This weekend brought devastating news from two corners of the world. At Brown University, two students were killed and nine injured during finals week. At Sydney’s Bondi Beach, sixteen people—including a ten-year-old girl—were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration. Communities are shattered. Grief is overwhelming.
In the wake of such unimaginable tragedies, a familiar response has already begun: calls for expanded mental health services, more therapists, additional crisis counseling.
These resources matter. But here’s what the research tells us that might surprise you: in moments of crisis, the most powerful medicine often isn’t found in a therapist’s office. It’s found in the people already around you.
The Default Response Isn’t Always the Right Response
We’ve developed a cultural reflex: when something terrible happens, we immediately reach for professional intervention. It makes sense. Trauma requires expertise, doesn’t it? But decades of research on how people actually recover from traumatic events tells a more nuanced story.
After trauma exposure, social support from friends emerges as one of the most significant predictors of recovery. A 2024 longitudinal study published in Behavioral Sciences tracking 151 individuals in the year following trauma found that increases in support from friends consistently accelerated recovery from PTSD symptoms across the entire recovery period. The relationship was bidirectional: feeling supported helped people heal, and as people healed, they were better able to maintain those connections.
What’s striking is that this wasn’t about professional support. It was about having someone check in, listen without judgment, and simply be present.
What Happens When We Turn to Each Other
Think about what actually happens in the hours and days after a crisis. At Brown, students didn’t wait for counseling appointments. They found each other. One student who fled the engineering building ended up sheltering with a classmate he’d never met before—someone who trusted him enough to bring him into her home simply because they shared the bond of being Brown students.
In Sydney, as the horror of Bondi Beach unfolded, lines formed at blood donation centers stretching around blocks. A GoFundMe for the bystander who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers raised nearly a million dollars in hours. The Australian Red Cross reported the biggest community response since the 2009 bushfires.
That immediate human response—the instinct to reach out, to shelter, to protect, to give—isn’t just kindness. It’s the foundation of healing.
Research on community resilience consistently shows that natural support systems activate faster and reach more people than formal interventions. After disasters, neighbors checking on neighbors, friends gathering to process shock together, communities organizing mutual aid—these informal networks become the first responders for psychological wellbeing.
The Therapeutic Power of Being Known
There’s something profoundly healing about being known by the people in your life. When your roommate notices you’ve been quieter than usual, when your friend texts because they had a feeling you might need to talk, when your parent calls just to hear your voice—these moments of recognition carry immense power.
Professional therapy has its place, particularly for those developing clinical symptoms or those whose trauma history makes this event especially triggering. But for many people navigating shock, grief, and fear, what they need most isn’t a stranger with credentials. They need their people.
The evidence bears this out. Studies examining social support after traumatic events found that emotional support—being listened to, feeling cared for—significantly reduces psychological distress. This kind of support doesn’t require training. It requires presence, consistency, and genuine care.
When Professional Help Makes Sense
This isn’t an argument against therapy. Some people will need and benefit enormously from professional support, particularly those who:
- Develop persistent symptoms that interfere with daily functioning
- Have a history of trauma that this event reactivates
- Find their existing support system insufficient or complicated
- Experience severe anxiety, depression, or PTSD symptoms
Professional intervention becomes essential when symptoms persist, when someone feels unsafe, or when informal support isn’t enough. But making therapy the default response for everyone affected by a traumatic event can inadvertently suggest that normal grief and shock reactions are pathological—that you can’t handle this without expert help.
What Actually Helps
If you or someone you care about is navigating the aftermath of trauma, here’s what the research suggests matters most right now:
Show up consistently.
Don’t wait for them to ask for help. Text. Call. Knock on their door. One of the most powerful aspects of social support is its reliability. Regular check-ins signal “you’re not alone” more effectively than occasional grand gestures.
Listen more than you fix.
Resist the urge to problem-solve or minimize. “That sounds really scary” is more helpful than “at least you’re safe now.” People need their experience validated, not rationalized away.
Be present with uncertainty.
Nobody knows what to say right now because there isn’t a right thing to say. “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here” is honest and real.
Create normal moments.
Go for a walk together. Get coffee. Watch something mindless on TV. Recovery isn’t just about processing trauma—it’s also about remembering that normal life still exists.
Don’t pathologize normal responses.
Trouble sleeping, replaying events, feeling on edge, crying unexpectedly—these are normal responses to abnormal events. They don’t automatically require professional intervention. They require patience, support, and time.
The Community Holds the Medicine
There’s a reason humans have survived crises throughout history long before we had trauma therapists. We’ve always had each other. Communities heal together not despite the absence of professional intervention, but often because of their capacity for mutual care.
The Brown community faces a long and painful road ahead. There’s no timeline for this kind of grief, no simple path forward. But healing, when it comes, will likely emerge from the ordinary moments of connection—friends gathering in dining halls not because they have answers but because they need to be together, roommates sitting in silence because sometimes presence is all we can offer, study groups that eventually resume not because life returns to normal but because doing something familiar can feel like solid ground when nothing else does.
It will happen through the accumulated small gestures: the text that says “thinking of you,” the offer to walk someone back from the library after dark, the friend who shows up with food because eating feels impossible but must be done anyway.
Professional support can enhance this process for those who need it. But it cannot replace it. Your friends, your family, your community—they’re not just the people who hold you until you can get to a therapist. They are the therapy.
In our rush to professionalize care, we’ve sometimes forgotten what generations before us knew: we heal in connection. The most important question to ask right now isn’t “should I see a therapist?” It’s “who can I reach out to?” and “who might need me to reach out to them?”
The answer to both questions is probably simpler than you think. It’s the people who already know you, who already care about you, who are feeling this same shock and searching for the same reassurance that life goes on.
Call them. Text them. Find them. Be with them.
That’s where healing begins.
I wish you all the best,
Dr. Samantha Boardman
