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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. 

Pam King: When people go through disaster and extreme loss and grief, having a loving source of sacredness, divine grace, God being with us, a God I can find refuge in, that is psychologically so important.

Meaning making is so fundamental to who we are as humans, and when that is ruptured, it's devastating. And then when you rupture social networks, relationships, etc., like so much of what makes us human is missing. The significance of space and how sacred space is for people and homes. We might say, Oh, you know, home is where the heart is.

Witnessing my friends and colleagues lose their physical homes and neighborhoods has really challenged the way I think about that.

Jamie Aten: We need resilience, but also would encourage the power of spiritual fortitude. So this is something that we've been researching now for a while. And a lot of it came out of my own experience of both cancer, as well as those that we work with in disaster zones.

And so one of the things that we discovered through some of our research was that spiritual fortitude is different from resilience, right? Resilience, we can think of that as. You know, bouncing back to get back to life, but what spiritual fortitude does is it helps us to realize that it's important that we still learn to live even amidst the suffering, not just waiting to get on the other side of it to live and to know that there is something powerful and redemptive and meaning to be found in just enduring.

Spiritual fortitude helps us to really metabolize our suffering. And so for those of who are listening, who are struggling and don't feel like you're bouncing back like everyone else, that it's okay. Do good as best as you can and have others to carry you through this time.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. 

Disaster preparedness is sort of an oxymoron. Disaster is the kind of indiscriminate calamity that only ever finds us ill equipped to manage. And if you are truly prepared, you've probably averted disaster, but it's very fascinating.

To see the huge difference between the impact of disaster on physical and material life on the one hand, and the outsized impact on mental, emotional, and spiritual life on the other. Personal disasters like a terminal illness, natural disasters like the recent fires that raised Southern Californian communities.

Not to mention the impact of endless, senseless wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods. These of course all cause severe pain and physical damage, but that can be the kind of thing that is mitigated or rebuilt, even if over a long period of time. But the worst of these cases threaten also to destroy the very meaning of our lives.

No wonder disaster takes such a psychological and spiritual toll. There's Urgent need to find or even make meaning from it, to somehow explain it, justify why God would allow it, and tell a grand story that makes sense of the senseless. These

are certainly difficult questions, and my guests today both have personal experience with disaster, as well as expertise in psychology and spirituality. Dr. Pam King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology, and is the Executive Director of the Thrive Center.

Thank you for your time. She's an ordained Presbyterian minister and she hosts a podcast on psychology and spirituality called With and For. Dr. Jamie Aden is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert, helping others navigate mass humanitarian and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights.

He's the founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, where he holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership. The idea for this particular episode was conceived with Pam. When she shared with me about her recent experience on the ground and in the hills of Altadena, California, where she spent January 8th, 2025, pouring out five gallon buckets of pool water to extinguish these creeping flames and successfully save a friend's home.

And thereafter, she told me about Jamie's really fascinating work and the psychology of humanitarian disaster, doing research and response. Jamie isn't only familiar with disasters at scale, he tells the story of his own battle with cancer. In his book, A Walking Disaster, What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me About Faith and Resilience.

In this conversation, we discuss the psychological study of disaster, the personal impact of disaster on mental, emotional, and spiritual health, the difference between resilience and fortitude, and the theological and practical considerations. for how to live through disastrous events. 

Thanks for listening, friends.

Jamie, Pam, thanks for joining me on For the Life of the World.

Pam King: Honor to be here, Evan. 

Jamie Aten: Yeah, looking forward to today's conversation. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, it's a sobering one. Just about a month ago, Southern California experienced some of the most dramatic and destructive fires it ever has. And Pam, you were very close to the flames, it turns out, and In the wake of that, there's been all sorts of questions around the social and political aspects of disaster, the meaning of support and emergency response, questions about public utilities, but you had this very close up experience of the fires, even as they were burning.

And I was hoping that you could spend a few moments just describing some of the visuals and sensory. experience of what that was like. 

Pam King: That's so interesting, Evan. It has been such a sensory experience. My office at Fuller, I actually look out onto the San Gabriel mountains where the fire started. And on Tuesday, the 7th, we had these severe wind warnings of the Santa Ana winds.

And I sat in my office watching these tall, skinny palm trees bob up and down. I go home that evening and we lose power at like 6 31 and I'm walking up into my bedroom and I'm looking at the same mountains. I live on the same street I work on but now I see flames in the dark from my bedroom which was startling.

My husband and I ended up going under the roof of our house in the midst of the wind just to see more of the flames and that was a wild experience. I think I actually saw an electrical pole go on fire because it like burst up the mountain at one point and then the next day was up at a friend's house who lives way high towards the residential line into the mountains because The fire responders had to leave to go put out places like Protect JPL, one of our country's major technology and science resources, and the water pressure was Not working, so there was nothing they could do, but her garage was on fire and there were spot fires on her property with various trees burning.

So we got our buckets and pots and some friends were just putting out fires. Somehow she managed to get a pump hose and was able to pump water out of her pool, which really was saving the house, but she had burnt trees leaning on her home and how it didn't burn down. I don't know, but. Yeah, and there was grace of God in that as well.

But all the homes around her were gone, minus one or two. And as I drove up and approached the house, and it really was like a war zone. It was just home after home, reduced to a pile of ashes and a chimney standing and gas lines were still going. So each house had a fire burning within the rubble of the gas lines, which was really, um, very eerie and disturbing.

