Tips for Helping Gifted, Highly Sensitive Teens & Kids Cope with Trauma
This month, April, 2009 is the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. Sharon Barnes moved into the Columbine neighborhood about six weeks before this tragedy. She wrote this article right after the shooting. Creative, highly sensitive and gifted people are often greatly affected by traumatic events-even those on the other side of the country or the world. Mrs. Barnes brings this article back in the hope that it will help you cope with this and other traumas you may encounter.
What do you do at three thirty in the morning when you can't sleep after a tragedy has occurred? First, you acknowledge that it is affecting you, and then you do what you can. Early in the morning after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 21, 1999, I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. It hit too close to home. I had moved to a house less than a mile from Columbine High School two months before the shooting, and I had two sons in high school, albeit a different one. I couldn't get my mind off of what had happened, and how it must be affecting the people directly involved.