis of depression, but a bereavement is not an illness.? It’s a life process.

David Flomenhaft:? But if it interferes with the ability to cope and manage your needs, then you got to get some help.

David Flomenhaft:? Anti-depressants play a role in helping function.? I’m not a great fan of them either because they have their side effects that we have to be mindful of.? I’d say the most important thing is support and education.? Support and education also of the spouses to understand what their loved one is going through.

David Flomenhaft:? I think that it’s important to understand that adult siblings are very instrumental in supporting their extended families.? These are people that have to multi-task to take care of their own family, their children, their spouse, especially for the female adult siblings, and that they need support and education.? They also need to set some reasonable limits about how much care taking they can do of their adult parents because they, too, have to learn and get support of their own.? I think we need to also for those that lose loved ones in very public events, they need to shield themselves from all the media exposure.? They can overdo it and it tends to prolong and worsen the grief process by continually being exposed to the media, to doing the interviews, to watching an excessive amount of TV.? A number of the families that I spoke with, their children had a degree of post-traumatic stress because of all the TV that they watched after 9/11.

David Flomenhaft:? You have to get a good referral to a good grief therapist when you go through this.? 9/11 is, though, a unique event.? We’re still engaged in a war that followed this event so this loss has daily reminders, and I think because it’s an event that’s named after a date, it has an unusually long residence.? I don’t think this is going to go away as quickly as any of the previous mass trauma.

?

Popularity: 2% [?]