What child survivors of the Twin Cities church shooting will need to deal with trauma

MINNEAPOLIS — When the bullets started flying into the church, adults jumped up to protect children from the onslaught. Students tried to help too, shielding their friends and younger classmates.

Kids who lived through the Wednesday morning shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in south Minneapolis experienced an acute mental trauma, even if physically unscathed, child psychologists and counselors said. Their parents will face their own challenges. Two families are reckoning with the fact that their children are not coming home.

“There is no wrong way to grieve to move through this,” said Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012 in Connecticut. “There is no getting over it, so all you can do is move through it.”

The path for each child and family member will be different, mental health professionals said. Parents may see their children act out in unusual ways, but those reactions are normal.

Officials at Annunciation Catholic School wrote in a message on Wednesday that “we will send further communication about support services available to us all at a later time.”

The children who came home from Annunciation’s all-school Mass on Wednesday likely will experience a broad spectrum of emotion: anger, shock, loss of a sense of safety, numbness.

Some children may not want to talk about it. Some will act out, even if they previously were calm. Others may regress by needing more attention or by wetting the bed, even if they have been potty trained for years. If those things happen, “just normalize it. Don’t shame, but also don’t alarm,” said Anne Gearity, a therapist who teaches psychiatrists in training at the University of Minnesota.

Parents should not pathologize their children’s behavior in the immediate aftermath either by labeling it as PTSD or any other psychological condition. Tai Mendenhall, a medical family therapist and professor at the U, said that research has shown that suggesting someone has a chronic problem right after a trauma can actually make it more likely that issues persist over time.

In reality, “The majority of people who go through trauma like this do not go on to develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” he said. The reactions kids have in the immediate aftermath are “a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.”

Young kids are unlikely to be able to have a long, sustained conversation about what happened. They may bring it up only in brief moments, or while they are playing. But if they do want to talk about it, it’s important to let them lead the conversation, counselors said.

The biggest mistake would be to avoid the topic entirely.

“Not talking about the event makes it even more threatening in a child’s mind,” said Sara Gonzalez, the clinical director for psychological services at Children’s Minnesota. “Silence suggests this is something horrible, or it magnifies it in their head.”

One of the hardest aspects of mass shootings is that they are not random catastrophes like a hurricane or tornado, Mendenhall said. Someone decided to carry out the shooting, which can spark feelings of deep anger.

After Sandy Hook, Barden said he struggled because “this wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a disease. This was someone else’s choice.”

Most counselors said that parents do not need to immediately rush their children into therapy to make sense of what happened. Everyone will come up with their own understanding of the event, Gearity said, but adults should resist the impulse to try to explain the entire situation or “fix” a traumatized child’s feelings.

There is no clear timeline for when kids should begin behaving more normally, Gonzalez said. But some reactions signal it’s time to reach out for more help.

If behavioral changes last for months, or parents see their child fully withdrawing from interaction or having negative thoughts about themselves or others, that’s a sign to find a professional. Other warning signs include self-harm, hallucinations or impulses to carry a weapon for personal safety.

Parents also need to take care of themselves. “That’s the group I’m worried about,” said Marguerite Ohrtman, who trains therapists and school counselors at the U.

Two parents may have drastically different responses to the shooting. Sometimes, a therapist can help the adult members of the family agree on how to move forward, or to just process their feelings together.

“Developmentally, [kids are] watching what your reaction is,” Ohrtman said. “They’re watching for, ‘How should I handle this, how should I talk about this.’”

Returning to school will be important for children from Annunciation when they are ready. Some may not want to go back to the same school.

But in general, the social support of being in class is just as important as the actual instruction, counselors said.

“Students form some of the strongest peer relationships and some of their strongest social networks in schools,” said Adil Nure, a member of the student safety crisis and response committee at the National Association of School Psychologists. “A lot of healing happens in schools.”

It will be important for the school to acknowledge what happened on the first day students return, whenever that is, Mendenhall said. But in the meantime, gathering with others, whether in another church, a vigil or another setting is ideal. “People need people,” he said.

Barden, who founded the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, aimed at preventing school shootings, said his family didn’t go to vigils because they didn’t want to grieve so publicly after that shooting. But extended family members immediately showed up at his house, and others in the community brought food at 6 p.m. each night.

People will offer help, he said, and if you need it, say yes.

In some instances, Barden said, his elder children, James, then 12, and Natalie, then 10, wound up supporting him.

He recalled one moment when he and his wife were “in a pile of tears, sobbing on the kitchen floor, and James and Natalie appeared from somewhere and wrapped their arms around us.”

In those moments, he said, you do “whatever it takes to get from one moment to the next.”

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If you feel you are in need of immediate mental health assistance, you can call or text 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

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