Evan Rosa: And what is it like at this point? It's a month later. I don't know if it's right to say the dust is settled, the ash is settled, but like, what's, what is it like at this moment? 

Pam King: There are like 5, 000 homes destroyed in just the Eaton fire. There are 55 schools and houses of worship gone. So it is, it's like a bomb went off or.

That it was war. It's just a whole community that is 100 years old is, and you might have one home here or there, but there are blocks and blocks that are just annihilated. And then you'll have little stretches of neighbor, like a street where perhaps the embers blew over it. And so that those houses exist.

Evan Rosa: Jamie, I want to turn to you and ask for a little bit of Your background, we can of course, come back to some of these details and try to understand this particular instance, this particular disaster. But I preface with this, that like Pam's description of a bomb going off, it kind of seems to me that disaster is inherently something that's very difficult to prepare for.

I remember as a kid, I mean, anyone really in the post war era now knows what duck and cover is and disaster preparedness drills. And yet the fact that It seems like we are so impervious to things like this until it actually happens, seems to be this property of disasters. And I was curious if you can help us lay some context for what it means to understand the human response or the impact of disasters on humanity.

And then the human response to disaster. Where do you start? 

Jamie Aten: The impact of disasters on humanity is continuing to worsen and be more significant over time. So there's studies that look back to about 1985. The show almost a 400 percent increase in natural disasters globally. Now with that, not all of those are giant hurricanes, you know, that a lot of that's involving different types of things like flash flooding and those types of events as well.

But we are seeing a significant increase in disasters. We're seeing as populations shift over time where we're relocating, that we tend to be in more densely located areas that tend to be higher at risk. You know, Miami would be an example of that. You know, another. thing that we start to see with disasters that there is that they're actually becoming more complex, where you see one event triggering another event.

So an example of this. would be in Japan after the 311 tsunami. That's one of the places where we had worked for quite a while afterwards. And, you know, it actually started off with a bunch of these small little kind of ripples that were happening of like these mini earthquakes that then led to the full tsunami, which then led to a nuclear plant meltdown, which then led to a public health crisis, which then led to, you know, And the list just goes on and on.

And so we are seeing events becoming much more complex and more challenging. So the impact we also know doesn't just impact us physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. 

Evan Rosa: If something about the kind of lived or infrastructure or the kind of like the space that we create in the first place, um, I'll, I'll add, um, an experience of my own that I, I visited Haiti in 2012 where they were still reeling and their preexisting unpreparedness or the, the lack of, of stable, secure, safe infrastructure created this context of vulnerability and maybe fragility such that.

There's just no way to, to be able to respond like you want to be able to respond when it actually does hit. Yeah, 

Jamie Aten: absolutely. And Haiti, I think is a really powerful example about how those who are more vulnerable or have fewer resources tend to suffer and suffer longer and stay at higher levels of risk.

You know, so we were there after the earthquake and working for a few years on a project there, helping, you know, Did to care for children that had been rescued after out of trafficking who had lost their parents in the earthquake back in 2010. And so when you talk about lack of infrastructure, right, that you can go back just a few years to that earthquake and how much that country was decimated, and then to have this huge hurricane few years later when.

I was there probably about three months before that hurricane hit and remember still seeing USAID like seed bags that were still outside of a local church that I had visited on and off for a few years and where people were still using those as like makeshift tenants and then you've got this hurricane that comes along.

So absolutely the types of resources that we have definitely impacts our experience of what it's like to go through a disaster. 

Evan Rosa: I don't want to go too much further without also acknowledging the sort of your point, Jamie, that there are these. natural disasters, but there's also personal disasters. And you being a cancer survivor have your own story about that.

And Pam, this is going to come back into some of the territory that I know you are also passionate about in terms of just sort of the relational nature of, of traumas like this and the relational response. So Jamie, I'm hoping that you can share a little bit about your personal experience and like kind of, Bring it home to a personal level, and I'd love Pam for you to also kind of share some of your thoughts about when disaster becomes personal.

Jamie Aten: Yeah. For, for me, I had never actually set out to study or do work in disaster mental health or psychology. I thought I was gonna be working on rural mental health. That's what I was really passionate about, coming straight outta grad school. And so I took a job at Southern Miss. And just six days after being a newly minted PhD, you know, my first teaching gig, I'm not, you know, I'm not even there a full week is when we find out that Hurricane Katrina is barreling down for our community where we had just moved into.

And so that really changed the trajectory of my life in many ways. And within a few weeks, you know, anybody that knows me isn't surprised, but within a few weeks I was on the ground doing research, doing training, and starting to work to mobilize faith communities there. And then that led to one thing after the other and continue to do that.

And that's really what I've focused my life's work on so far, but fast forward about eight years into that experience after I'd been doing disaster work. that I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the age of 35. And it was really suddenly like the disaster was unfolding inside of me instead of something that I was going into to help other people.

Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: You call it evacuation impossible. 

Jamie Aten: Yeah. There, there was no evacuation 

Evan Rosa: in this case. Pam, especially having been so close to the fires and having thought through the psychological toll That traumas like this can take your developmental psychologist. I'm wondering what's your vantage on. The way that disaster becomes so personalized and it's the toll it takes on human psychology.

Pam King: Yeah. Well, one comment I'll say is I studied human thriving, not surviving. So this has been a bit of a crash course. I've always leaned into being trauma informed, but this has definitely had, you know, We dial deeper into that. One of the things as developmental psychologists, we understand that we're all unique and we all have our unique journeys.

