Sheepdog Tip of the Day, After Combat tip 33
After one horrendous massacre at a middle school, many of the 11-, 12- and 13-year-old children said in their debriefings that they believed that what had happened was all their fault. "If I had just been nicer to him on the bus on Friday maybe he wouldn't have been mad at us." "If I had just said something to him in the hallway on Monday, maybe he wouldn't have done this." "If I had not let the fire door shut behind us..." "If I had only pulled her down to the ground when I went down." On and on it went. If the kids were thinking this way, finding some convoluted probability path by which they could have prevented some aspect of what had happened, what do you suppose the teachers were thinking? They were eating themselves alive. This brings us to the second debriefing principle: pain shared is pain divided.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
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Additional Resources
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