In the flood of reflections 10 years on from 9/11, the language used to describe our experience of terrorism and war has slowly morphed toward the clinical. Fear, disbelief and ongoing sadness have become anxiety, denial, grief and closure. What are the effects of using this kind of diagnostic language in the wake of tragedy? Has the way we talk about terror hampered our ability to reflect and to act on our experience?
I’m not sure how to look back on the attacks on the twin towers. Every year the articles come out, more so on this 10th anniversary than for some years, and every year we attempt to draw new meaning and understanding from the event. The days, weeks, months and years following the attacks were meant to be a turning point, a time to do things differently and to harness the sense of community that many felt directly after the tragedy. Instead, we may have settled for merely trying to feel safer.
There are many reasons for this settling, and one of them may be that we no longer have a real language to talk about terror. Instead, we have a kind of homogenised psychobabble that is emblematic of our current obsession with packaging experience into pre-digested containers. Maybe one of the effects of this packaging is that we have become less and less able to respond effectively to disaster. We’ve packaged up our feelings and sent them off express post before we even really know what they really are.
I have a client who once tried to describe a deep feeling of sadness to me. He was having difficulty coming up with a word that fit the feeling. Sadness wasn’t enough. It didn’t convey either the depth or the length of the feeling. He finally said the feeling was really sorrow, but that there was no room anymore under capitalism, in modern times, for the word sorrow. He was describing a feeling of the overwhelming impact of a single terrible event that had changed his life forever. Ruined it, really. This sorrow marked his experience from that time on. Grief was not the word. Grief holds an implication of time-limited processing. It is a psychological word, useful in its own way, but sometimes out of step with the lived experience of an ongoing and underlying sadness following an event that permanently destroys the world as we knew it.
There is a call when terrible things happen to grow and to change for the better. To reflect and to feel and to take action. This is why, in the wake of even more common tragic events, death, separation, serious illness, so many of us reassess our lives. But there are so many pitfalls in the way of real change. So many things that call us to make surface changes rather than to take the risks required for real transformation.