And as Jamie was just illustrating, and as I'm experiencing and witnessing here is that people come into this collective trauma with their own stories, with their own tools in many cases, and also with their own quote unquote baggage, so to speak. So trauma, one thing that's been very helpful for me is understanding the compounded trauma that people come into a natural disaster with existing traumas in their life, whether it's a recent death in the family, which is the case of one of my colleagues and, or families going through difficult times or struggling with chronic illness or divorce.

There are Many things that impact how people personally experience a collective traumatic event. I'm also really struck by the social aspect of it. And one of the issues of the Eaton fire that has captured a lot of media attention is Altadena having a very strong and multi generational Black community that came here.

Earlier in the 1900s, because it was one of the very few areas that black people were allowed to purchase property in Los Angeles. So you have these multi generational families living within blocks of each other or sometimes in ADPs on the same property. And so when that whole neighborhood is burnt.

All their social capital, or not maybe all, but a lot of their social capital is lost. All their family is out of homes. There's no aunt or uncle to go stay with, where I have friends who grew up down the hill, so they're with parents. We have a lot of transplants in LA, so there's a lot of people with nowhere to go.

But it is very poignant to see And we're going to see how a very tight knit community that is, resides in a neighborhood and the neighborhood is gone. You lose more than just a home.

Evan Rosa: You've been on the show to talk with me about thriving before, and you've really been continually developing that work with some of your recent initiatives. I wonder if we could like pause for you to be able to explain what under normal conditions, what constitutes thriving and then what could possibly constitute thriving under disaster conditions.

Pam King: Yeah. I'd like it almost feels like a bad word to talk about when people are surviving, but it's still helpful. It's really helpful. So under, under normal circumstances, thriving has to do with adaptive growth. So in a world that's always changing, people are always having to adapt and grow. And it has to do with, you know, Become growing into your own strengths in authenticity.

So I admire you, Evan, a lot, and I admire you, Jamie, a lot, but I'm called to be me. And so my growing into who I am is part of my thriving. But I always say that we thrive when we are with others and for others. It's an inherently relational concept. Humans don't grow without love, without being known, without others to be cared for and to care for.

to reciprocate with. And we grow purposely. We grow for something bigger than ourselves. Some of us understand that as a vocation or purpose. It could be for the good of humanity, but so thriving has a lot to do with relationality and purpose. So in a situation like this, when we're knocked off our feet, when the ground below us is no longer the ground we once knew, thriving reminds us that.

We all do this uniquely. We need people in the process. I gave a talk in the community the other day about self care is not just me care, but we care because we need others and others need us. And it's something that people have appreciated hearing from me is that we can be purposeful, that a lot of those dislocated right now, evacuated or without homes may not be going after their sense of purpose fully, but.

As time goes by increasingly. a few minutes a day. And those who want to help, I've encouraged to help out of their strengths and their sense of purpose. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. I've heard something about trauma brain and the impact of basically the cognitive effects of undergoing something like this. It'll slow you down.

It'll scramble things. Jamie, can you give us sort of like layout? The psychological picture. I think folks think about disaster relief. They might even think about the kind of, you know, the politics of disaster, like does the president visit afterward or not? What kind of resources are going to come from FEMA?

What kind of aid are we providing if it's overseas? But the psychology of disaster offers like this unique. And we're going to talk about the spirituality of it as well, but I'm hoping that you can paint a picture there of what is the psychological study of disaster. 

Jamie Aten: Well, when you kind of look at the psychological study and the psychological impact the disasters have, you could almost picture kind of a, uh, say a grapefruit next to a large beach ball.

And the grapefruit. is what really focuses on the physical damage that has been occurred and maybe health related types of impact. So that's about the size of a grapefruit. But then if you compare it to the psychological, you could then put that up against a beach fall, that the psychological impact is going to be significantly even larger than the physical area.

So that's not to say that, you know, using the grapefruit analogy here, that the event is small, it's just trying to give some context. So imagine, You know, we, if we use that analogy, then for this huge fire that's happened in California, that's a pretty large grapefruit that we're talking about. So then your beach ball is going to be even larger, but we see it being even farther reaching of not even just those individuals who are directly impacted, but even people can be impacted on the other side of the world because of the news and the way that it connects with them.

And so it can be really far reaching. 

Evan Rosa: Describe some of your research then as well. You say you describe yourself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, applying some of your research and wanting to learn and wanting to collect the kind of data that can ultimately help us understand what resilience really looks like.

Jamie Aten: Yeah. You know, for me really at the heart of my research and at the organization, the Humanitarian Disaster Institute, Wheaton College that I founded, as well as the organization Spiritual First Aid that I co founded a couple of years back. that at the heart of both of those is really trying to translate research into practical resources and tools and training for others.

That, you know, I believe in research for knowledge sake, but for me personally, just because I think so much of my own experience of what I experienced through Katrina, I want to make sure that I'm always giving back with those and making it, you know, How do we get people into tangible resources? So sometimes that research might be going door to door after an event, you know, so that's something that we've done pretty commonly.

Uh, another project that we're working on right now is that we did a pilot five months into the war at Ukraine at the spiritual, uh, first aid intervention culturally adapted there. And now we're running a large scale clinical trial along with some economists looking at cancer transfers in addition to pairing that with psychological support.

