[lindabaker]

Apologies for length...couldn't figure out any other way to let Illuminate see this. Katie is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the impact of trauma. Linda


Original with permission from Katie to Linda March, 2009.

SAME PLACE, DIFFERENT STORY --Katie Gentile, Ph.D.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was on my way to work as usual when my partner, who had returned to our apartment to get something he forgot, ran out saying there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. A helicopter or plane had hit it. We continued to the train (we live in Hoboken, directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan near the World Trade Center).
We rounded the street corner and approached the first pier in Hoboken to catch the train into the city. The sight of the Towers against a beautiful clear blue sky came into view, as well as an enormous fire with smoke streaming from the North Tower.
From there, near the first pier in Hoboken, I watched as a plane suddenly appeared low in the sky and struck the South Tower. I turned to my partner, and we left, not knowing or understanding what was about to take place.
This pier is where people gathered to watch from across the river as the towers burned and fell. It was a busy site for the next week or so, as people from throughout the area came to see the space of absence in the sky.
This past Thursday as I was walking again to the train my partner called to say a plane had crashed into the Hudson River. Deja-vu. I went to the pier again to see what was happening. This time it was different.
First, word was that everyone had survived. Additionally, this plane was surrounded by ferries, the Coast Guard and the Circle Line ships who were all able to help. Like watching the events of 9/11, there was something surreal about seeing a plane float down the river. But unlike 9/11, it was not terrifying; it was merely surreal.
I am an academic psychologist and trained psychoanalyst. I publish and specialize in the impact of trauma. So it was interesting to me that as I watched the plane float by, knowing the positive outcome, I felt I was re-experiencing 9/11 in a new way.
It is thought that people who have experienced trauma attempt to master it through repetition. For me, this was a healing repetition. Here I was in the same place, looking at another plane crash, under the same sunny blue sky, but it was markedly different.
Many of the things that we were unable to do during 9/11, we were able to do this time. The New York Waterways Ferries we often take into Manhattan were the first responders. And this time, in this situation, they were able to save the lives of the passengers.
It felt on Thursday like this plane crash, while in no way being a good thing -- I would not have wanted to be in that plane nor in the frigid water hoping for help -- was responded to in a new way.
Yes, no one died. But the pilot's knowledge is being celebrated. He knew what to do. The benefits of a skilled leader are being acknowledged as a good thing; a life-saving quality and a necessity.
I feel like the plane's successful water landing burst a bubble for me that was created by seven years of world-altering insidious abuses of power by U.S. leaders who showed no capacity to reflect, think or hold emotion. It burst it with a story about knowledgeable leaders, such as the pilots and crew, who knew what to do, and did it.
Again, I am in no way saying the crash was a good thing because it wasn't. Even though no one died, it doesn't mean that people weren't impacted and potentially harmed in significant ways.