As common as traumatic experiences may be, there is far too little education right now on the best ways to help families work through them.
Nelba Márquez-Greene is a licensed marriage and family therapist who has spent her life helping others. In December 2012 she was the coordinator of a youth and adolescent outpatient psychiatric clinic and a university instructor supervising six clinical interns. But nothing in her professional training could have prepared her for what she, her family, and community would experience after her beautiful six-year-old daughter Ana Grace and twenty-five other children and teachers were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
“I imagine our home was not that much different than many others . . . I was married to my high school sweetheart and the mother of two beautiful children. My husband, Jimmy, was working fifteen minutes from our house as a professor at a local university. We were both happy to be back in Connecticut and so close to New York City. On December 13th we went out to dinner to the Cheesecake Factory, which we never, ever, ever did during the week. After dinner, Jimmy took the kids home and I stayed at the mall to buy their Christmas gifts.
“And then everything changed.
“The next morning, Ana, our daughter and Isaiah’s sister, was executed while hiding in the tiny bathroom of her first grade classroom. Her teachers along with four other educators and 19 of her schoolmates were also murdered. My son physically survived the massacre. But he was in the building at the time of the shooting. He heard the shots that took his sister’s life. He remembers the screaming, the crying. He remembers his teacher’s survival instructions: Please be quiet and please be still.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/overcoming-evil_b_5579471.html
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