VIOLENCE HEALERS

By Stephanie Domet

Sandy Phillips was having trouble sleeping. Her daughter, Jessi, had been one of the victims of a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012. “I couldn't wrap my heart or my brain around what had happened to Jessi in that theater. In my dreams and really throughout the day, I would reenact the shooting, which was very unhealthy, of course, and very traumatizing,” she says. Working with a trauma therapist helped. “Part of her trauma therapy with me was to get me to actually breathe properly and to be able to calm my mind and take myself out of the theater where Jessi was killed.”

The day after their daughter’s murder, Sandy and her husband, Lonnie, dedicated themselves to helping other families grieve in the wake of gun violence. They sold their house in Texas, bought a motorhome, and now, almost 10 years after losing Jessi, they travel wherever they are needed to mentor survivors of gun violence.

One of the most potent tools they have is mindfulness. What began for Sandy in her therapist’s office was solidified when she met meditation teacher and Pandemic of Love founder Shelly Tygielski after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “She said, ‘I love the work you're doing. Let's bring mindfulness to those who are suffering.’” Together, they planned a retreat in Massachusetts.

“We brought in 40 survivors from all over the country,” Sandy says. “Some were from mass shootings— Parkland, Tree of Life. Some were individual shootings from Chicago and other places. And to see them go through that process of being able to let go through mindfulness practices—you could just see them become lighter people. I don't think anybody left there unchanged.”

With Tygielski’s help, Survivors Empowered connected with Fadel Zeidan at the University of California San Diego’s Center for Mindfulness. Survivors from across the country learned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, via Zoom, as part of a study. “The hope is to have these folks become certified, and be able to go back to their communities and be violence interrupters and violence healers,” says Sandy. “We really feel this is going to change how survivors respond to their grief.”

Survivors Empowered was born out of one family’s response to tragic loss. After the shooting death of their daughter, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips devoted themselves to mentoring other survivors of gun violence in carrying on, mindfully.

UCSD is developing a mindfulness program for survivors of gun violence, with 100 new participants to start training in February 2022. “The fact that they're working with us to help survivors all across the country—that's a legacy that Jessi would be incredibly proud of. Just to know that these people will be going back into their own communities and offering the same thing to others, right there in their cities and their towns. That's going to change a lot of people's lives.”

For Sandy and Lonnie, helping other survivors is vitally important. “Because we've seen people who do not receive trauma therapy or do not embrace mindfulness spiral out of control,” Sandy says. “We know that trauma can often become rage and anger. And that's not good for them. It's not good for society. So we just push as hard as we can, as gently as we can, and we've seen the difference.” Sandy says people she’s known through the group for years, people whose grief is a decade or more old, are able to find some release through mindfulness. “To see them able to put together a healthier life and embrace mindfulness—it’s a beautiful thing to witness.”

Sandy believes the good that arises from mindfulness training can ripple outward. “The idea is to change community by community, because violence interruption and violence healing is really the key to the trauma that this country is suffering from gun violence.”

Sandy sleeps easier now. “I could focus on how horrible Jessi’s death was and continues to be,” she says. “But I choose to focus on how we've been able to lessen others’ pain. So it's a good life. And that's what we want survivors to understand: As horrible as life is without your loved one, it can still be a good life. There'll always be a hole in your heart and there'll always be a chair empty at the table. But it can be a good life and you can find joy and peace again.” that, or I could stay in it forever. And that would be really bad.”

“You go down the rabbit hole of grief, and it’s very lonely,” says Mitch, who had gone into a vortex of his own scattered thinking after Nick’s murder: “It’s a feeling of desperation—I’m desperate to see my son again. I’m desperate to get back to moments of happiness that I used to have, but I can’t get it back because I can’t get Nick back. And then it goes in different avenues: Oh my God, what happened to Nick? The violence—the violence of what he went through. And I miss him and I…I won’t be able to ever hear his voice or see him again, and I won’t be able to experience a future. And I start thinking about what would have been, or what he would look like. He was just going to be 18.”

Mitch unraveled, again and again, into a place of deep despair. There seemed to be no way out.

The Journey Through Pain

In Chicago, Brenda Mitchell had been traveling a similar path of unremittent pain for more than a decade.

Brenda, 66, can speak calmly now about losing her son Kenneth, who was gunned down outside a bar in suburban Chicago in 2005. He was 31. “Never in a million years would I imagine Kenneth would be the one to die from an act of gun violence,” she wrote in an online piece for Moms Demand Action, which describes itself as “a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence.”

Kenneth was the first grandchild in a close African-American family, a role model for his cousins and siblings. Kenneth had two young sons and a third on the way, and he was the family member, Brenda says, who would organize a barbecue if they had not gathered for some time. Kenneth was manager of a golf center in University Park, a Chicago suburb, and the weekend he was killed he was about to host a Super Bowl party. Kenneth had gone out the night before to a sports bar to play darts with friends.

As he was leaving the bar, an argument broke out between two men; he tried to intervene as a peacemaker, Brenda says. But a friend of one of the men went to his van, got a gun, and opened fire, killing Kenneth.

“A week earlier he had taken his brother to the airport for his third tour of duty in a conflict in the Middle East,” Brenda says. “And this tour was his last tour in Afghanistan, only to lose Kenneth a week later in a free country.”

The trauma of gun violence disproportionally impacts people of color, especially African-Americans, in the United States; homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males up to 44 years old. According to a CDC analysis, Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 accounted for 37% of gun homicides in 2019 in the United States, though that age group comprises just 2% of the country’s population.

