Q&A with Laurie Nadel, PhD
Laurie Nadel, PhD., is a specialist in acute stress, trauma and anxiety issues. She is a member of a critical incident stress management team working with first responders. After losing her home to Hurricane Sandy, Dr. Laurie ran long-term support groups for survivors. From 2003 to 2005, she directed a program for teenagers whose fathers were killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and wrote the script for After the Fall: The Rise of a 9/11 Community Center, narrated by Dan Rather.
She also helped created the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization that since 1981 has fought for the rights of journalists around the world. THE FIVE GIFTS: Discovering Healing, Hope and Strength When Disaster Strikes is her seventh book.
Q: You have written seven books on a variety of topics. Is there a common thread present running through all of them?
A: I don’t find a common thread. My first three books– Corazon Aquino: Journey to Power, The Great Stream of History: A Biography of Richard Nixon and The Kremlin Coup — were YA non-fiction. They grew out of my twenty years writing and producing obituaries and hard news for TV.
My experience as a journalist helped me research Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power which was a breakaway book for me. I became the first writer to report on the Pentagon’s secret psychic espionage program and it was the first book that looked at intuitive intelligence as a natural ability that could be developed without a metaphysical belief system.
Sixth Sense led me back to grad school where I completed a Masters in psychology, a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and a second doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy.
Dancing with the Wind: a True Story of Zen in the Art of Windsurfing is a spiritual adventure story about love, life, marriage, divorce, sickness, health, and TV news as seen through the lens of Zen meditation and windsurfing. Happiness Genes: Unlocking the Positive Potential within Your DNA was a work for hire about how changing our mental environment can affect our genes.
The Five Gifts: Discovering Hope, Healing and Strength When Disaster Strikes integrates my experience as a journalist and a psychotherapist who works with people whose lives have been shattered by catastrophic events that are often breaking news stories.
Q: As journalist for twenty years, you reported for Newsweek and United Press International in South America, wrote TV news for CBS, ABC News and Reuters Television, and were a religion columnist for The New York Times’ Long Island section. How has your work as a journalist impacted your writing books?
A: Moliere wrote that writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Finally, you do it for money. I once joked to my editor at the NY Times that “I’m still waiting for the money but I write for adventure.”
As a young reporter, journalism opened the way for me to travel to the forgotten corners of South America; lead a human rights mission to South Africa during the apartheid era; and to interview amazing people whom I would not have otherwise met. As the “On the Water” reporter for The New York Times Long Island section, I went kayaking to see migrating seals, sailed around Long Island in a nor’easter, and helped biologists measure a 430 pound Mako shark. I hope that sense of adventure and discovery is conveyed in my books.
Q: As a therapist, you pioneered emotional first aid tools to help people recover from acute stress after catastrophic events. In THE FIVE GIFTS, you say one tool is “Spend 15 minutes a day writing about your physical/mental/emotional reactions.” How did writing help you recover when your own home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy?
A I kept an intense journal for 20 years. It became Dancing with the Wind: a True Story of Zen in the Art of Windsurfing. But I have not journaled much since then. After the storm, I was in survival mode for a long time. I had no desire to write about my own personal ordeal during or after Hurricane Sandy. I decided to write about it so that the millions of other people who struggle to regain their emotional footing after a disaster could feel less alone.
As part of Sandy support program, I recommended that everyone keep a ‘news and goods’ journal and I kept one for a year. In a ‘news and goods’ journal you take note of at least one moment during the day when something nice happened: someone took the time to answer your question or smiled at you; something made you laugh; or something as simple as sunlight coming through a window struck you as beautiful.
In my three decades as a clinician, I have seen how, in the aftermath of a traumatic event, people report feeling less stressed when they spend ten or fifteen minutes a day writing about their reactions.
Q: You helped create the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization which since 1981 has fought for the rights of journalists around the world. What are some emotional challenges that journalists face after reporting in a war zone?
A: Reporting in a war zone takes nerves of steel, ambition, focus, and a love of high-adrenaline life and death situations. When I was a young reporter on assignment for “Newsweek” in Chile during a military dictatorship, a source informed on me because I was asking uncomfortable questions. I was whisked into hiding as we knew that the secret police would be looking for me.
