Finding Meaning after Hurricane Harvey

In 2008, almost 3 years after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to a broad swath of the Gulf region, I was invited by the New Orleans Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center to work with the local clinicians to address the ongoing sense of disorientation and self-doubt that was, if anything, getting worse with the passage of time since the hurricane. As I understood it, and as the therapists I interviewed made sense of their distress, it was only after life had taken on a semblance of normality, children back in school, spouses finding new jobs, homes repaired or rebuilt, familiar businesses reopened, and downtown making a dramatic comeback, that the therapists could start to take stock of the psychic losses they were facing themselves. As one of them said to me at the time, “we have lost something very precious, I'm not sure it will be regained” (Alford, 2010; Boulanger, 2009, 2013a, 2013b; Boulanger, Floyd, Nathan, Poitevant, & Pool, 2013; Boulanger, 2017).

So, when I was asked to respond to these two papers, written within 6 months of Hurricane Harvey, I was struck by how soon after that extraordinary footage of Houston under water, the image of citizen volunteers coordinating rescue efforts in a flotilla of private boats, these two authors started to give meaning to their experiences during and immediately after Harvey.

There is an arc to a natural disaster, both in terms of geographical proximity to the event and the passage of time; that proximity or distance has profound psychological ramifications. It could be argued that these two papers represent opposite ends of that arc. JoAnn Ponder and Jean Goodwin describe the aftermath of Harvey from their own very different vantage points; therefore, I feel the need to address these papers individually, but also to emphasize the underlying task that we mental health professionals face when we are called upon to cope with the consequences of an environmental disaster whether we have been caught in it or not.

I want to emphasize one