Stages of grief following a terrorist attack

The Six Stages of Public and Political Grief Following a Terrorist Attack

1. Shock
2. Panic and paranoia
3. Twitter storm
4. Selective fury, ideological posturing, scapegoating, expressed in Manichaean and apocalyptic discourse
5. Knee-jerk clampdowns and counter-violence
6. Shopping and self-beautification

Six Factors Which Inhibit the Grief Process and Suggest the Need for Counselling

1. Pausing and taking a deep breath
2. Self-examination
3. Attentiveness and joined-up thinking
4. Abjuring demonization and xenophobia
5. Looking for political solutions rather than relentlessly bombing the barbarians “back to the Stone Age” (Curtis LeMay)
6. Cultivating empathy (not fashionable feelings), imagination (not the same-old same-old), hope (not liberal optimism) – and prayer (not as withdrawal or escape from world but as Karl Barth’s “beginning of the uprising against the world”)