And then other times, you know, it's going to be trying to figure out working with the local community of what is your most pressing need. There was one community, one time where we were doing a community based participatory project and I came in and the goal was to focus on disaster mental health, but.

After about six months, we pivoted and focused on diabetes education. Now that might not quite sound like a psychological study, but if you're in a community where you have a high level of diabetes and then now medications are even harder to get and suddenly people are losing limbs, that's going to have a huge psychological impact.

So we have to think differently sometimes about psychology, which is why in that spiritual first aid training and courses that we've developed, that we take a very strong holistic approach because we realize that all of those basic needs that we have. 

Evan Rosa: I'd love to get both of you thinking about, like, the grapefruit beach ball analogy and why that is.

So what about human psychology makes the toll of a disaster magnified by whatever that magnitude is between a grapefruit and a beach ball? 

Jamie Aten: Yeah, you know, from some of the studies that we've done, a couple of things kind of jump out. One of those is the idea of a meaning rupture occurring. You know, so Pam, you were talking some about, you know, sometimes literally having the earth underneath us not be the same anymore.

And so the same thing happens with the way that we understand and perceive the world. And the bigger that kind of rupture, so to speak, is the more we're directly impacted, the more psychological distress that we're going to have. In fact, we have one study Where if you looked at the data, it almost looks like one of those kind of scary roller coasters where And one side going straight up is the higher the amount of spiritual meaning making somebody actually achieves, then the PTSD actually drops like going down on a roller coaster, right?

But then the flip side of that is lower levels of spiritual meaning making. We saw much higher levels of PTSD among survivors, and we've seen that happen in a number of different types of studies that we've done. 

Pam King: I would agree. Meaning making is so fundamental to who we are as humans. It's perhaps one of the uniquest things we do as humans, and when that is ruptured, it's devastating.

And then when you rupture social networks, relationships, et cetera, like so much of what makes us human is missing. Honestly, I know what we're related, and maybe it's to talk about later, but I just, the significance of space and how sacred space is for people in homes has really been something that I've been pondering and appreciating where we might say, Oh, you know, home is where the heart is.

Witnessing my friends and colleagues lose their physical homes and neighborhoods has really challenged the way I think about that. 

Jamie Aten: It's actually one of the things that's on my dissertation outcomes that I promised my college by the end of the semester. So I think you're definitely, it's definitely connected.

So I'm actually on a project right now out of Regent University and then a couple of researchers from Harvard, Zellersheen Center there. And one of the things that we're looking at is the psychology of. Place and spirituality and particular interest of mine is looking at disasters because, you know, one of the things that we often see, you know, Pam, you're giving those great examples of how people, you know, maybe an entire community lost their home and that sense of connection, or, you know, when I think about Hurricane Katrina, I remember hearing a lot of people say, well, why don't people in New Orleans just leave New Orleans, right?

that people would say things like that, or, you know, one of the things that in the community where I was in, they referred to the Sunday after Katrina as Slab Sunday. And that's because the Sunday afterwards, all that was left of many of the churches where people would gather, that was so deeply ingrained into our space and who we are, were just gone.

It was just the concrete slabs. left on the ground, that was it. You know, so that point of connection or, you know, I even think about my own life, about growing up in a small rural farming community of about a thousand people that, you know, I know I'm not going to take back the family farm, but that family farm and that land is still very much a part of my identity, that I'm still connected to that.

Evan Rosa: Let's keep, I would love to stay on, on this particular, this subject, both with respect to the impact of a changed space, a space changed by disaster, but also perhaps, and not to be too, too quick ushering in hope, but also the redemptive, um, capacities of rebuilding a space or acknowledging a space. And one of the primary examples that I might.

point to is this recent case of a sermon that a pastor in Bethlehem preached. His name's Munter Isaac, and he preached a sermon called Christ in the Rubble. And for Christmas that year, they set up a creche, a nativity scene in some of the actual rubble from Bethlehem that was just like part of the damage of war.

And that says something. It says something very powerful about the impact of. Disaster on a space. And then again, the human response. to that and how and what rebuilding might look like or what understanding what building meaning might look like in the wake of that. 

Jamie Aten: Yeah, we've done some research on religious attributions because you see that quite often in the aftermath of an event where that it can bring hope, where you start to see these powerful symbols, you know, as you were talking about the nativity scene, I immediately a picture that I have at my office at the college right behind my behind where I normally sit is one where it shows this rubble and somebody had pulled out parts of plastic nativity scene and placed it And they propped it up where it was kind of above the rest of the rubble.

And those things aren't uncommon or even to see sometimes where maybe there's something that survives that resembles a cross and then people start to, you know, find meaning in that sort of thing as well. So both that we can find meaning in the restructuring of things, but also even in the rubble itself.

That's, 

Evan Rosa: that's 

Jamie Aten: beautiful, 

Evan Rosa: Pam, tell me, tell us more about like the space that, that you are seeing being rebuilt right now, even with respect to the relational space that Altadena or just Southern California in general, you feel like how that's become. 

Pam King: Yeah, Evan, I don't see space being rebuilt yet, but what I see are other community members coming together, um, in really profound ways, like I feel like I see hope embodied through networks of people coming together to bring clothes, Thanks.

Sort clothes, uh, bring water, sort, hand out, that it is, it is really invigorating to see others come together on behalf. You know, it's a very with and for experience. So that's hopeful, but I really experienced people right now, just even this week, extremely disillusioned and so disoriented by space. A friend mentioned that her eighth grade son, Just started crying the other morning and said, I can't find a spoon.

