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is to avoid it or, in some way, distance themselves from it. Recall Denise Levertov’s poem “The Ache of Marriage,” where she analyzed the experience in a less personal, more distant way. Other avoidance strategies include trying to put the unwanted emotional experience out of mind altogether. In fact, distancing oneself from pain can be a very effective way to regulate emotions, especially in the short run. If I receive bad news about the death of my dog just prior to a business meeting, it behooves me to ignore my feelings and to continue the meeting as though nothing has happened even though part of me wants to collapse onto the floor and wail.

There appears to be an art form to avoiding emotional pain in the short run. In a series of brilliant laboratory studies, Dan Wegner and his colleagues have shown that people can’t just stop thinking about an emotional event. Rather, they need to start paying attention to something else. If something terrible happens before that meeting, Wegner would advise you to think about the meeting itself and not say to yourself “Don’t think about the dog, don’t think about the dog.”

When do people naturally use avoidance versus acknowledgment strategies in dealing with traumatic experiences? Only recently have scientists been able to track the ways people react to traumas as they unfold. Through a mix of technological innovations, it is becoming clear that most people tend to adopt both avoidance and acknowledgment strategies in the short run when dealing with upheavals.

THE SHOCK OF A TRAUMA IN THE FIRST HOURS

A few years ago my family and I were staying at the house of my friend Hector over the holidays. He asked me to listen to his voice messages and to contact him if there was an emergency. Several days into our stay, he received a message from a male who spoke in a quiet and flat tone:

Hector, it’s Nolan. Just calling to say that Marguerite died last night. She took a turn for the worse a couple of days ago. Thanks for calling last week. Really appreciate it. There will be a memorial service on Monday. Will try to call you later. Stay in touch. Take care. Bye.

I didn’t know Nolan or Marguerite nor did I know their relationship. But it was obvious that Nolan was completely crushed. As I listened to the message again, I tried to figure out why I knew that he was so devastated. He never said he was sad or in pain. He didn’t cry and his voice didn’t waver. The starkness of his language, however, was something I was not used to.

As a connoisseur of pronouns, I was struck that Nolan never used I, me, or my in his message. In fact, in the years since hearing Nolan’s voice message, I have heard at least three others where friends called to tell me about the death of someone close. And, like Nolan, they rarely used the word I.

More recently, I cataloged the first lines of blog posts from people who wrote about the death of a parent, spouse, or sibling that had occurred within the same day of their posting. Comparing their language with another post they made just prior to the death, the same pattern emerged. In the peak hours of suffering, most people used relatively few I-words and a low rate of negative emotion words. Their language was relatively simple, using smaller words, shorter sentences, and fewer cognitive words.

Immediately after a traumatic loss, people are often disoriented, numb, and in excruciating pain. As a way to reduce the pain, they regulate their attention away from their bodies. Intense grief causes people to pay less attention to themselves and their emotions. Instead, they focus more on the person who has died, their family, and the details of the death.

TRACKING THE EMOTIONS OF A COUNTRY: BLOGS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

It makes sense that people psychologically distance themselves from a personal trauma in the minutes or hours after hearing emotionally overwhelming news. Does this happen on a broader scale when large groups of people face a traumatic experience? In the United States, when people heard the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln