EMERGENCY EPISODE: From Shock to Steady Ground — Coping Skills to Calm Anxiety & Stress After a School Shooting

How do you begin to feel safe and steady again after experiencing a shooting?

You don’t have to have all the answers, and you don’t have to go through this alone.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. The most important steps to protect your safety, body, and mind in the first days after a shooting
2. How to gently reintroduce routine and emotional regulation in the following week
3. Grounding practices and therapy options that can help you heal from the inside out

🎧 Take 10 minutes to protect your mental health and begin your healing—you’re worth it.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline – Call or text 988
• National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center – nmvvrc.org
• SAMHSA Disaster Distress Helpline – Call or text 1-800-985-5990
• EMDRIA Find a Therapist – emdria.org/find-a-therapist
• One-page guide from Episodes 6, 7, and 97 – Name, Tame, and Aim(request (request by email: mj@mjmurrayvachon.com)
• MP3 grounding guides – Box Breathing and Two-Minute Cricket Reset (request by email: mj@mjmurrayvachon.com)

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover some ways to stay grounded and protect your mental health in the critical weeks after a shooting.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:08

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:32

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm. This is an emergency episode. Perhaps it's the first time you've joined me. In today's episode, I'm sharing coping skills that you can use if you've been involved in a shooting incident. Let me begin by offering my deepest condolences. This is heartbreaking for you, for your family, for your community. One of the unfortunate coping skills many of us have unknowingly developed is the ability to live surrounded by violence without actively thinking about it. Until it happens to us. This episode is a gentle guide for what to do in the early days and over the next two weeks when your world has been turned upside down by a shooting. This is not a complete path to healing, but just a gentle start. Let's begin right now. The first few days, your only job is your own safety and comfort. Expect to be shocked and disoriented. You may feel numb or in a daze. You might not sleep. You might not eat or you might eat constantly. You may cry or feel waves of fear, grief, disbelief, and confusion. This is your body, your mind, heart, and soul trying to process the unimaginable. Expect nothing of yourself except to breathe and respond in ways that feel natural. If you wanna watch Netflix, hold your children, be with your colleagues. Call your mother or best friend or cuddle with your spouse. Do that. If you need alone time, give that to yourself as well. This is not a time for doing. It's a time for being skip the gym, or take a gentle workout. Trust yourself. This is your normal human reaction to a very abnormal human experience. Another Thing that you wanna do in this early phase is focus on basic needs and psychological safety. If you've been physically injured, caring for your injuries comes first. If not, turn your attention to the psychological and emotional injuries that are normal in this situation. As difficult as it may be, limit your exposure to media coverage of the event. In the first few days, repeatedly watching or reading about the shooting can feed a cycle of anxiety and hyper vigilance. This keeps your nervous system stuck in a heightened state instead of allowing it to begin calming. We've learned from past traumas that repeated exposure actually gets in the way of your healing, prioritize hydration. Yes, drink enough water, eat regular meals, and rest as much as you can. Be cautious with alcohol. It's a depressant that can intensify difficult emotions. The same with weed, cannabis or pot, whatever you call it. Be careful of relying on it. It may temporarily numb distress. But can disrupt healthy emotional processing interfere with sleep and heighten your anxiety once its effects fade. It's understandable that you want to minimize your distress, but don't underestimate how medicinal time and community can be as you work through this trauma. There really isn't a healthy way around working through the trauma of a shooting. So I want to gently invite you to lean in and move through it in the days, weeks, and months ahead. But back to now, over the next week, roughly days four to 10, one of the most helpful things you can do is allow your feelings without judgment. This may come naturally to you, or it may be a new skill you learned through this tragedy. If you have a method for emotional regulation, please use it. If not, I invite you to listen to episodes six and seven and 97 where I walk you through my method. I call it name. Tame and aim. Our culture teaches us to blame and unclaim our emotions, which in the long run is not good for any of our mental wellness, i'll include my one pager in the show notes. A. Remember, you don't get to choose what you feel, but you do get to choose how you respond to your feelings. This is overwhelming. So again, be very gentle with yourself. Feel free to use journaling, voice memos, and talking to others as a way to process how you're experiencing this. Use the support system around you and also consider formal support. Loved ones and coworkers who weren't on site may be experiencing secondary trauma and may have their own needs mixed in. There are highly trained professionals, therapists, faith leaders, and hotlines that can assist you. I will include a number for a few of these in my show notes. At this time, gently reintroduce routine and predictability where you can, if you're parenting or have a pet, their needs may naturally create structure. Expect to feel tired. Sluggish and to struggle with concentration. Trust me, it will come back in time, but it can feel particularly difficult in these early weeks. Processing the unimaginable takes energy even when you're not focusing on it. Another reminder to use grounding to pause. Feel your feet and do breath work. Do some stretches, nothing heroic. Arms, circles, and toe touches will help your body. Let go of the tension. Be patient with yourself. I don't recommend things happen for a reason. Mindset, I just don't believe it. But as a therapist, with almost 40 years of experience, I've had the privilege of working with many people, harm through no fault of their own, who discovered parts of themselves they didn't know they had during healing. You don't have to look for these changes and growth opportunities. They tend to find you when you commit to working through this in a healthy whole way. Let's move to the last days of the two weeks, roughly days, 11 to 14. This is an estimate, just to give you a sense of this process, but again, you are your own person and trust how much time any of this takes you. By now some of the shock may have lifted, but life still feels changed. The familiar can seem profoundly different. You might find yourself walking to the grocery store acutely aware of what you've been through and feeling confused that everyone else is going about their day as if nothing happened. You turn on the news and the story has been pushed aside. Buried. That's hard because what you've experienced is a big deal and yet our country's coping mechanism often seems to be to minimize and move on. I am so sorry because that is really not helpful for you. I wanna encourage you to hold onto your truth and stay committed to healing from the inside out. I invite you to watch for signs that your acute stress isn't easing, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, hyper vigilance, avoidance, or panic attacks If these are present, consider a few sessions of em. DR. Therapy, a specialized treatment for processing trauma. I'll link em, Andrea, in the show notes so you can find a therapist when you call or send an email, say you were in a recent shooting, and ask to be seen as soon as possible. Don't forget to keep grounding in your daily rhythm. I teach these practices in episode 1 73. Grounding, brings you back to the present, and helps reregulate your nervous system. Move your awareness to your feet. Focus on your breath. If you feel anxious, try box breathing. Or my two minute cricket reset in my show notes, if you would like either of these MP threes, please email me at mj@mjmurrayvachon.com and I'll send them to you for free. It's helpful to practice grounding a few times a day, not just when you feel overwhelmed with anxiety. Try it when you're waiting in line, filling a water bottle or before your drive. This strengthens your ability to guide your mind and calm your body, This process is about you rebuilding safety and control. When bad things actually happen, your sense of safety is shaken. This will take time. I'm not suggesting that after two weeks all will be well. It won't, and I am so sorry. My hope is that this short episode gives you some guidance and hope to get through the beginning of this. Give yourself permission to move forward with gentleness and wisdom. Lean towards growth even in this life experience you would've never chosen. Don't underestimate your strength. Reaching out for help is brave. Healing never happens in a vacuum. We need each other.

10:05

Feel free to explore my other episodes and check the show notes for the resources I've mentioned and please share this episode with others. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm Home.