And it was the little thing in what's supposed to be a home. He should know where his spoon is for spoons are for cereal, but these little things that should be just common to our life and easy and simple. Everything is a cognitive load. We don't know what to wear because we're putting together outfits from people who've given us clothes or from stores that are donating.

Everything is effort, which is, It's wild to see how taxing psychologically that is. A thought on home and space though, maybe going back, you know, your colleagues, Evan at Yale, I was since the fire rereading the home of God by Miroslav and Ryan, and just really Kind of meditating on the concept of the redemption and fulfillment of creation and even the created order and God coming to dwell here and seeing the devastation in the created order ravaged here.

I think their perspective of God's dwelling in earth and the fulfillment of the eschatological fulfillment being more earth oriented than earth. Otherworldly oriented gives me perspective on why space and place is so sacred to us. Their theology really affirms that the material world is part of our human experience, and it's valid.

And that's been validating for me of why people are so disoriented and disturbed to lose their physical home and neighborhoods. 

Evan Rosa: That's, I think, a very good point. Jamie, with spiritual first aid, where do you see that fitting in? So this is to try to develop that point about sort of the theological spiritual take now.

Um, it'd be wonderful to see how the psychology and the spirituality kind of integrate there, but, but tell me, tell us a little bit about spiritual first aid, what that means and what you're trying to respond to there. 

Jamie Aten: And so Spiritual First Aid is a research driven course that teaches people how to really turn their compassion for unmet mental health needs into effective care.

And we do that by bringing in theological perspectives, along with the psychological and trauma informed care, and it's evidence informed. And what we're really trying to do is to teach people how to practically put their faith, into action is what we're trying to do with it. And, you know, oftentimes we think about, we see these devastating.

You know, disasters that occur. And one of the things people will feel is I don't know what I could do to help. But one of the things that we, I think sometimes underestimate is just how powerful that human connection and support is. So we've had a number of studies that we've done. One that comes to mind was after the, a mass shooting that happened at a junior college in Oregon.

And one of the things that we found was that when people received positive spiritual support, that they reported lower levels of trauma, lower levels of depression, and lower levels of anxiety. And when we're talking about providing that spiritual support, it wasn't something overly complex. It was that showing up, being present both physically, emotionally, and spiritually to care for others intangible needs.

And so what we've done with spiritual first aid is to take all this, about 50 different studies that we've done and hundreds of scholarly publications, and to really be able to translate that into a really simple model that we call blessed CPR that we teach, which is Instead of having to focus on, you know, a lot of mental health interventions focus on here's 20 different types of mental health problems.

Here's a list of about, you know, 50 symptoms for each, go memorize all that. And then you get to the end of your day and you're like, well, what do I do now? And so we've really boiled it down to the BLESS being those kind of five basic needs that our research showed unmet cause psychological distress. So biological, livelihood, emotional, social, mental health.

And it really kind of bypasses having to know all of those other types of symptoms to be able to know what is your most pressing need right now? And what's one thing I can do to help you? That could be bring me a glass of water. It could also be to sit with me. It could be to help me with paying a bill that I have, you know, that we're teaching people to start there.

And then that's the triage process, right? Because we can't help people. Everything. But when you look at those needs, I like to think of them as a Rubik's cube because never do we help somebody that has one problem, right? Instead, most people we interact with, you could probably fill up the entire side of a Rubik's cube or maybe a whole Rubik's cube with all the problems.

But what happens when you focus on just one tile, when you push on that one tile, it shifts the entire puzzle. And that's the approach that we take to caring for mental health and as well as the spiritual needs. And then from there, is the C, which is the care with practical presence. So that's, again, about being there in the moment, but also providing that tangible relief.

And then the next, the P stands for providing coping practices, and then the R refer and resource. So we're helping to really provide basics where we can step into those gaps where people may not be able to get coping. Care, provide ho, uh, hope and care to be able to keep promise from getting worse, stabilize others, and then also when needed to be able to refer to get them connected to other resources.

Evan Rosa: Pam, you're deeply invested in the concept of spirituality and in particular spiritual health, and that seems to be like a pretty important crossover, um, point here. So, um, like kind of staying in tune with the spiritual response of the spiritual first aid in response to disaster. I'm going to come back to definitions again.

Like, tell us a little bit about, I'm thinking again, both of the graph that you described, Jamie, about this, about the way post traumatic stress inversely seems to correlate to the felt sense of meaning or purpose, and perhaps a spirit, a strong spiritual sense is an aspect of that. Pam, describe your take on spirituality, spiritual health, and psychologically, what grounds the importance of spirituality in this context of disaster relief.

Pam King: Very aligned with Jamie in saying that for Spirituality from a psychological perspective has so much to do with our ultimate sources of meaning. And one of the things I'm very curious about in this experience in LA is that spirituality is pretty diverse. We're in a community that people are pretty untethered from traditional religious congregations and their Maybe they're historic traditions or they've not been raised with one.

And so I'm really curious, like, how will people make meaning out of this? In, in the, from the framework of spiritual health, we identify that people need a source of transcendence, something bigger than themselves. In the Christian tradition, that is God in Christ. For others, people need, It might be nature, or science, or found within another religious tradition, but when people go through disaster and extreme loss and grief, having a loving source of sacredness, divine, again, in the Christian worldview, God being with us, a God I can find refuge in, that is psychologically so important to have someone bigger than us.

