My Story about The Hurricane is a guided activity workbook for children, teachers, and families provided by the Children’s Psychological Health Center. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone helping a child or children process Hurricane Helene using evidence based methods to encourage learning and expression.
We use this activity book both with Lucy Daniels School students and also with our therapy patients and their families and highly recommend it as a great resource to help cope and thrive after a disaster.
This book is to promote healthy, active coping with stress. If you are an adult looking at this book, your idea is probably the same as ours. You want to try to help children change a stressful, possibly traumatic situation into a constructive learning and coping experience. Hurricanes, floods, and their aftermaths can be a useful developmental crisis for children, because even though they are scary, they can stimulate learning and growth in children’s brains and in their feelings. But they can also be a negative experience, creating only doubt, fear, and insecurity.
Some children who already have lived through bad things like a hurricane or tornado are less much more scared when it happens again. Surprising as it may seem, some children who have survived a natural disaster once are less scared when it happens again. After any hurricane, all children need a network of relatives, teachers, and other helpers at this time, to give them strength to struggle with their personal, challenges, and the challenges their family and community faces after a natural disaster. This workbook comes from our experience in helping strengthen the mental health of disaster survivors. Its main purpose is to give psychological first aid to children and adolescents. In that way, it will also be useful to you as an adult, helping you to help the children you know and love, or children for whom you are a helper or teacher. Perhaps you are a parent, a temporary foster parent during this disaster, or a shelter worker who has responsibility for evacuated children and families. Perhaps you are helping as a volunteer, a teacher or a counselor. This workbook is designed to strengthen both you and the children you know, love and help. If you are a family member with a child and you have been through a hurricane, you may have been through a range of very painful emotions and have experienced severe, sustained stress. If your home or workplace was damaged or your life was seriously disrupted by other aftereffects of the hurricane, these feelings can be magnified by practical challenges. Certainly many victims of hurricanes have been very frightened and many have felt helpless or hopeless. Even when they don’t experience the effects of a hurricane directly, children and adults who suffer the threat of hurricanes can be traumatized. Waiting long hours in traffic during an evacuation, not knowing what you will find when you return home or what you will find when the danger has passed, and fears for personal safety can all take a toll. Just knowing that your home could be flooded or destroyed can be traumatic even if that does not happen to you personally. After a hurricane, many children and adults suffer from knowing someone personally who was injured or killed or whose home and community were devastated by a hurricane. When children hear about these things happening to others, whether or not they know them personally, they may have bad dreams, feelings of being unsafe, fears about the future, and other symptoms of stress and trauma. Getting mentally active by getting past fears and painful memories and putting them in a bigger and positive perspective is an important part of moving forward. Our focus is to have strength for the future without either dwelling on or forgetting the suffering. Remembering and planning
are both needed to help build a better tomorrow. Despite the stress you may still be under, your idea is probably the same as ours. You want to help children and families change a disorganized and confusing situation into some constructive learning and coping experience. Helping others, especially children, is one of the best things you can do to get beyond the past and make the future better!
