Introduction During the first two to four weeks after any disaster, workers rush to fix collapsed bridges and freeways, utility crews replace broken poles, gas lines and power lines while water crews repair water supplies and sewers. The Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Salvation Army set up shelters and food lines, all working to repair the infrastructure and establish order from chaos. But engineers can't fix people, nor can retrofitted buildings heal the trauma that survivors of natural disasters experience.

Disaster survivors need more than simple advice from a grief counselor. They need a mental mechanism to cope with their emotional trauma. If you are a disaster victim, this book provides you with that mental mechanism. If you have a relative or friend who has been in a natural disaster, this book will help you understand what the person is going through and how you can help with the healing process.

Coping and moving beyond the emotional trauma works best when you use the right "tactics," tactics that are found in this book. The six tactics tell you what to do to build the mechanism you need. They offer a solution, not a diagnosis. They belong to a unified psychotherapy, not an eclectic collection of mental health exercises that merely try to make you think differently.

These tactics differ from traditional counseling in three profound ways. First, they help put you in charge of you. You become the expert on your needs and your solutions. Second, unlike traditional counseling theories, these do not rely on a "talking cure." They disprove the notion that to recover and avoid posttraumatic stress disorder, you must relive your horror by repeatedly talking about what you saw, heard and felt. (In fact, this is one of the worst things that you can do.) Third, they refute the counseling and medical notion that you will go through predictable stages of grief recovery before getting over your ordeal.

A human behavior model, not a medical disease model, underpins these six tactics. The human behavior model holds that emotional reactions result from ordinary human characteristics, not pathogens, and that our emotional reaction system is unique and differs from that of any other person. There is no formula to follow. Rather, you can learn to neutralize your emotional upset even during catastrophic circumstances, a position confirmed by three decades of field research at the Center for Counter-Conditioning Therapy??.