Therapist Feels Strains of Hurricane Victims' Traumas in Her Own Life

Antoinette Q. Bankston spent 20 years as a therapist in private practice before she became director of mental-health services

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at the Baton Rouge Children's Health Project, in Louisiana. Following are her experiences in coping with trauma and stress she suffered as she worked with children who live at or below the poverty line, many of whom lost their homes during Hurricane Katrina:

Not too long after I started the job 16 months ago, I experienced a sort of emotional numbing in my personal life. I would be spending time with my four children, and the stories they would share wouldn't elicit the same laughter in me. I would find my mind wandering to a boy who'd been stuck on a bridge for five days after the hurricane. You feel that you're not all there, that you're not experiencing things.

For some people, there comes a time when someone is telling them the most horrible story, but they're not experiencing the full range of emotions. I never really got there. For me, it mostly affected my personal life.

Part of the challenge has been processing what I witnessed right after Hurricane Katrina. When the hurricane hit, I went to the airport in New Orleans to do some volunteer work helping to reconnect children with their families. I saw some things that I wasn't prepared for. It was a very low point for humanity.

It wasn't long after I returned, once the dust settled and things calmed down, that I began noticing I was having recurring dreams.

I would dream about some of the things I'd seen at the airport, re-experiencing and working out through my dreams what I'd experienced. I saw people who'd arrived at the airport after being stuck on bridges for five or six days. People's clothes were covered in excrement. I can never forget the expression on their faces. They just had blank stares, and they were handled by the soldiers, shuttled through the airport, very robotically.

When I started my new position in June 2006, I was exposed to many more people who were dealing with trauma. In private practice, maybe half of your patients in a day face trauma. With this work, it's everyone. And I was hearing stories that would trigger things in me. At first I told myself it was the stress of leaving my practice and changing jobs. But I realized it was really secondary trauma.

I'm very aware of secondary trauma because of my training, and I've long been very involved in good self-care. I created the mental-health program at the Baton Rouge Children's Health Project from the ground up. From the day I got here, I've been putting in place protocols and procedures for how to help clients, and so I've also put in place protocols for how we take care of ourselves.

Our entire team went through intensive training run by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. Someone from the Center for Post-Traumatic Stress is coming to do a whole day on compassion fatigue. When working with mind-and-body techniques, we believe that we will only be effective in helping clients learn tools that we've practiced and mastered ourselves. The goal is to start by looking at oneself and then helping to heal others.

We try to limit the number of patients we see, and we have staff retreats. We also have weekly team meetings. It's really a sacred time, when we can process what we've gone through.

On the day of the second anniversary of Katrina this past August, our unit was parked in Renaissance Village, a trailer park that's home to many evacuees of the storm. It was a gray day, and we noticed that people were knocking on our door more often. They were more tearful, and we were more irritable. It was as though everyone was having a bad day all at once.

At lunch, we started talking, and we realized that there was a mood in the park because of the anniversary, and that it was impacting us. We talked about what this day brought up for us individually, and for all of us native to Louisiana. Having that chance to talk was very helpful.

I do this because I want to have longevity; I want to be in this work for the long haul.