 So in the northern hemisphere at least it's summertime at the moment which unfortunately means it's also fire season and there's been a lot in the news recently around fires in Maui, in Hawaii. Yeah, that's a terrible one. They went in Maui. We were recently in Greece. We happened to be in Rhodes right when the fires were happening there. In fact, our hotel got turned into an evacuation center, which is something I haven't seen before despite being an Australian and somewhat familiar with fires. In fact, because I woke up at about five o'clock in the morning to go to the airport and I'm walking through the fire and there's all these people sleeping everywhere and thinking, does the hotel know there's people sleeping everywhere? They knew. And families will try to sleep because they've had a rough night being kicked out of their hotels and whatnot. Yeah, they didn't look very comfortable at all. But it also got me thinking about at the institute we've delivered training to a lot of people in roles related to emergencies like fires. So whether it's first responders who are needing skills to look after their own well-being, after what they've been through in responding to different scenarios or we recently trained 1,500 staff of an insurance company that managed the home claims of people who'd lost their homes to fire, for example and community members and volunteers training them around things like trauma-informed practice and how to work with people who've been through trauma. So it's a topic that is relevant in many different ways and I just want to have a chat about it. Yeah, definitely. People are interested in trauma. But one thing I would like to remind people, trauma is not as common as most people think. Trauma is an extreme reaction to an event. So a very small percentage of people suffer from trauma. Now we can be impacted by something and still have an impact to our mental health without being traumatized. That's right. So trauma in psychology is very specific. And we've got to be really careful I think with the language we use because when we make assumptions and we use words like this person's being traumatized by something, we can sometimes actually make it worse by setting this expectation that if you've been through an event, you will be traumatized for the rest of your life when we know that that's not the case, statistically speaking. Only a small proportion of people, I'm sure everyone's affected by something, the things that they go through in life but statistically only a small percentage of people will get to the point where it's considered a trauma response and they'll need additional help with that. The reason for that is because in psychology there's very particular therapies for trauma than for something that is disturbing or distressing to a person, different treatments. Obviously the trauma one requires a much more heavy approach. However, we can't take away from the fact that in the Maui fact fires, this has been a little bit traumatic in a sense to the whole world because we're all aware of this. When you look at the pictures of the fire, the devastation of the fire is incredible, what's happened there and it makes very little sense to the human mind how can something like that happen to that level of catastrophe. And that's one of the things we know, whether it's a direct experience of an event like that itself or whether it's a vicarious experience watching on the news and hearing other people talk about it etc. The existential aspect of responding to something like that. So by that I mean when people become aware that I thought I had control over my life but there are situations where things happen that are outside of your control and that can be a real shock to our system psychologically. And that's I think one of the biggest impacts because there's a lot of emotions obviously that are normal emotions after an event but one that people don't expect is just how much it gets people thinking about what's the meaning of life if I don't have control over these things, how do I have any certainty in anything ever at all and people need to kind of work through that process. And that is a normal human response because when we hear of a story in which there are characters whether the story is real or not, we always identify with a character. So how we learn that we show empathy. So it's normal for a human being to hear of a news event and to go if they stop and pay attention to it to say how would I react in this situation? What would I do? Would I be one of the ones that get caught out or not? So it's essentially- And we assume that we wouldn't, oh no I would do this, I would do that, I would be prepared and that protects us and makes us feel good but then you find out in the moment that that's not always possible. Well, there's a part of us that knows that we're bullshitting ourselves that we know that we can't prevent everything in life. We know that one day we will die, it will be us. We don't know how, we don't know in what circumstances but we are finite and we know that. So this serves us to prepare us for that moment hopefully but most people would rather not think of that moment because it is scary. It's scary to think that one day we're going to die, we're going to finish but it is important that we are prepared for it but it does throw us into an existential crisis for most of us even if it's a mini one. And the aim is that we can move through that process rather than get caught in it we can come to alright well seeing as that is the case the one day I won't be here, am I doing the things that are most important am I living my life the way I want to are there any tweaks or changes that I might want to make you know spend more time with family or you know pursue this career instead of that one. So if we can move through it we can actually use that for good and you know make sure that we're on path we're living our life that's authentic for us but these are all normal responses in fact any response after we've seen an event like this we say it's a normal response to an abnormal situation and so if we can not panic about it and we can remind ourselves that this is okay my body and my mind is just doing what it needs to do to cope with what's happened and when you look at you know we have in our training we look at all the different sort of responses that people can have and you look at each one and there's a logic to each one even if it might not seem logical in the moment when you actually look at it there's a really good reason that we do what that we respond in a way that we do whether it's avoiding you know shutting down withdrawing from the world for a little bit of time that's okay and many of the stuff that we teach people have got inbuilt psychological processes that help them at the neurological level not just at the intellectual level you know people sometimes they say I'm not sure why I'm doing this exercise just trust the process just go with it because we understand what's happening in neurology but that's why it helps to if people aren't sort of moving through that process on their own it can help to have someone who understands that psychology to come in and say look I'll guide you through this process you're right where you need to be it's all okay I'll just help you take those next steps through and sometimes therapy is warranted but what we know with traumatic events like Maui is that forcing people to get counseling it's a bad idea forcing them people should only access counseling when they feel they need to when we force people that are not wanting to talk to talk we actually make it worse we've got the studies now to prove it that when we force people to talk about something because we believe counseling is the way to go those people don't fare very well as a percentage later on and that's a really good point because we often get asked how can I help my friend who's being through something and really the answer is ask them ask them what help they need and they may or may not know in that moment but if you come in demanding you've got to talk about it when they're not ready that can have the opposite impact on what you want or vice versa if you go in and you don't say anything about it and they really need to talk so it's really that sort of negotiation and checking in regularly and just kind of feeling out where they are, what do they need, how can you know so I think the final words to the Maui people we send you our love and our thoughts and our prayers and we hope that we can put this horrible event as quickly as we can behind us I know it's going to be a recovery stage for them so, thank you