A guide for volunteers and neighbors exposed to other people’s suffering
When an emergency affects a community, people step forward to help. You may listen to someone’s story, witness injuries or destruction, provide food or transportation, search for belongings, or stay with someone who is frightened. Exposure to another person’s suffering can affect you too.
Notice your own responses. After helping, you may notice changes in sleep, concentration, appetite, mood, patience, or your ability to settle. You may keep thinking about what you saw or heard. You may feel exhausted, restless, detached, irritable, tearful, or unusually alert. Some reactions appear immediately. Others may show up later.
Stay connected. Helping does not mean handling everything by yourself. Talk with people you trust. Spend time with people who know you outside the emergency. Let someone know what you have been seeing and doing. Ordinary human connection can be an important source of support.
Take breaks. You need food, water, rest, and time away from disturbing situations too. When possible, rotate responsibilities and step away from scenes that are becoming too much. You can say, “I need a break,” or “Someone else needs to take this one.”
Remember your limits. You can care deeply about another person’s suffering without being responsible for fixing it. You can listen, provide practical help, and connect someone with additional resources without taking responsibility for everything that happens to them.
Pay attention to cumulative exposure. Repeated encounters with suffering can affect you differently than one difficult encounter. Your response may also be shaped by your own losses, previous experiences, health, responsibilities, or lack of support. Notice changes that persist or begin interfering with sleep, relationships, daily activities, or your ability to function safely.
Return to ordinary human life. After exposure to suffering, familiar people, places, routines, food, rest, and ordinary conversation can help provide continuity. Remember that It is okay to laugh, rest, make art, watch something familiar, walk with someone, or do something completely unrelated to what happened.
Know when to seek additional help. Reach out for professional or emergency assistance if your distress becomes severe or persistent, you cannot function safely, you are using substances in ways that are becoming unsafe, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself or someone else.
Remember
You are part of the community too.
Your wellbeing matters while you are helping someone else’s.
For the full scoop on emergency preparedness from an Interpersonal Neurobiology lens, visit Trauma Aware America’s Emergency Preparedness page.
