A Tragedy in Maine
Maine spree shooter. Image: Maine State Police
[UPDATE: Authorities reported that on Friday night, October 27, the gunman suspected of killing 18 people and injuring 13 others in Maine was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shelter-in-place orders have been rescinded and schools and businesses have been given permission to re-open].
The first 911 call came in at 6:56 pm EST on Wednesday October 25th. A man with a military-style semiautomatic assault rifle was firing shots in a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine. It was youth night. He then drove to a nearby bar where the rampage continued. 18 innocent people, folks at work or out enjoying an evening, were murdered (with the death toll likely to increase) and scores of others wounded. It was, as such events are formally called, a “spree killing.”
The loss of life, devastation to the injured, and unalterable impact to all the affected families and the local community is heartbreaking.
The situation is still unfolding. Surviving victims are in hospital beds trying to comprehend the extent of damage inflicted on their bodies. Next of kin are learning the fate of loved ones, though some of the victims' identities are still unconfirmed. The armed and dangerous killer remains at-large, the focus of a massive multi-agency manhunt. Thousands of residents are in lock down, with schools and businesses closed.
To many people, terrible events like this can seem remote, too unimaginable to cognize. No matter how prosocial, compassionate, and generous we consider ourselves, we can become desensitized to the unbearable pain we know others are experiencing someplace else. We can render loss and trauma as a distant abstraction — something that’s happened ‘over there’ but not something we have to deeply feel ourselves. Becoming inured to overwhelming suffering — to dissociate — is a feature of our psychology that at once, paradoxically, can help us survive traumatic experiences and situations while also handicapping our ability to reintegrate and recover from them. Or to be able to empathically respond to others’ suffering.
These are natural human tendencies. Nobody is immune. And it can be especially challenging in our age of ceaselessly inundating trauma-saturated news and social media, and in a world in which the quantity and scope of human barbarity seems limitless.
But as a trained psychoanalyst, I understand how vital connection, emotional expressivity, and communication are to living through trauma. And to breaking the cycles of re-traumatization. It feels essential that I not distance myself from this terrifying, horrifying event.
That ethos is at the heart of my work and has been shaped by my education, clinical training, and many years of experience both treating patients and advising leaders of organizations. But it does not come from professional preparation alone. It’s also borne of personal experience.
9/11 was catalytic to reorienting my trajectory from clinical practice to founding Dolus Advisors, a consultancy I established to deploy psychoanalytic principles and techniques at scale to help corporate leaders address organizational issues and challenges relating to power, authority, and psycho-social dynamics that are frequently overlooked or misunderstood.
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a capped allotment of disasters. My family finds itself again affected by malevolent forces. My younger son is a freshman, a recruited athlete, at Bates College, a private liberal arts college in the heart of Lewiston, Maine.
My wife and I were in touch with our son on Wednesday night. We learned that, thankfully, he and all the other students in the school were unharmed. Everyone on campus was instructed to immediately shelter-in-place in locked residence halls and academic buildings. Communications from college officials advised that everyone in the Bates community was safe, with the terrible exception of one college employee who was present and injured at one of the shooting locations. On orders from the state’s public safety commissioner and law enforcement, the college remains on lockdown as the manhunt for the gunman continues.
We’re fortunate. Following every mass casualty incident, some families will learn the worst possible news, and their lives are forever changed.
Now, barring an eruption of more violence, attention is correctly focused, as a priority, on locating and apprehending the suspect. This will be followed by lifting the shelter and lock-down orders, restoring a sense of public safety, creating space for people to grieve, and helping others, especially but not exclusively children and young people, to navigate their trauma response so they can move forward with minimal and hopefully impermanent psychological scarring.
But while the news cycle and the industrial information (and misinformation) complex will instantly spotlight other crises, the citizens of Lewiston Maine and the students (and their families), faculty, and administration at Bates College will not rebound into any semblance of normalcy so fast. Healing, a seemingly simple word bandied with beguiling ease after a tragedy, is actually a very complicated, non-linear, slow-moving process.
Somewhere, though I don’t recall exactly, Freud wrote something to the effect that, in a fire, it’s the fireman’s job to first extinguish the flames before attempting to ascertain its cause. He was of course using that as a metaphor to describe the clinician’s approach to patients in crisis.
So it is in Lewiston. There is immediate work to be done. Paramount is neutralizing the proximate threat and re-opening schools and businesses. But that is by no means all.
The Lewiston massacre, like other mass shootings, is both of a piece with and symptomatic of a broader socio-political and ideological crisis which, I would assert, affects all of us not just those with a direct link to this or any other specific incident.
Following every active shooter incident or other outbreak of senseless violence, there is, inevitably, inordinate focus on the perpetrator. The myth of the rogue actor or lone wolf— together with promulgating the false security of mitigating recurrence — is grounded in labeling him deranged or lunatic and performing a pseudo-autopsy of his mental health and mental illness; developing a profile and ascertaining motive; identifying warning flags of impending malicious action that were missed or ignored. To be sure, all of those are important for law enforcement personnel.
“The Clenched Hand” by Mohsen Nouri Najafi
However, much of what gets presented to and ultimately shapes public notions about the antecedents, triggers, drivers, and potential deterrents to radically malevolent behavior veers between psychologically naïve and psychologically illiterate. Reductionism and over-simplifications are rampant.
The problems and their root causes are thick, nesting, multisystemic, and multidimensional. There are, accordingly, no simple or easy answers. Especially in situations like this, the phrase ‘silver bullet’ in reference to a solution has no place.
We live in a broken society where violence, cruelty at scale, and constant unchecked eruptions of nihilistic male rage are common even valorized occurrences. Where lawlessness and remorseless, unbridled sociopathy are often rewarded, amplified, and commoditized rather than punished and squashed. Where children and young people’s emotional and psychological well-being are subordinated or dismissed to the sadism and self-serving avarice of a few. Where corruption and abuses of power by feckless toadies in positions of authority and responsibility are lauded and recast as a credential. And cycles of transgenerational trauma are willfully and indifferently repeated without regard for near- or long-term consequence.
Sane, responsible regulations, policies, and safeguards around gun access, ownership, licensure, and usage consistent with Second Amendment rights have been vociferously blocked and deformed by a minority of the polity allied with corporate arms cartels who rely on irrational and constitutionally spurious arguments.
None of this should be normalized or accepted. We must identify and implement ways to disrupt and dismantle this pathological status quo.
For those wishing to help by providing financial support, this is a curated list of reputable charities organizing aid in Lewiston/Auburn:
Maine Community Foundation's Lewiston-Auburn Area Response Fund will be directly supporting victims and families impacted by the shootings.
United Way of Androscoggin County's Community Fund is the United Way in Maine that covers the Lewiston region, and their Community Fund is used to support community partners providing mental health services and other critical needs.
Red Cross of Central Maine & the Red Cross of Southern Maine are sending resources to the region for immediate response, including licensed mental health care, condolence care and counseling, and other critical support.
LA Metro Chamber Foundation is collecting donations to share with organizations responding to the greatest need and supporting EMS workers. Specify Foundation in the drop-down after entering your contact information on the second page.