- Hi, my name is Steph Smart.
I grew up in a cattle
property outside of Cloncurry,
in Far North West Queensland,
where my family still are.
February 2019 will unfortunately be a time
that they will never forget.
As they, like so many of our friends
and people in the surrounding communities,
were impacted by a weather
event that will affect them
not only financially,
but emotionally for many years to come.
Not knowing how to support
my family and friends
going through this, I
contacted a friend of mine
Paul Blackburn, who is
an expert in emotional,
and mindset mastery.
I knew Paul had had extensive experience,
not only working with individuals,
but entire communities
after natural disasters
and traumatic events.
Being the kind of bloke Paul is,
he said he would love to help
out his fellow Australians,
and he suggested that we pull
together some practical tools
and resources, to help people
help their family and friends,
and their communities get
through the challenges
that they are facing.
Such as what has happened
in Far North Queensland.
So thank you Paul, really
appreciate your time
that you've given us to do this.
- No worries, if we can
just help one person,
that'd be great.
- Let alone help a bunch of 'em.
- So can you tell us a little
bit about yourself Paul
and the experience that
you've had working with
natural disaster and trauma?
- Well I started out as
a high school teacher
in the Western Suburbs in Sydney
so that's got nothing to do with the bush,
but very quickly we ended
up living in bush ourselves,
and my wife and I, and our kids,
and I happened to be on the spot
when the 2003 Canberra
bush fires came through.
For those who don't remember the details,
500 houses burnt to the ground,
three people were killed,
pretty monumental kind of a disaster,
and I was involved in helping the people
who had not just houses,
but businesses go down
at that point.
So the government got me to come in
and help with basically
the emotional trauma,
and the mindset that
you'll need for recovery.
- And that was a difficult
time for everybody,
difficult to watch, difficult to be in,
no one was a winner in
that kind of a thing.
But I learnt a lot
about how to help people
on a larger scale.
Which is why we're sitting here today.
But I've learnt a few things,
that if we can pass them on to everybody
it's just gonna help them
not just help themselves,
but help the people around them,
because these things are gonna
be around for a long time.
You know, February 2019
probably gonna be remembered
for more than a generation,
it's probably gonna take more
than a generation to recover.
And a lot of that recovery is you know,
we can measure the financial recovery,
what you don't see is emotional damage,
and the lives that are set back,
and the things that kids
pick up because mum and dad
are under pressure or
stress, or not coping well.
Not that we would expect
anybody to cope well,
but there are ways that
we can do a bit better
than if we're just left
to our own devices.
- Yep.
And so, the motivation for
pulling these tools and resources
together, for me initially it was to help
my family and friends
with what they were facing up North,
after the flooding and the weather event.
But the reality is
there are so many people
in rural Australia hurting right now.
So, whether it's droughts,
fires, floods, locust plagues,
animal activism, there are
a lot of people hurting
in our country right now.
And it's not just the people on the land,
the flow on affect is huge,
and it's often a lot of the businesses
and people in the rural communities
that are really suffering as well.
- Yeah, really difficult because
you know, the peripherals
you know, around a community,
so say for example, you know,
the butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker,
the hairdresser, all
of those people suffer,
because people who've been
through this kind of trauma
are gonna pull back in every kind of way,
they're gonna be less
open about everything
but they're certainly not
gonna open their wallets
as quickly when they know
there's nothing in there.
So, that means that all
those businesses now
their turnover's gonna drop dramatically,
some of them will be
borderline themselves,
and so they may not have actually lost
you know, hundreds and thousands of cattle
and all the other things
we see on the news,
but equally they have a
business, just goes under.
Unpredictably, out of the blue,
you know, what was a good
business suddenly isn't,
not viable.
- And the sense of responsibility
you know on a business owner
in the agricultural industry,
and that sense of
responsibility to the people
that you employ.
That's a really big burden to carry.
- For many people you know,
the guilt and the shame
of having to sack someone
because we can't pay them,
is far greater than the
personal guilt and shame
about the business going under.
And you know, it's probably true,
and part of the Australian spirit
is we go "Well okay,
well that happened to me
I'll cope with it,
but poor old Jack who worked for me,
I had to sack him and I'll
never feel good about that."
And so, that's a difficult
thing to deal with
in amongst everything else you know,
everything kind of quietens down,
and so the whole economy, region wise,
just takes a beating and
everybody takes a beating
along with that.
- Absolutely.
So Paul, what we've done just after,
it was just really a general
conversation that we had.
You suggested that we pull together
some tools and resources,
to better equip people
that are you know,
facing these challenges.
Especially in our rural communities,
these tools and resources are universal,
and they can be applied
to many different sectors.
So, we've come up with five main topics,
the first topic we've
come up with is shock,
so can you tell us a little bit
about what we're gonna talk about there.
