Never the same: Shooting survivors share ongoing struggles

When Lacey Welch goes into a restaurant, she never sits with her back to the door. If she sees a police officer, she notices whether he’s paying attention to anything or anyone in particular.

Welch, 34, will tell you she went back to her Soda Springs, Idaho, hometown because she’s more at ease there. Big cities make her somewhat nervous now. She’s happy to be somewhere she’s comfortable opening her window on a hot night or leaving her car unlocked while she runs an errand.

She moved back in 2021 after living in Las Vegas, where she and her mom and sister attended the Route 91 concert featuring Jason Aldean that ended abruptly with a massacre in 2017. A gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400. Welch and her family still go to concerts and other public events. But her sense of safety was shattered, perhaps forever.

Still, she’s just not willing to let bad guys win.

That’s a sentiment she shares with Cindy Maudsley, of Bountiful, Utah, who was 15 in 1999 when two fellow students killed 13 and wounded 21 more at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. A quarter-century later, she admits she’s not over it. Certain smells, sights, events trigger a flood of memories. When she goes out with her husband and five kids, ages 3 to 15, she scans her surroundings and thinks about how to keep them and herself safe should something happen.

She’s the first to say that even if you have a plan, how you’d actually react is something you learn in real time as an event unfolds. But she tries to shrink her unease until it’s manageable and she can go on with her life.

“It doesn’t stop me from sending my kids to school or going to a movie,” she said this week. “I try to live more with faith than in fear, but the trauma’s always there. You have to learn to focus on not worrying about everything.”

In the wake of the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump, former president and 2024 GOP presidential nominee, and killing of bystander Corey Comperatore at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, one wonders how people who were there react to such a trauma. And whether mass events, from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to shootings at grocery stores, concerts, a movie theater and schools have impacted even people who weren’t there more than they realize.

What does trauma do to a person? Is there a “normal” and when does life reclaim it? Deseret News asked both mental health experts and people who survived horrifying events. Here’s what they told us.

Reacting to trauma

When asked what trauma people carry forward from a mass shooting or similar event, Sheldon Solomon responded wryly that anyone who could answer that question would be celebrating their Nobel Prize on a beach somewhere. People are very different.

Still, it is “fair to say that any event of this nature is going — this is to common sense masquerading as psychological insight — to raise existential concerns more specifically about death. And some of those concerns are quite conscious, and some are quite unconscious,” said Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and holder of a presidential citation from the American Psychological Association. His research includes the “effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on behavior.” He’s also an American Psychological Society fellow.

Research suggests humans are “fundamentally motivated” to skirt the concept of death and also “basically yearn to perceive themselves as persons of value in a world of meaning.” So they choose the versions of reality that let them feel that way, he said. When they experience physical or psychological threats or have direct contact with death, some will avoid what’s associated, so folks might skip political rallies after the shooting in Butler or not fly after Sept 11, 2001. They choose rational defenses to minimize the prospect of future death.

“Other people, whether they’re aware of it or not, cling more tenaciously to their preexisting world views,” Solomon said. So religious people become more religious and folks attached to highly charismatic leaders become more attached. He predicts Trump will pick up supporters and lose very few.

“Another clump of folks by virtue of prior experiences or the magnitude of the danger that they perceive to themselves or some combination are literally psycho-dynamically shattered by those kinds of events,” he said. They exhibit post-traumatic stress reactions.

How trauma affects people boils down to “lots of ways.”

“I think what one could say for sure is that these kinds of events, be they environmental or political or economic, all raise these kinds of existential concerns that result in a variety of reactions depending upon individuals, their current circumstance and their prior beliefs,” Solomon said.

‘That could have been me’

Susan Silk, a clinical psychologist in Detroit, Michigan, is part of the American Red Cross’ Disaster Mental Health Team. They go out to disasters of all kinds to help those impacted.

A shooting at a movie theater or at a concert creates a near-universal kind of dread, because nearly everyone can see themselves in such a venue. That’s a factor in how people respond: whether they can picture themselves there.

For a while, people working in mental health and related businesses didn’t think news reports and repeated images of a shooting or similar event could traumatize people unless they were there. Many have changed their mind, recognizing it “might increase our collective sense of vulnerability and identification with trauma and its victims,” Silk said.