That experience led to my starting a human rights committee at the Overseas Press Club and later, the Committee to Protect Journalists because I knew first-hand how vulnerable journalists are when working in war zones.
Q: Your bestselling book, Sixth Sense, was featured twice on Oprah which some consider the “holy grail” for authors. How did her attention effect your writing career?
A: Most authors who appeared on Oprah did not become instantly famous. Most of us noticed a jump in sales for a week or so after they were on her show and then sales dropped off. That’s what happened to Sixth Sense. I was a talking head for 10 minutes and in the end, it did not affect my writing career in any significant way. I think that if Oprah took a special interest in your work, the outcomes were more dramatic. But most of the authors I knew who appeared on her show reported experiences like mine.
Q: You worked as a TV news writer in the days when women were a minority in the field. Did you experience any “me too” moments and if so, how did you deal with them?
A: I don’t know any woman who started out in the 1960s who was not subjected to sexual harrassment. It was the price of admission. Men did not believe that women belonged in the workplace and they made you pay for that by subjecting you to sexual discrimination and verbal humiliation. I was the first woman writer hired by ABC News in 1972. It was a snake pit.
Men could leer, grab, proposition, and make lewd sounds with impunity…while making demeaning remarks like “You know what they’re like when they get their periods.” The worst incident came later, in the mid 1970s when I was interviewed for a job with a publisher of art books. He took me for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and while we were waiting to be served, he grabbed my hand and pulled it under the table to feel his erection.
I screamed as loud as I could, ‘You disgusting pig!” And anything else I could think of. He turned red as everyone in the restaurant stared at him. I grabbed my coat– can still remember what I was wearing — and ran out the door to the first phone booth I could find. I called my friend, Barbara. Over the years, I have sometimes wondered if that really happened but as the #MeToo stories started surfacing, she reminded me of that incident.
Q: Have you ever considered writing fiction?
A: I spent several years in the 1970s writing The War Park, a novel about reporters covering the Middle East war in the future. My agent at William Morris loved it but The War Park was rejected by 36 publishers, 2 networks and a Hollywood production company. I am thinking about repurposing it as a graphic novel with a speculative fiction theme. I also wrote Solar Katrina, a play that takes place in New York City a year after the grid goes down. One week after Solar Katrina had a reading at the Actors Studio in LA, Hurricane Sandy knocked out the grid. It was a synchronistic example of life imitating art.
Q: What do you like to read on your own time?
A: I read The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post religiously. Anything by Lee Child. I’m a big Jack Reacher fan. Every few years I reread Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Q: Where do you get your inspiration?
A: The ocean always inspires me.
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For more information, please visit www.laurienadel.com.
About THE FIVE GIFTS
As the frequency and intensity of catastrophic events continue to surge, organizations provide guidelines for how to pack a “Go-Kit” in case of emergency. The Five Gifts is like an emergency ‘Go-Kit’ for the mind, packed with information and insight that can minimize and prevent long-term psycho-spiritual damage from a traumatic event. It’s a field guide for the heart and soul to guide you through to cycles of damage and recovery that can be useful before, during, and after a tragic loss, trauma, or disaster.
In a nationwide Google survey Dr. Nadel commissioned for this book, 33% of those surveyed identified their greatest fear as a terrorist attack, followed by displacement from their homes. As this upsurge in violent episodes continues, the numbers show a greater likelihood that you, or someone close to you, will be directly affected by a traumatic event.
But what if you had access to a mind-body-spirit ‘Go-Kit’ before disaster strikes? In The Five Gifts, Dr. Nadel wisely maps out a path integrating what she has learned from over two decades of working with people damaged by a trauma event. Her own life was impacted by the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012. The Five Gifts contains interviews with people whose lives were directly impacted by such major news events as the Rwanda genocide, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the tsunami in Bali, and the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing.
Although you can never be fully prepared for a shocking, traumatic event, this book will provide information, ideas, insight and tools to build the emotional stamina and clarity needed to cope with acute stress responses and emotional aftershocks. If you are open to receiving the gifts of Humility, Patience, Empathy, Forgiveness, and Growth, The Five Gifts will lead you safely through disaster and traumatic minefields.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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