- Sure, shock comes in two forms,
there's the shock of an overnight event,
there's also the shock of
a long term build up thing.
So one of the things we can say
is you know, if you were gonna get cancer,
and it was gonna take three
years to take you out,
would you wanna know now?
Or would you not wanna know?
And so the people who say
"Oh I'd rather know
so that I could maximize
that last three years."
That's one way of handling
difficult situations.
Other people say "Oh I'd rather not know,
I would rather, you
know, live till the end
and then boom, I'm out."
What that means is that for
the people who handle shock
best if they've got some warning,
then they're really traumatized right now,
because there was no
warning for this event.
For the people who would
rather not have a warning,
they're probably on the
outside at least coping
a little better because it's turned up,
they turn practical,
they say "Okay, well that's bad
but what have I gotta do now,
how do I get on with it?"
And they've got a list
of jobs a mile long,
and they're getting on with it.
So those two forms of handing shock,
we need to talk about
them in a bit more depth.
- So essentially what
you're talking about there
is the shock without a lead up
is what has happened in
Far North West Queensland.
A natural disaster that's
come out of the blue,
that you've had no control over,
that's just caught you
completely off guard.
But the longer term shock
that you are also referring to
is I guess people that have been suffering
through the ongoing drought.
- Yeah, so if we go back
to the cancer analogy,
the drought is kind of like you know,
everyday you can get
up and say your prayers
and hope for rain, get disappointed again,
so that builds up,
and over a period of time
what you see is that people
who handle the first
few years of a drought
start to not handle it so well, you know.
Years two, three, four, five,
seven is like, I don't know
how people handle that, so.
That long term endurance,
it's like a marathon runner,
there's some people who are
built for running a marathon,
and others are sprinters,
and you can't really
get 'em to swap around.
So we have to know how to cope with that,
so they're the two forms,
a slow build up, some people prefer it,
nobody's gonna prefer a drought,
but you know what I mean.
Other people would just
rather handle the shock.
So we have both of those
in natural disasters,
we have them also in our own lives,
and so if we took it
outside the rural community,
then you'd see that,
you know, we can have Fred
who catches some disease
and takes five years to take him out,
and we can have Mary-Anne who
gets killed in a car smash,
they're both shock, and they're
both difficult to deal with
and we would prefer
none of that to happen.
Practically speaking everybody
who's watching us now
will have had an example of both.
- Yep, and so we have
our natural disasters,
and we also have unnatural
disasters as well.
- Yeah, and the unnatural
disasters we wanna fix them,
so we want the animal activists
to all piss of somewhere else, you know?
People killed in car smashes,
we wanna fix the roads,
so that that doesn't happen,
so you will see that mobs
like governments get involved,
and say "Okay, we're gonna put
a speed limit on the road."
That's supposed to do
something about the road toll,
that kind of thing.
So, where there are things
which are preventable,
we wanna prevent them if we can.
But they're difficult to implement,
not everybody reacts the same way,
as soon as you say, you know,
"There's a speed limit on this road."
There are people who wanna
break the speed limit,
there are people who say
"Well we can't go any faster than that."
Individual reactions to everything
is pretty much what we need to cover.
- Okay.
So that's shock.
The second topic we're gonna talk about
is why people behave the way that they do.
- Yeah, and pretty much that's
related to the first one,
so it's just as well
we made it number two.
But essentially why I react to
something differently to you
comes from my expectations
of how I think I can cope with it,
and how much difficulty I think I've got.
For example, I might assume
that I should be doing fine
because my mate down the road,
the devastation was double
for him what it was for me.
So, I'm gonna react differently
even if I'm good at it,
I'm still gonna be kind of
behind the able a little bit.
Men react quite differently to women,
so, women understand talk
it out to work it out,
men understand work it
out, then do something.
And so, women quite
often struggle with men
because you know they say
"He won't talk to me."
or "He doesn't know how he feels."
He does, but he's trying
to figure out the answer,
he wants to deliver the answer.
Men are, you know, driven
by the need to fix things
and make things right,
and make things happen.
Women understand that if we
can talk it out to work it out
we might find a better solution.
So that's a gender difference,
but then there's differences
between all women and all men
in terms of what nails
us and what doesn't.
- Okay, so then the third
topic we're going to cover
is how to help your mates.
- Yep, and mostly that's about
finding that delicate balance
between interfering, and
yet being there to support.
So, even the language we
use, the things that we do,
there are things that we can do.
Most people do something
out of all good intentions,
but it's actually just dumb
as dog shit when they do it.
And when we say, you know,
that person that I went to help
was all insulted, then we get
insulted that they're insulted
when in actual fact we
just didn't understand
how we knew to relate to them.