Collectively, we “tend to think that could have been me,” she said. Hearing narratives of people who were there also makes it more real. “Whatever trauma we have had in our lives, we attach it to that.” People who have been injured or scared or experienced a traffic pileup or ice storm, for instance, may better identify with others’ tragedy because they, too, have survived situations where they felt they didn’t have any control, Silk said.

Trauma is worse for you if it happens to you — most of the time, said Fran Walfish, a Beverly Hills family psychotherapist and author of “The Self-Aware Parent.” But it can be as traumatizing and sometimes worse to witness it.

Walfish said reactions vary based on personality differences, ego strength — “how much stress a person can handle in their moral, biological, physiological constitution” — and personal experiences with trauma.

The first thing that happens is shock, because feelings and emotions from experiencing or witnessing trauma are too big to process all at once, she said. Walfish thinks when Trump waved his fist, “He was moving forward but clearly had not taken in the enormity of what had happened.” Released from the hospital, he was surrounded by family. Walfish said staying connected to your support system is her first suggestion for processing such an event.

Unfairness of judging reactions

Watch a TV drama or visit a real courtroom and you might see people talking about how someone reacted to tragedy. Convictions and exonerations have been built on others’ assessment of one’s demeanor. Experts like Silk and Solomon say it’s a poor way to judge.

As Silk notes, reactions can be aroused or numbed. In the former, someone might run around being distraught. In the latter, someone might hardly visibly react. She remembers a court case involving children who died when a car, driven by their father, crashed. Police were suspicious because he didn’t seem distraught enough. It made them think it was deliberate. The man was more likely in shock.

Nor are people hardwired to act a certain way in a terrible event. Some folks are paralyzed with fear and others become hyper-agitated. Later, the post-traumatic stress type of individual becomes hyper-vigilant and super sensitive to any physical stimulus that reminds them of the precipitating event, Solomon said.

There are likely even folks who simply carry on with their routine. “That was a downer. But we’re in Vegas. Let’s go to the buffet.” Lest anyone judge those folks, he adds, “for some that may serve as a viable compensatory reaction to restore a sense of psychological equanimity.”

Solomon said judgments “are demonstrably skewed by existential concerns.” He and colleagues once did an experiment with municipal court judges in Arizona. They subtly reminded some that they were going to die and with others they did not. Judges with death on their minds were far more punitive, though they all said they didn’t even notice they’d been asked about dying and no way did that impact them.

The experiment was later replicated with strong controls, the result unchanged.

When they did a similar experiment but had people think about terrible nonlethal events, the effect was not the same.

The reaction of people who live through an event depends on them. “After Sept. 11, some folks that like gambling gambled more. Those who liked watching TV watched TV more. We know that in response to existential anxieties, securely attached people become more committed to their significant others. All we could say with confidence is that people who are threatened, either consciously or not, by concerns about death will behave in ways to boost their sense of meaning and value,” Solomon said.

That’s visible in people who run toward danger and also in those who run away, he said, “amplifying our preexisting tendencies.” While it’s hard not to sound judgmental, he adds, both people are needed. “It seems obvious that the helpful and courageous are important for a highly social creature like humans for our mutual welfare.” But he notes that the apprehensive, very danger-averse are also needed: “It turns out that they have a greater awareness of external threats.”

They are valuable canaries in the coal mine.

“We don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking there’s only one adequate response,” Solomon said.

Yet no one is safe from criticism when people are judging reactions. If someone seems “too” upset, whatever that is, some view it like stolen valor, Silk said, like they’re reacting in ways that call attention to themselves when they didn’t suffer enough to earn it. Those who don’t react visibly appear to be callous.

“Who knows internally how they’re processing that or how well they’ll sleep at night,” she said. “Sometimes the persons themselves don’t truly know how they’re affected.”

Silk suggests everyone practice benevolence and figure people are doing the best they can with an abnormal situation.

Signs of distress are just as varied and may not be recognized as related to the traumatic event.

Parents sometimes try to jostle their children out of distressed emotions because they make the adult uncomfortable. They’re used to fixing things; when they can’t, they try to make it go away.

