I heard a female psychologist on NPR saying that she tells anyone (I assume her clients) who was traumatized by the events of 9/11 that if they've ever seen the footage of the first tower collapsing and the plane striking the second tower, they should not ever watch it again and avoid the restrospectives being televised today. "They need to avoid getting sucked into watching it so they can get over it and go on with their life."
What a bunch of crock. What bull. The psychologist sounded a teeny bit hysterical and in need of psychology herself.

Here is a fundamental trait of human behavior: Human beings see some extraordinary catastropic event like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the destruction of the Towers, the assasination of JFK, etc. and they have a need to talk about it, to see it again, to try to understand it and try to explain it.
Humans are natural rubberneckers period, because we are curious beings. When people see an accident, or some event sudden and terrible, they are drawn to look at it, to take in and assimilate it into rationality.

When the earliest humans encountered some distrastrous event-maybe their hunters being pushed off a cliff by a mastodon, or overwhelmed by sudden attack by enemies, etc., surely they would sit around their fires for generations and recall that time, and speak of it and re-enact it in their lore.
One day, as one generation passes into another, as one tragedy follows another, all the people who were alive at the time of the catastrophy die off and it becomes fodder for history books, and the rawness and acuteness of it fades.

I'd like to say to that psychologist that remembering and talking of horrible events is a natural human thing, it is not as she intimated, that it is like picking at scabs so that the soreness of it never gets well. You can't scab over emotion and feelings; in time, all things heal and there might be a scar, but that is the natural progression of things.

I didn't know a soul who died in the Towers or in the highjacked planes, but I watched some of the restrospectives today and felt such sorrow for those who died in such terrible circumstances, and teared up thinking of the waste of all those lives.
September 11, 2001/September 11, 2011

susil

PS One last thing--if I'm ever in a skyscraper that's on fire, I don't care if the police or firemen say stay put help is coming, I'm gonna get the hell out of there.