Tornado fear is appropriate, but don’t let it take over your life

April 27 tornado remembranceLimestone County officials held a ceremony on Friday April 27, 2012, to remember the four people in the county who died in the April 27, 2011 tornadoes, and to show a rendering of a memorial to be built for all Limestone County residents killed by tornadoes since 1900. Service was held in parking lot for Bethel Church of Christ cemetery. The church was destroyed in the April 2011 tornadoes. Amy Abernathy hugs her uncle, Wesley Turner following the service. Turner lost a daughter in the tornado. (The Huntsville Times/Dave Dieter)HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Professional researchers are taking a closer look at how tornadoes affect our minds and moods, but there's something they want you to understand from the start.  You should be scared of tornadoes!" as one ask-the-doctor website put it. There's nothing wrong if storms make you anxious.

That might sound obvious, but advising people the right way to respond to loved ones' anxiety is fairly high on psychologists' lists of tornado advice. "What can happen sometimes, particularly among adults, is a discounting - an, 'Oh, you're just overreacting, don't be so silly,'" Huntsville psychologist Dr. Patrick Quirk said this month.

"What you want," Quirk said, "is that loved one to be coached to be a little more patient and to be able to talk in a more reassuring way about this storm, where it's going, what we've done to see that we're safe, and those kind of practical reassurances that we're going to be OK."

Quirk actually advises that, "if there's a married couple and one of them gets freaked out and the other one tends not to be that concerned, then practice how you can be more reassuring."

Quirk is talking about anxiety, not the "intrusive" fear that makes it hard to function. You may need professional help if a tornado watch freezes you in place.

But "listen," "reassure," "anticipate" and "prepare" are words heard repeatedly in discussions of life in a place where the weather can literally kill you - but probably won't.

Stay informed, have your box of storm supplies and have something to do - a game, a book - while you're waiting for the storm to pass. That's the advice from Quirk and other professionals. "To feel that I have a plan in place, that that plan is there for me to use, is reassuring," he said.

How we make decisions before and after storms - what we take seriously, what we ignore or minimize - is something Dr. Marita O'Brien is studying in North Alabama. O'Brien is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

O'Brien hears that people took shelter after "my aunt sent me a text" or "my buddy called me."

"It's not the technology I trust," she summarized recently. "It's that person who knows me, who knows where I am."

"Is it possible," O'Brien wonders, "to have technology that knows me as well as my aunt?"

O'Brien agrees that we need to gather information and make decisions ourselves. It's empowering, and we believe it.

And O'Brien suggests one simple way to see how much the tornado threat is really affecting us. Did we change anything after last year? Do we have that box of supplies? Those batteries? That full tank of gas?

Gathering information and making plans before the storm is important, because when weather anxiety - a thinking and feeling process - turns into actual fear - a purely biological response - then it's fight, flight or hide time. Habitual responses take over.

When we feel anxiety building, Quirk recommends trying to slow our breathing. Deep, slow breaths calm anxiety, he said, but shallow, rapid breathing winds us up.

All of this pre-storm advice is for adults. For children, the stakes are bigger and the sense of possible control is smaller because, as Quirk said, a bad storm is a much bigger part of a child's life.

"Whereas an older teenager or adult ... sees that single event as just one event in a long life," Quirk said, "with a child it fills up most of their memory banks and becomes this huge experience and sticks out more."

For children, caregivers need to be specific. Here's what we're doing to find out about the weather. Here's where the storms are going. Here's what we're going to do. We'll be right in here, together.

Psychologists have been studying people's responses to tornadoes and hurricanes for decades, and now they are broadening their research to similar disasters such as wild fires and earthquakes.

Among the findings is that, in some ways, tornadoes and other "surprise" events are worse.

"Katrina, they knew it was coming," explained Dr. Jennifer Silva Brown, a researcher and assistant professor of psychology at Drury University in Springfield, Mo.

People had time to leave and to select the valuables they wanted to take with them, Silva Brown said. With a tornado, the warning time is minutes, not days. The sense of horrible randomness is reinforced by a walk down the street after the storm.

Silva Brown, who earned her doctorate at Louisiana State University before moving to Missouri, studied both Katrina and last year's Joplin tornado that killed 160 people.

"How do people cope?" she said, describing her research interest. "What are good coping mechanisms?"

Just as before the storm, social support makes coping afterward better, Silva Brown said. That support can be informal - friends, family, neighbors - or it can be formal in the form of social workers, clergy or therapists.

She said first responders and caregivers must respect the reality of the situation. "It is a trauma," she said, "and we need to be respectful of the grief process."

That said, the faster people can begin to see a silver lining and believe they can make a plan for the future, the better they will recover, Silva Brown said.

What's risky? Disengaging from family and friends is a red flag, she said, and so is abuse of alcohol or other substances.

"We want to foster the positive," she said. "We want to look for the good."

The good news before a storm is that we aren't powerless. We can prepare, help each other and "act on what the truth is, as opposed to what my fears lead me to believe it to be," as Quirk put it.

After the storm, the message is much the same. We can begin to plan again, help and listen to each other, and we can recover.

Just talking after a storm is powerful, Dr. Margaret Bibb, Quirk's wife and a clinical psychologist herself, discussed after last year's storm in a column she and Quirk wrote for The Times for several years.

"Often only in the retelling of an experience do we really discover our feelings about it or its effect upon our lives," Bibb wrote. "Listening to the stories of others ... is where we find community and connection. We find validation in others' empathy, and sometimes perspective on how relatively small our own problems are."

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