It’s not a good approach. “It’s fine for a parent to say I am here and I love you and I am going to take care of you and things will get better. It’s wrong to say you’re not really scared. When a child is expressing hurt or scared,” Silk warns, make sure the reassurance is not about easing parental discomfort.

Let children grieve. But with traumatic mass events, Silk says to limit their exposure. Don’t have it running over and over on TV.

Traumatized though you weren’t there

You can also be traumatized at a distance; you don’t have to be there, Solomon said. He cowrote a book about Sept. 11, “In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror.” “Unless you live in southern Manhattan, which was in very close proximity to the planes flying into the buildings, you were just as affected by watching it on TV if you lived in Montana or Alaska than if you lived at the top of Manhattan. So these events are existentially impactful, even to folks that didn’t happen to be there. Especially when the average individual has probably seen a replay,” he said.

Most American adults have probably seen replays of the near assassination of Trump over and over. And already, “Americans were marinating in existential anxieties every day. … The weather and the political divisiveness and the economic instability are just really impinging upon us in ways that we’re mostly unaware of, but are all demonstrably connected to that anxiety.”

Walfish agreed you needn’t be near such tragedies to feel fear. On Saturday, folks watched on TV as people in the rally crowd were scrambling to get under the grandstands — and some didn’t fit. It was scary, she said. Could that happen to me?

Moving forward

Jon Lane was a teacher who disarmed a student shooter in the Frontier Middle School shooting in 1996 in Moses Lake, Washington. A teacher and two students were killed; others were held hostage.

“Any shooting that happens brings back a sadness to think that a family, a neighborhood, a community will go through profound grief from a senseless act and will miss a loved one,” Lane said by email. “I am especially upset when a young person is the victim. I know there are mentally ill, angry people who choose to do harm to others, it happens too often and we haven’t come up with ways to prevent these shootings. I know that the media needs to report on these incidents but wonder if this leads to copycats and further incidents. We can point to violence in media, breakdown of the family, drugs, mental illness and even declining attendance/involvement in some type of a faith community.”

Lane added that “so many people make good choices and have a positive impact in their community and I choose to focus on the good in the world. I think I am doing OK and I have an amazing family that inspires me for the future.”

After the concert massacre, Welch had eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, therapy for over a year, which “helped a ton.” But she still takes note of security screening methods at concerts and other venues.

When she hears of other shootings, she wonders how everyone there is doing. She knows you don’t have to be hit by gunfire to be hurt — and in lots of ways. Before the concert, she’d read about a tragedy and empathize. “I didn’t feel it to the core like I do now.”

Every year, she and her mom and sister say they’ll go to a Jason Aldean concert. Somehow, they have never managed it.

Maudsley feels like time’s passage helps, but isn’t a cure. Maybe it’s like taking an aspirin for joint pain. It eases it, but the pain comes back.

She thinks she’s gone through all the emotional stages one might expect, including anger and resentment. Forgiveness was when she was able to let go of the pain and stop thinking about Columbine every day.

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean it’s OK it happened and someone gets a pass. I haven’t moved on, but I can move forward, be productive and honor what I went through and remember the victims and all the people impacted by it. People who lost their lives. You never forget about it. You don’t get over it. But you move forward and live your best way possible,” she said.

Maudsley said she still has nightmares; healing is a lifelong process. She takes a few steps forward and then something like the shooting at the political rally happens and she has to take a step back and let herself feel her emotions.

Sometimes, she reads about the events; sometimes she avoids it. She never reads survivor stories from school shootings; they put her back in Columbine. But she does read the victims’ names and look at their photos as a way to honor them.

Dealing with the trauma

Walfish offers advice for dealing with this kind of trauma:

• Stay connected to your support group. “Talking is the glue that holds people together.”
• Find healthy activities that offer a way to express what you’re feeling. Singing is a way to expel sounds along the same pathway as crying or screaming in anger. Move your body in gentle ways.
• Eat balanced, healthy meals.
• Do your best to keep a regular sleep routine, with the same bed and awake time.
• Practice mindfulness techniques.
• Join a support group. Therapy may be helpful. “I say sometimes because with this kind of trauma, group therapy may be more indicated and therapeutic. It takes the stigma off that something’s wrong with the way I am dealing with this.”
• Don’t let your kids see you fall apart. It accelerates their sense of not being safe.