The Long, Emotional Road To Rebuilding Mental Health After The Fires
Amanda Kloots knows better than most what it’s like to absorb the impact of a large-scale tragedy. Kloots stood at the bedside of her husband Nick Cordero in 2020 as the actor waged a brutal battle with, and eventually died from, the devastating effects of a new virus.
She has a few pieces of guidance for those suffering a different crucible five years later.
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“Don’t be afraid of sitting in it — sitting in your sadness and fear,” the talk-show host told a group of L.A. fire survivors and their allies on a Zoom call several days ago. “And you have to give in to ‘I need help.’ You have to not be afraid…to let your guard down.”
The destruction wrought by the Palisades, Eaton and other Los Angeles fires has left the significant physical challenge of rebuilding, with many unanswered engineering and environmental questions. But just as important, say trauma veterans and professionals, is the psychological reconstruction — the Herculean challenge of restoring the sense of confidence and hope now also reduced to rubble.
No single piece of advice can cure all, of course. But interviews with experts suggest just how many commonly held notions of grief are wrong — and how correcting them might offer the best shot at healing.
“The biggest myth is that we think of grief as death. But grief is any change to ourselves we don’t want,” says David Kessler, the author and grief specialist who operates the website Grief.com. “And we’re all living with a change we don’t want right now.”
Kessler himself lives with his family in a house in Studio City, where they’ve had go-bags packed for a week. He says he’s not sure people understand what awaits even after the suitcases are put away.
“An old saying has it that just because the firetrucks leave doesn’t mean it’s over. This is just beginning,” he says. He adds, “It’s very easy for us to say, ‘let’s get the physical essentials of food and blankets and coats’; we’re really good at that. The mental-health issues are much harder to grasp.”
Part of what can be confounding about grief is that what salves one person does the opposite for another. Research indicates “internal processors” and “external processors” — loosely, those who benefit most from talking about grief with others and those who need something different. Figuring out which category a person falls into and acting accordingly can be a huge challenge.
“We encourage people to go to therapy and talk about grief,” says Joanne Cacciatore, an Arizona State University professor and author of the book Bearing the Unbearable who founded the grief-focused MISS Foundation after her daughter died in 1994. “But that only works if you’re an external processor. For an internal processor that can feel like a burden. They need to find other ways — by writing, for example, or by hiking by themselves.”
Grief itself can seem like a strong word for those whose loved ones are OK; can it really apply to things, we wonder? But experts say it suits perfectly the loss of a home and its contents. A grandparent’s jewelry, a child’s artwork, an item bought on a honeymoon — some objects transcend physical space. “These things represent not things themselves,” Steve Leder, senior rabbi of Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard Temple and author of the grief memoir The Beauty That Remains, said on the Zoom. “They’re vessels for moments.”
In fact, those who’ve lived through the devastation of a house fire say to be on guard for a kind of treadmill of regret when it comes to objects.
“The catalog of what you did when you left and what you did wrong is something that you’ll keep running over in your mind for a long time,” says Real Time With Bill Maher writer-producer Chris Kelly, who lost his Malibu home in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, adding that the pain keeps asserting itself. “Families… have heirlooms. And you’re no longer one of those families.”
To reach that realization is to participate in what some trauma experts call “shattered assumptions theory” — the moment when a person realizes that a vision they had for their lives is gone and a whole new one must be created. So powerful is this understanding that the body self-regulates it, creating a gradually loosening system of denial and even limiting an associated stress hormone. “It has to drip into the bloodstream a little at a time because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be able to take it,” Cacciatore says.
Even so, the effects can linger: an experiment conducted on lab animals that were chemically introduced to a new threat wound up, surprisingly, also passing on that fear to their offspring.
The sheer amount of material that has been lost in the fires can be mind-boggling. Some 12,000 structures — buildings and cars — have been destroyed so far, and with them many tons of property of all levels of sentimental meaning. People have been uprooted from their long-time safe spaces with no inkling about where they’ll go or who they are anymore. And even those Angelenos whose homes are still standing are feeling a newfound sense of fragility, realizing with every step into the acrid air how little about their lives is assured.
In the face of such forces, all people can do is find ways to use words to recreate what was lost. “Telling stories is one of the best ways to process grief,” Kessler says. “That’s why you’ll hear someone talk about ‘when Dad did that thing’ ten different times. People who’ve lost their homes or community might be doing this a lot in the coming months. This is good — it’s them processing.”
Like all experts, Kessler warns others not to chide grief victims for such behavior and not to engage in “toxic positivity” — the catchphrase that describes telling a trauma victim that everything was or will be for the best. It can, he notes, come off as deeply invalidating of what they’re feeling right now. He and others say that even Angelenos who have just been under evacuation warnings — large swaths of the area — have felt a particular sense of fear and anxiety. “Just walking around the house and deciding what to take is a huge moment that we underestimate,” he says.
Also potentially triggering, say experts, is the act of returning to destroyed spaces — which in the fires case complicates the narrative of simply going back to the Palisades or Altadena to rebuild. To do so, Cacciatore says, can mean being reminded of what was lost all over again.
Jeff Berg, the former ICM and Resolution chairman who has lived in the Palisades for 40 years, says he believes kids in particular in his community will face this. “They’re used to going to the Little League or the village square or the school, and now when they go there they’ll say ‘where am I?’,” says Berg, who now runs consultancy Northside Services. He pauses. “It’s going to take people very adroit at mental health to solve this.”
Still, there can be value in returning for a short time. Leder, the Wilshire Boulevard rabbi, recommends victims go back and visit the charred remains of their home. “Even if you’re equivocating or uncertain, do it,” he says. ‘Because ‘if I can see it and talk about it, I can survive it.’”
Few have tried to confront tragedies head-on more than Ricki Lake. The talk-show host escaped a house fire in Malibu with her two young sons in 2010, then endured the death of her ex-husband Christian Evans by suicide in 2017. Hoping for a fresh start, she designed a new home in the Palisades shortly after, and lived there with new husband Ross Burningham, whom she married in 2022.
That house burned down last week, as video of Burningham trying in vain to use the garden hose to fight the fire went viral on Instagram.
“We built a sanctuary,” Lake told survivors on Zoom as she tried to hold back tears. “I’m a basket case right now.” But she also says past traumas have “turned into gifts and blessings.”
Experts say that this can happen with the right amount of work (and a little luck).
“I’m reluctant to even bring this up because it’s so soon, but there is something researchers have found called post-traumatic growth, which can live alongside post-traumatic stress,” says Alexandra Beth Solomon, a clinical psychologist and Northwestern University adjunct professor who hosts the podcast Reimagining Love. “It’s the idea that grief, when tended to well, can foster a deeper sense of spirituality and interconnectedness and compassion and appreciation.”
She notes that “of course there’s no way to ensure that this happens, but there are conditions that can maximize the possibilities,” including “finding community, being able to say the messy scary hard stuff out loud and not disassociating” by entering perpetual states of anger or fear. “If the trauma stays more integrated there’s less of a chance it will overwhelm us,” she says.
Kloots describes exactly this post-traumatic growth outcome, the evolution and stress somehow living side-by-side in her after her trauma. “You become a different version of yourself,” she said.
Taking a deep breath, she added, “Grief changed how I lived, how I loved.
“Grief,” she noted, “turns you into someone you didn’t know existed before.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental-health challenges, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255
Chris Gardner contributed to this report.
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