I hear a lot of people ask, where is God in this? And it brings up theological issues around God's power and sovereignty, God's presence, God's love for us. And I know personally, I have really had to lean into God's presence in this, that, you know, I have thought of the cross in rubble that, you know, Christ's death, crucifixion, that loss, that death is, allows, I believe, God to have.

a lot of empathy for us. And I imagine God's distress in this, but being able to lean into God's comfort as in, which I feel like has become a practice of refugeeing instead of thinking, seeking a refuge of refuge, being something active of actively. Just needing to find God's presence in the midst of the rubble and the pain around here has been very important to me.

But so that would be an aspect of spiritual health that's really important and practices are a second aspect and I've really been encouraging people and I want to ask Jamie like when meaning making comes in because I have had friends say, I can't even listen to a meditation. I can pretty much breathe.

That is all I have the capacity for. And so wanting to meet people where they're at with practices that ground them in their senses, in the ground that's available to them. Some have found lament very helpful of being able to hold those things that are destroyed and what they're grateful for, but others aren't there yet.

So understanding that. Like when practices are appropriate, I want to ask Dr. Ayton. 

Jamie Aten: Yeah, so kind of looking at some of those practices, you know, that's another piece that we do in spiritual first aid is also to talk about how or when or is it even appropriate to bring in things like prayer or, you know, different sacred readings into care and teaching people how to navigate that where we're meeting people with where they're at.

And both in terms of where they are in terms of their own beliefs, but then also meeting that person where they're at in terms of what their situation is. Because when we initially developed spiritual first aid and started piloting it five years ago or so, and then we released it during COVID that we had initially thought was just going to be a disaster intervention.

And then we started hearing people using it in everyday life. So we did a major revamping of it where we really developed it now to be used for mild stress all the way to mass trauma with the way the intervention set up. So we're grappling with those things of like, how do we incorporate practices and when do we do that?

And so, As we're starting to navigate that, one of the things that we've seen oftentimes is it'll depend on how much and how much that person was impacted as well as the timing, like what you were talking about, Pam, about early on, you're not necessarily going to be finding making meaning yet, but it is important that you still strive for it, you know?

And so there was a, I'm also a part of a research project being led by Elizabeth Hall out of Biola University and Crystal Park out of University of Connecticut, and we've actually been studying lament. in this particular grant that we have. And one of the things that we found in one of the early grants a couple of years back was that even if a person doesn't come to fully achieving meaning made, that if you look at a review of the literature, that people who still strive to find meaning tend to have similar positive outcomes.

The part where it starts to get nuanced is when meaning is never made. And it becomes to that point where now I'm obsessed with that, that I just, you know, the example of somebody who's lost somebody in their life, and then they lose everyone in their life because they've just fallen off the grid, so to speak, right?

That's when it becomes, when that question takes over everything. is when it becomes problematic, but striving in of itself is valuable. And so, you know, lamenting, I think is one of those things because it's bringing that, it doesn't mean you have a resolution, right? Like I remember early on after I was diagnosed with cancer, somebody gave me a book on Kierkegaard.

Great book. Kierkegaard was not going to solve all my pain or suffering or take away all my why questions. You know, in fact, my why questions weren't questions. They were actually moments of lament. When I look back on them, you know, that it was me kind of an emotional outlet. not really asking anybody to answer those questions for me.

And so I think early on, it's to create those spaces to lament, to be able to hear what others are going through. And the other thing is, again, starting to work toward trying to make that mastery or meaning over the experience. So, um, here's just a simple practice that we did after the Baton Rouge flood back in 2016.

So we did a study there. And we randomized people after the, in our study where one group we had to control, another group ended up writing for 10 minutes, just a journal entry about their disaster experience. And then the third group, we had them specifically to journal to God about their disaster experience.

And then we trapped them out over six months. And at the six month point, those individuals is simply early on within six weeks of the event, simply wrote. A 10 minute journal to God about their disaster experience had statistically significant higher levels of spiritual meaning achieved that withstood even at the six month mark.

So again, we don't, these things don't have to be major things that we're always doing, but it's also even looking to our faith because most faith traditions provide us a roadmap for how to think and navigate suffering. And then the other part. is that our faiths also connect us to resources that are going to help our overall spiritual and emotional well being.

So we did a major review article a few years back, and we looked at every research article that had been done over 45 years on religion and disaster mental health. And what we found, you couldn't really tell a difference between one faith being, say, more healthy, so to speak, in the aftermath of a disaster.

And what it really kind of came down to was that it wasn't just about how religious or spiritual a person was, but much more so about how they engaged their faith. That was the best predictor of resilience. And it kind of comes back to what Pam was talking about that, you know, if I view God as being a loving and caring God, and maybe I lost everything and then a neighbor who lost everything.

They view God as being, you know, God sent that event specifically to punish them, view them more wrathful. That person's going to struggle a lot more spiritually, emotionally, and even physically in one of our studies that we found. So it's not just about how committed we are, but also very much how we engage during these difficult times.

Pam King: I really appreciate that, Jamie. That's helpful. Do you have research or insight into people who maybe are really untethered from faith? They may never have grown up in a faith tradition. They don't really have a God or not really clear on that. Like, how do they tend to make meaning or those who are marginalized from faith, where do they go?

