E-Book of Articles - World Federation of Music Therapy

event
Media (film crew reporting the event)
Hospital staff (including porters, cleaners)
The immediate community (the street/area)
The broader community (county/country/beyond)
Sutton, Julie; Beyond the Ordinairy
Impact on those with previous/similar experience of traumatic
Those seeing TV reports/reading newspaper
Longer-term impact on survivors (physical/psychological)
Longer-term impact on ongoing support services/family/friends
Longer-term effect on the community (ability of survivors to
contribute to community; future relationships, etc.)
The impact on us here today
I have used this example of the house fire to show the widespread affect a
traumatic event can have. It vividly exposes the many levels at which a
single event affects all of us in some way, at a number of different levels.
We do not have to be present to be affected, and how we are affected
depends on who we are and on our life experiences from birth onwards. To
return to Garland, who wrote about the importance of these individual,
unique life histories:
"However precisely we might be able to identify and quantify the
nature of the stressor, it is not sufficient as a way of understanding
the impact on the individual. The individual has a constitution and a
history which have shaped his internal world; hence a character and
a personality. He also has a culture. So he is someone who is more or
less vulnerable to that particular event in his developmental history.
That vulnerability is a function of the inevitable interplay between
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