For weeks now, wildfires have been ravaging Southern California, devastating neighborhoods and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. It’s not difficult to see the external consequences of these disasters, but the internal effects natural disasters have on the people experiencing them can also be debilitating.
Natural disasters have always been part of the reality of life on Earth. But as global temperatures have risen due to climate change, wildfires, floods and hurricanes have become increasingly frequent, making discussions about their consequences all the more critical. These events can present unique mental health challenges, and variables such as socioeconomic factors and the status of rebuilding efforts can all play into how a natural disaster manifests psychologically. Still, anyone who experiences a natural disaster will likely first undergo a period of grief, says Alan Wolfelt, Ph.D., who is the founder of Center For Loss and Life Transition and the author of the book Healing Your Grief When Disaster Strikes.
Making space for grief
Following a disaster, there’s no getting around the grief. “People don’t need symptoms treated away,” says Wolfelt. “It’s ultimately [about] acknowledging reality gently, with no rewards for speed, that helps you allow your grief to become active mourning… Mourning is what integrates loss into our lives.”
James Langabeer, Ph.D., Ed.D., a behavioral researcher and professor of psychiatry/behavioral science and emergency medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center, also emphasizes the importance of mourning. “We first want to ensure that we’re physically safe and that we have food and shelter,” he says. “But then we’ve got to really focus on addressing that grief. You have to process it. There’s no way around [it or way to just] forget that it happened or [refuse] to accept that it did happen.”
For Lisa J. Heathfield, whose community was decimated by Hurricane Helene in September 2024, the grief is ongoing. “Being subject to just all of that destruction around you brings such a heavy, heavy kind of hopelessness,” she says, emphasizing that her community is still struggling to rebuild months after the event. “There are great organizations and there are great people trying to keep spirits up. But it’s hard.”
Mindy Milam, a New Orleans-based therapist who works on helping people through population-scale traumas as part of The Center For Mind-Body Medicine, says that sitting with grief—getting curious about it, observing it and just allowing it to exist—was a critical step in her process after Hurricane Katrina decimated her home and community in 2005.
“I had made a decision that I was not going to censor myself, and that I would allow myself to grieve as it came up,” she says. “This year is the 20th anniversary. Now Katrina just feels like a really big thing I went through, because I let myself go through all of the emotional elements of it.”
The importance of community and connection
Mourning can look different for everyone, but connection is critical during the process. After a disaster occurs, “we recommend not isolating yourself… but really embedding yourself within the community,” says Langabeer. Whether that looks like joining a church, getting involved in recovery efforts, or gathering family and friends close, it can be helpful to take advantage of support systems. “I would definitely say… the more you can focus on the bigger ‘we’ and not the smaller ‘I’—so really focusing less on yourself and more on community [can bring] a great sense of satisfaction to you, and emotionally speaking that can help to take out some of the trauma that you’re going through,” he adds.
Wolfelt also emphasizes the importance of talking about what happened. “Both our heads and hearts need repetition to come to understand what has happened. You need to retell the story…It’s as if each time you tell the story, it becomes a little more bearable.”
He notes that not everyone will be helpful. “Listeners… have to be somebody who is empathetic and supportive,” he says. “What’s… unhelpful is being around people who… tell you to move on or project toxic positivity. I wish people would know how to do what I call staying for the cup of coffee. To be present [for] people in pain without taking it away.”
Milam says that hearing other people’s stories and talking about her own has been critical in coming to terms with what happened to her. “There are some people in this city who still say, I never talked about Katrina,” she says. “If you go through something traumatic, it is important to have space to talk about it.” She also notes that it was helpful to listen to stories from others who have been through unfathomable events across time. “Looking at the history of humanity, and what difficult periods or events or times people have been able to overcome,” she says, was a turning point in her own process.
Focusing on what you can control
Of course, self-care and therapy can come in handy after any traumatic event. Wolfelt specifically recommends focusing on taking a 20 to 30-minute walk each day, staying hydrated, and getting proper sleep and nutrition are always helpful. Pilar Brooks, a plant medicine practitioner and former therapist who lives in Ojai, California, also suggests exploring somatic work, nervous system healing or any practices that can help “orient you to safety.”
In the longer term, especially when dealing with PTSD, Langabeer says there are options such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), or cognitive behavioral therapy, which might look like trying to replace thoughts about a disaster with different, more positive images.
Reflect on your experience and don’t put a time limit on mourning
In the aftermath of a disaster, says Langabeer, it’s also natural to ask questions about why something like it happened, but he recommends not getting wrapped up in self-blame or existential bargaining. Instead, he suggests pausing to reflect and consider if there are any new life paths you want to take or changes you want to make.
Survivor’s guilt is another common consequence of natural disasters, says Langabeer, but it often hinges on unhelpful lines of questioning. “Survivor’s guilt is basically [asking] ‘Why not me?’” he says. “The only way to really deal with that is… to try to build internal resilience. A lot of [it is] going to come to grips with the acceptance part…. There is no rhyme or reason for a lot of things that happen, especially natural disasters.”
Heathfield says that she has been dealing with survivor’s guilt, but she has also been inspired to refocus her financial investments advisory practice on rebuilding efforts. “Whenever anything is destroyed, something must be rebuilt,” she says. “Now significant investment does need to be made into Western North Carolina, and I’m trying to imagine taking these spaces or these things that were broken and making them more collective; more community-based.”
Milam also says that in the wake of Katrina, her Buddhist practice helped her to find meaning in what happened. “It was super helpful to have… a way to make meaning and to say, even in the midst of all of this, ‘I can still create some really positive results or effects from it. I can choose how I want to respond to it,’” she says. Through that, she’s been able to see Katrina as something that “helped me become a better therapist and helped me become a better person.”
Still, Wolfelt emphasizes that after a disaster, the most critical thing to do from a mental health standpoint is to allow yourself to grieve. “We have such short social norms for grief and mourning within North American culture,” he says. “Integrating loss into our lives is a long-term effort toward not resolving [anything], but [toward] reconciling grief into our lives.”
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