Jamie Aten: Yeah. So again, a lot of our samples actually for most of our studies have been large samples that were not focusing just on religious communities, you know, so sometimes that would be literally going door to door, uh, after any event or randomly sampling. 1500 people from an entire city. And so we would get people from all these different traditions, including people that reported no religious beliefs or atheism, for example.

And one of the things that we tended to see, even amongst individuals there, that you still would see higher levels of spiritual meaning occurring because people even maybe removed again, like what you were saying, like maybe it's nature or, but it was finding meaning maybe in more secular ways. And so, That tends to happen.

You do also tend to see a spike in religiosity, where in both reports of practices and religious attendances, you know, like 9 11 is a real clear, large scale study, you know, several studies that were done there that you can see those patterns. And then another thing that tends to happen is is that you'll also hear people who maybe they themselves aren't people of faith but who maybe had a positive experience with somebody of faith in the aftermath because you see a lot of the relief organizations both coming in as well as a lot of relief efforts are often led by local or external faith communities.

And so that again brings them into that experience of having positive relationships with others. You know, it's kind of goes back to not to oversimplify that a little bit like Mr. Rogers, right? That there's that kind of famous story that he told about when things are rough, you know, that his mother, I think it was that encouraged him to look for the helpers, right?

There's something powerful about that. I actually had somebody once asked me, like, You know, what's the best way or what's the one thing I could do to prepare myself well for a disaster? And I really think it comes down to again, Mr. Rogers, that it's like, get to know your neighbor, right? Because in the event of a disaster, if you know your neighbor, you've got somebody you can turn to.

And also they're more likely to turn to you and to try to turn to a neighbor that you've never had contact with in the aftermath of a disaster. It's too late at that point. 

Pam King: Let me push on that. So though when the neighborhood is gone and you don't have access to the neighbor, kind of what does that mean?

But on the same time, I have heard so many of my friends say, our neighborhood text chain, our buy nothing community. There are these regional neighborhoods digitally set up that are being way used and activated and so helpful right now. So I'm just curious about when the physical neighbor isn't there, but I do know like my own street, The night of the fire, we were all keeping each other posted on water quality, evacuation lines.

So people helped people out of houses in evacuated zones. So neighbors were helpful. 

Evan Rosa: I'm going to let Jamie take this one, except for saying one thing that I think I would just point out that proximity is, I think this makes the point that proximity alone is not what it takes to become a neighbor from proximity often, but they extend so far beyond that.

And you can reach beyond proximity once a connection is made. 

Jamie Aten: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if we kind of think through those kind of, the social relationships that we all have, those kinds of spheres of, you know, the more that we have both in terms of physically close proximity, as well as others who, you know, I've got friends that I've not seen for years, but I still feel close to, or, you know, like Pam had mentioned that, You know, it's been a couple of years since we actually talked and I'm like, wait, that can't be right.

It feels like we just talked, right? There's still that sense of connection that's there, but the more that we have of all of those, it becomes kind of like a web, right? And that it's going to strengthen our resilience and with disasters. One of the most harmful things is that it does oftentimes split up where you have people that, you know, neighborhoods, your neighbors aren't living there anymore, or.

Maybe they don't come back or you don't know where your neighbors are because they evacuated, you know, so those social disruptions are so impactful on us, but social media and other types of online resources are making that easier. And then we are seeing where you do see neighbors helping neighbors, but also again, one of the reasons why I encourage us to get to know our neighbors is, you know, I think about some neighborhoods where, you know, you might have, maybe it's an area where.

Most of the neighborhood has changed over in the last 15 years. And there's maybe that one older couple that still lives there who might actually feel threatened if somebody is suddenly knock on their door, right? They may, they might not know other people. And so again, it's going to vary a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood, but the more that we can get to know each other, the better.

And to establish those relationships and to be able to start to find ways, you know, for example, one of the things that we often advise when we're working with churches where their communities have been impacted about somewhere, maybe three to six months, you start to see a lot of local clergy start to burn out.

You know, that you'll hear them say things like, I went to seminary and I've trained for these things. I've not done any of that. for six months. I'm now managing relief teams. I'm bringing donations in. I sometimes forget what being a pastor was even like prior to, you know, said event. And a lot of times they start to feel isolated.

And so one of the things though, is it's hard to ever get them to leave, to go out, to connect with people. Friends or family elsewhere, because they feel like they can't leave their communities or their congregations. And so there's a couple of denominations that we've advised in the past to like, well, try to set up weekends where you're paying to bring somebody in to visit them or have somebody that's going to be willing to volunteer for a week to work alongside them that they've not seen for a while, you know?

So if we can't necessarily get to others, can others maybe come to us, you know? So trying to find ways that we're staying in touch is just so important. Absolutely, 

Pam King: that's really helpful. Jamie, I'd love to ask you, like, ongoing support for clergy, civic leaders, mental health providers that are in a community where we're talking at least five years till people are rebuilding homes here.

What do you recommend in terms of social support? Should pastors have small groups? Should there be new kind of supervision? Should they go out of town and get a time away? What, how do people pace themselves? 

Jamie Aten: You know, I think all of those things, we, like, we all need all of those things, right? That those are all highly important, but especially in the aftermath of a disaster.

And one of the things that I would encourage people to be thinking about is just how to find those relationships that are really life giving to them, right? So it doesn't mean that we have to actually do all of those things because you're, Probably feeling overwhelmed. And in fact, uh, in spiritual first aid, when we talk about self care, we actually don't hardly use the word self care.