So, you know, you'll
find all sorts of warfare
amongst people who shouldn't be at war,
because there is just
difficulty in communicating
and how each individual
prefers their communication
coming to them.
- And I guess one of the main reasons
that we wanted to pull
together these tools,
especially for up North
and what people are facing
around Australia,
that there are lots of mental
health initiatives out there,
and some very good ones.
But I guess initially
for a lot of those people
especially up North,
they are limited by distance,
so to actually physically
go and speak to someone
or you know, having the time to do that
is often difficult,
there are barriers there.
So we thought that this
just might be a tool
that people may get some ideas
of how they can just help
support their loved ones, or friends,
or people in the community.
And you know, they can do it by listening
while they're you know,
driving between properties,
or on the tractor,
yeah, just a way that they
can get some form of help,
without you know, obviously
it's not going to take the place
of seeing a professional if
they need to see a professional,
but it just might give
them some practical tools
and resources.
- Well I think that most
communities have to sort this stuff
out themselves because there's not enough
of the professionals out there,
so, essentially how you help your mates
means you have to understand
what makes them tick.
That means that you can't
help hundreds of people,
but there's probably a dozen people
you can make a solid impact on their life
because you know, I can say this to Fred,
but I can't say it to Jack.
And so if I'm gonna say
the same thing to Jack
I'll put it in different
words and know how to do that.
Recognizing the signs of stress and drama
are probably the main
things we need to know,
because most people in rural communities
are just gonna be busy getting on with it,
and so, it's a bit of a trap,
being busy getting on with it
can allow me to get all of my
trauma and just shove it down,
and you know, there's a
bit of a belief out there
that says that you know, "Well
you gotta do that anyway."
and "Who needs to pussyfoot around
with all this talking stuff
when there's work to be done."
So, that means that we might
actually have lots of people
who are suffering but not saying so,
and being able to recognize the signs
when someone's actually
struggling but looking okay,
that's a really important
ingredient for us.
- Absolutely.
Okay, the next topic we're covering
is managing your emotions and theirs.
- So, first of all we need
to know how to manage ours,
we've gotta do a lot more
than just get on with it,
once we are capable of handling
what we are suffering from,
or what we are struggling with,
and that doesn't matter whether
it's a blue with your spouse
or whether it's you know,
something that went drastically
wrong on your work today,
or the fact that you just broke something
that's gonna cost a
hundred thousand to fix.
All of those things trigger emotions,
and those emotions need
to be expressed in a way
that works for the person who's doing it,
doesn't damage anyone else around them,
in other words, you know, it might be fine
if you spit the dummy and blow a gasket,
but if that doesn't work for your spouse
then you know, now we got marital issues
that were not there before.
So, that means we need
to know how we operate,
we need to be better at
operating our own emotions,
make our emotions serve
us instead of running us,
it's no good to say
"Oh I buggered, I'm so sorry if I hurt you
but I had a bad day."
Cos you're still hurt.
So the old excuse of I had a bad day,
or I couldn't help it's no longer viable,
just doesn't work well.
So, we need to know how
to handle ourselves,
we also need to know how
to respond appropriately
so that we actually facilitate the world
being of other people who
are gonna be struggling
with their emotions and
don't have the education
that we're trying to provide here.
- Okay, great.
And the last topic we're
covering is recovery,
so what comes after the natural disaster
or traumatic event.
- In most disasters, and
remember we could be talking
to somebody who's just lost
a loved one in a car smash,
that's just as relevant now.
So when it comes to recovery,
most people struggle
because it's actually the
longest part of the journey.
We can say that the event,
you know, a month after it
we can say, okay, so the
floods happened in February,
now we're in March, we
can say a month after that
the floods are all gone,
the damage is just
lying around everywhere,
recovery for many people,
minimum 10 years perhaps longer.
That's gonna require serious
levels of personal endurance,
ability to withstand things going worse
because you know, who says
the banks are gonna play ball
on this whole kind of a thing.
The government says they're sending money,
but we'll believe that when we see it.
The volunteers are gonna go home,
so, you know, BlazeAid
doing an amazing job
but sooner or later all those volunteers
have gotta take care of their families,
and so you know, it's a
little bit like a funeral.
Everybody turns up and
you get a lot of support
while the funeral's on and
maybe a day or two later,
but after that certainly
a week or two later
everyone's goin' home and they're
all a thousand clicks away
and there we are basically
naked wondering how we cope
and yet the world is
diametrically different,
never gonna be the same again.
For many of the people we're talking to,
yeah that's never gonna be the same again.
And recovery will be a
massively long period of time.
So we need to know how to cope with that,
there are strategies out
that work in recovery,
and strategies that don't.
- Yep, okay.
- So we'll talk about them.
- Excellent, alright, let's get into it.
- Okay.
(uplifting acoustic music)
