Chapter 13: What's Your Trampoline?
September 11, 2001. My generations JFK assassination. The world was never the same after it, and we all remember exactly where we were when we first heard the news.
Do you remember where you were?
I was a few minutes late to school that day. On my way to class I ran into Mr. Felicello, my high school basketball coach. He told me that as he was pulling into the parking lot he heard on the radio that someone had crashed a plane into the World Trade Center.
I remember thinking it was probably some guy in a private plane who was drunk or messed up on medication or something like that. That it wasn't really a big deal. Minutes later, I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker. A second plane had hit the Towers. It was a big deal.
At the same time, about 100 miles South of me, a five-year-old boy named Noam Saul was running for his life through the streets of mid-town Manhattan. He was with his father, older brother, and tens of thousands of other people.
Minutes earlier Noam had been sitting in his first-grade classroom when an explosion shook the building and the heat from the fireball penetrated the classroom windows. He could clearly see smoke and fire pouring out of the World Trade Center, and people jumping from the burning buildings. His classroom at PS 234 was about five short blocks from the Towers, less than a 1/3 of a mile away.
Noam’s teacher guided the class down the stairs to the school lobby. Meanwhile Noam’s father ran back to the lobby, where he had just dropped off Noam and his older brother. The three of them were reunited, and they took off through the ash filled air, making it home safe together.
The next morning, September 12th, Noam woke up and started drawing. He drew what he had seen the day before: a plane crashing into a building, smoke, fire, firefighters, and people jumping from windows:
It so happened that Noam’s parents were friends with a psychiatrist named Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and he specialized in working with trauma.
While I was starting an 8-month training program with Dr. van der Kolk he shared the following story about what happened next:
September 14th, 2001
Bessel tells the story of how, three days after 9/11, he is in New York City visiting Noam’s parents. That day they walk through the pit where the Twin Towers had been and get a first hand view of the destruction.
When they all get home that night, Noam is still awake and he proudly shows Uncle Bessel the picture he drew on the morning of September 12th.
Bessel is in awe of the picture.
He says to Noam, “This is an amazing picture, could I have it?”
Noam says “No”.
And Bessel says “Well, let me explain, I’m writing a book and this picture HAS to go into that book, and so if you give me this picture you’ll be a famous man! Your picture will be all over the world. Will you give it to me?”
Noam says “No. I’ll sell it to you.”
“How much?”
“100 Dollars”
“Nobody’s ever paid a kid a $100 dollars for a drawing!”
“Take it or leave it”
Bessel laughs and gives him the 100 dollars. Because he finds what Noam has drawn to be so captivating. There at the top is the plane flying into the World Trade Center, and on the left people jumping out of buildings, and a black mass on the upper right, in front of the airplane.
Bessel asks, “What’s that black thing over there in front of the airplane?”
Noam says, “Oh, that’s the heat! When the airplanes hit there was this fireball and the heat came through our classroom window and we thought we were going to burn up.”
Bessel thinks to himself, yep that’s how people remember trauma, not as a story but as a sensation. Then he notices a black circle near the bottom of the buildings, and asks:
“What’s this little black circle over there?”
“Oh thats a trampoline”
“What's a trampoline doing there?"
“So that next time when people jump out of the World Trade Center they will be safe”
Bessel is stunned. His thoughts immediately return to what he had watched that morning, the President standing at Ground Zero with a megaphone declaring, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
To thunderous applause and chants of “USA - USA - USA”
Upon watching all this in the morning Bessel thought, ‘Yes, this is one of the normal responses to trauma; anger, a desire for retaliation. Creatures of all species respond to threats this way. This is the “Fight” in Fight-or-Flight.’
Now, with Noam and his picture in front of him Bessel thinks, This five-year-old kid has a more evolved response than our elected leaders! He’s already asking the higher level questions:
‘What happened here? And what can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?’
This five-year-old is imagining other outcomes! This is so important because I know how common it is for a person to get stuck in a constricted view of reality after experiencing traumatic events, and have that perception of reality color everything in their life. A traumatized person can become very lacking in imagination about how else things can be done.
Present Day
When I first heard this story from Bessel, I too was stunned.
How was this kid able to go from being in the middle of the worst terrorist attack in US history, and within 24 hours, start processing it, and coming up with creative solutions for saving lives in the future?
In the book, ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, Bessel went over four things that helped Noam recover and thrive so quickly:
1) Immediate support during the event
2) Taking an active role in escaping threat (mobilization of the body)
3) Connection with loved ones (safety of home)
4) Imagining alternate outcomes
In the first 24 hours after his traumatic event Noam’s nervous system was flooded with messages confirming:
I am loved
I am valued
I am part of a community or “tribe” that has my back
I am in control of my body
I can run from a threat and find safety
I am not alone in this
My family is here
We are going to make sense of this together
I am safe tonight
I can come up with a better ending for the future
How I wish my nervous system had experienced similar messages after I went through the intense events I did while in the military.
When I went through those events, I didn’t know that not getting the right kind of soothing, and not being able to imagine another way for those events to end, would lead to years of post-traumatic stress.
How about you?
What kind of messages did your nervous system receive after the intense events you went through?
Did you have immediate support?
Connection with a loved one or family around you?
The ability to move your body away from threats?
The mental freedom to imagine another way for things to go in the future?
If we didn't get one or more of those experiences in the past, we can find a way to bring them into our story now. In the next section of this series we're not just gonna bring our story home, we're gonna give it a new home.
Each of our stories has a "trampoline": a piece we can add to it, a plot twist, or new ending we can write for it that will give our nervous system the experience of finding redemption.
What's your trampoline?
Let’s find out in Chapter 14: I'm Safe to Imagine