For a long time after Kenneth’s murder, Brenda tried to carry on, denying her pain. Last spring, she spoke at a Zoom conference on how mindfulness can help people who have lost a loved one to gun violence. “I was in a doctor’s office and she was recommending that I don’t go back to work,” Brenda said, remembering how she felt a full decade after her son’s killing, “and I actually had on a new outfit to → go to a new job. I had to realize that I was broken and I was fragile. And I stopped in that moment to realize that I no longer saw myself—I couldn’t see me anymore. Everybody talked about a new norm, but I didn’t know how to get there.”

I no longer saw myself—those are chilling words; Brenda had lost not just her son but something even more basic: who she was. She had raised her two young grandsons and was working a demanding job in human resources in health care while also serving as a pastor of her church. Her own health was at dire risk; Brenda’s blood pressure soared to 250 over 110. She took her doctor’s advice, going on disability instead of starting the new job.

But Brenda was still a long way from reclaiming her life—or herself.

Where Do You Store Your Trauma?

Trauma is a psychological, emotional response to a deeply disturbing or distressing experience or event. People who experience trauma may feel unsafe, with a reduced capacity for regulating their emotions and navigating relationships. Trauma can shake our sense of self and cause lasting harm to our ability to live a full life.

The good news is, healing from trauma is possible.

Fadel Zeidan is an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of California San Diego and the executive director of the university’s Center for Mindfulness. He wanted to better understand the efficacy of trauma-informed mindfulness— specifically, how mindfulness might relate to the trauma of losing a loved one to gun violence. In early 2021 he had an opportunity to conduct a study of gun violence victims as they went through an intensive eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training. Those taking part in the study would also become trainers themselves and the new trainers could then teach others to become trainers too. The reasearch was ambitious and far-reaching.

Zeidan has been studying mindfulness for more than two decades; he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at UNC Charlotte on how one 20-minute session of mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety. But back then, he didn’t see how it could be studied objectively or empirically, and Zeidan was advised by many professors not to go down that path. “The study of mindfulness was considered woo-woo at the time,” he says. “As scientists we were very aware of what happened with the Transcendental Meditation movement in the ’70s and how it’s important to not bias data based on one’s own subjective experience.”

Despite the academic risk, Zeidan was hooked. He published research on mindfulness in graduate school, and then brain imaging began bringing science into the field in a new way, or at least the possibility of it. Zeidan didn’t hesitate: His postdoc fellowship zeroed in on brain imaging and mindfulness, and he would publish the first paper on the meditating brain, in the Journal of Neuroscience.

A Palestinian refugee, Zeidan is passionate about examining the horror of gun violence in America and the role he thinks mindfulness could play in helping those who have lost loved ones. While many studies (besides Zeidan’s) on how mindfulness impacts the brain have been published in the past decade, no researcher has drilled down into → how mindfulness might affect the life-altering state Mitch and Annika Dworet and Brenda Mitchell found themselves in, the trauma of loss on that level. The most relevant data we have, according to the University of Utah’s Eric Garland, who has published more papers on mindfulness than any other researcher, are studies on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

John Taylor guides a practice to connect with a sense of peace and freedom.

In Zeidan’s new study, 22 participants from Survivors Empowered, a national organization serving as a resource for those who have suffered loss through gun violence, were trained for eight weeks in MBSR via Zoom (Brenda Mitchell was one of the 22). They experienced changes quickly at a scale that Zeidan found impressive: 37% reported reduced symptoms of trauma; 52% a reduction in symptoms of PTSD (“a 52% reduction in post-traumatic stress symptoms on the scale that we used is really profound and incredibly encouraging,” he says); 52% were less depressed; sleep disturbance was reduced by 26%; and overall life satisfaction improved by 16%. “Some participants were able to close their eyes and not see their kids or their lost loved ones,” Zeidan says. “That was really striking to me.”

At the same time, he cautions restraint. The results are preliminary, and it’s a very small, self-reporting study. Full-scale studies with control groups need to be done; changes to the physiology of mindfulness practitioners will be the home run of scientific corroboration. Still, Zeidan’s study has teased the possibilities; the Hemera Foundation granted $100,000 in fall 2021 for Zeidan’s laboratory to continue his work on how survivors of gun violence might benefit from mindfulness. And larger studies could measure what’s happening with the body, to find out whether the dramatic preliminary evidence of significant changes is confirmed.

One of the organizers of Zeidan's study, Beth Mulligan, who is a longtime teacher of mindfulness, lays out how MBSR, the most widely taught mindfulness program in the world, can give direct help to people in the throes of trauma.

MBSR training starts, she says, by teaching the body scan. It’s not a relaxation technique, but a way to get tuned in to the sensations of one’s body, especially increased heart and respiratory rates, all the different ways we feel stress. “And we build on that resource of knowing the body,” Mulligan says, “so that when the fight or flight response hits, you recognize it much, much sooner.”

Triggers can come from anywhere: a car backfiring, or a shooting in another city on the news, or simply out of nowhere when one is sitting quietly on the couch and a flashback pops up—what Mitch Dworet calls going down the rabbit hole of reliving the trauma of Nick’s murder—and that’s when the practice of mindfulness can come into play.

“Because every time you relive what happened, your body responds like it’s happening now,” Mulligan says. “But you start to see that you have choices over what happens next.” She describes a quick route back to the present moment: Feel the sensations of breath, the rhythm of your chest going up and down, feel your feet on the ground, where your hands are, perhaps you look around the room and notice that the room is safe, that you have a roof over your head. Simplicity is the point here, in coming back from what’s threatening to overcome your mind. “And that calms down the whole nervous system.”

Seeing where the mind goes and coming back to the present moment, seeing where the mind goes and coming back—practicing that skill endlessly can make it possible to live with life-changing trauma.