We actually tend to say spiritual self aid. And part of the reason for that is that I know a lot of people in these contexts, myself included. There was one day I was listening to NPR and they were talking about self care and relationships. And the experts were talking about all the things you need to do to be healthy and avoid burnout, right?

And I sat down being the researcher I am, and I did the math, right? Of all the things, how long would it actually take for the, for me to do all of these things and realize, no wonder I feel stressed. It actually added up to more time than I have in a given day. Yeah. Right. And so if you're thinking about You know, where do I even start?

You know, I like to think of self care a little bit more like surfing, which is, you guys can see me that I don't fit the typical surf profile being the redhead that I am from the Midwest. But, but with that being said, I do think surfing is a good analogy that it's okay to sometimes go into the wave and be on these busy kind of crest of just things are about to knock you over.

But then you have to know when you need to come down off the wave. know when you need to just go into still waters and know when you need to get out onto the beach altogether. And so it's learning to have, I think it's really more about having healthy rhythms and maintaining those contacts even through times of craziness.

Evan Rosa: You speak in my language, Jamie. Um, and I'm going to resist the bait to talk about surfing. Um, just to kind of round out the time at a personal level for each of you, having been touched in various ways, you know, and I know that anyone listening to this is going to have their own frame of reference for the, the disasters of life and, and the ways that they have encountered life's disasters.

What. You've already shared, both of you have already shared a few things that have worked or haven't worked. Um, for someone who, who does need something in the moment, what words of comfort come to mind or what have you found personally useful for yourself, if not offering advice? 

Pam King: Go ahead. I'll share. So, Evan, I shared this with the fuller employees, staff the other day.

And for me, I will say I really had trauma brain, I would say, even though I had a home through vicarious or through running around trying to help anyone and everyone I could physically putting out fires, cooking, having people at my house, having animals at my house, et cetera. About eight days after I sat down in a chair, in a quiet space in my home, and I was like, who am I?

And, and I, I had to trust that in that moment, you know, my belief in God was that God is holding these fragmented pieces of me and knows me better than I know myself at this moment. And I, when I haven't been able to think clearly or feel clearly, I have felt so disorganized internally, that has been helpful for me.

And as that time persisted in that chair, I started, and this feels a little cheesy, but I was thinking about God and refuge. And I had this sense of God's presence with me, like a hazmat suit. My friend sorting through the rubble of her home, pulling out ceramics that she has personally thrown, um, in a hazmat suit with goggles is like seared in my mind.

And I started to imagine that, you know, There's no promise I'm not going to get burned, that people around me aren't going to suffer, but God's love is with me. And I can breathe that air of love as if in a hazmat suit of clean air wherever I am. And I have had to lean into that and take moments in the day of like, okay, you know, just relax, take the pressure and just imagine being in that hazmat suit.

As cheesy as that sounds, that has been a very helpful visual for me and reminder that God is with us. And I have to imagine when we're together and holding hands, so to speak, with those hazmat suits, those. They are more invigorated with God's presence. So that's been a go to for me. 

Jamie Aten: I like that image.

Yeah. Thank you, Pam, for sharing that. That's to me, it wasn't cheesy at all. It was actually quite powerful. And, you know, I had, uh, there was, uh, a colleague of mine who created, uh, sewed together a prayer shawl for me when I had cancer. I remember sometimes putting that on and just as a physical reminder that God's presence is powerful.

So I think in terms of one of the things that I would kind of end on would be to know that we need resilience, but But also would encourage others to consider too about the power of spiritual fortitude. So this is something that we've been researching now for a while. And a lot of it came out of, you know, my own experience of both cancer as well as those that we work with in disaster zones that, you know, when we talk about resilience, we often talk about it as bouncing back.

Well, bouncing back, if you've gone through something like this, like a fire. It's going to be slow and it's not going to necessarily look like a bounce probably at times. And so one of the things that we discovered through some of our research was that spiritual fortitude is different from resilience, right?

Resilience, we can think of that as, you know, bouncing back to get back to life. But what spiritual fortitude does is it helps us to realize that it's important that we still learn to live even amidst the suffering. not just waiting to get on the other side of it to live. And so to learn to live even amidst the suffering and to know that there is something powerful and redemptive and meaning to be found in just enduring, right?

That, and sometimes we forget that and that spiritual fortitude. Another way that we've kind of come to think about it is that it's powerful in terms of it helps us to really metabolize our suffering. And so for those of you, Who are listening, who are struggling and don't feel like you're bouncing back like everyone else, that it's okay.

Lean, do good as best as you can and have others to carry you through this time. 

Evan Rosa: Thank you both so much for sharing personally about this. That's not an easy thing to do. Uh, let alone in public and that the example that sets it, I think it creates a space where you're helping to bolster people who also need the fortitude to share about their own experience.

And I think it really, it does offer something unique and valuable to be able to hear the stories of what does help, what does not help and what both science and spirituality are telling us can pave a way forward. Thank you both for joining me. 

Pam King: Yeah, Evan, thank you. 

Jamie Aten: Jamie, 

Pam King: thank 

Jamie Aten: you. Thank you guys both for having me and just really enjoyed this conversation.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Jamie Ayton and Pam King. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett, and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa.and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. We can find all sorts of educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If this is your first time listening to the show, you're going to love it. Welcome, friend. Remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode.

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