It happened right before our eyes, and for some people, the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, is hard to come to terms with.
Harder, perhaps because Americans are bombarded with news of mass shootings and other death and destruction on a regular basis. For some, it causes emotional trauma and shakes up our notions of safety.
“It’s quite scary — it really is,” said Shelby Espiritu, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Sharp Mesa Vista Hospital. “It’s so much to digest, no matter where you are in your life — if you’re a single person, if you’re married, if you have kids. When something like this happens, we think about the things in our lives that matter.”
Feeling safe matters, and when a presidential candidate is attacked, that can shatter everyone’s sense of safety. Espiritu said it can be overwhelming.
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“It is so much to digest, and the unfortunate reality is there are things that are going to happen to all of us that are out of our control," Espiritu said. "We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t want it, and we’re placed there and have to manage it.”
Managing it may entail limiting your exposure to whatever is causing anxiety, said Espiritu, who also recommends talking to people you trust about your feelings or, conversely, choosing not to talk about it at all to “recharge” your emotional well-being.
Espiritu explained that each of us has a different threshold for the amount of trauma we can deal with. Some people are heavily impacted emotionally while some others aren’t impacted at all.
Health
NBC 7 asked if the number of acts of violence in recent years has normalized violence.
“It’s not normal," Espiritu said. "It’s not creating a safe space for us. We’re hearing about stuff so quickly. We’re seeing things in a way that stuff didn’t used to be live-streamed. Stuff didn’t use to be live-tweeted, and so we also have more access and we do need to consider that.”
Espiritu suggested that people who are affected by such images should limit their consumption of them.
“This isn’t going to stop, unfortunately,” Espiritu said. “We’re going to continue to be faced with these kinds of stressors in our lives, and these possible traumatic events in our lives, and so the more we can learn about ourselves and understand what we need and how we can best take care of ourselves, that’s where we’re gonna see all that resilience.”
