I really don’t know what to say about how shocked I have been to see the devastation playing out in Los Angeles. I grew up, lived, and worked in the Santa Monica / Pacific Palisades area, and my last home was literally a mile south of all the devastation. This past week I have found myself trying to sort out my feelings before traveling there to see the devastation firsthand. 

One of my best friends had to be evacuated from his home in Mandeville Canyon. In fact, his friend’s home was the only home left standing in a two-block area in Pacific Palisades! What a miracle! All told thousands of homes are gone and thousands of people are displaced by these relentless wildfires.

No rain in seven months is atypical in Los Angeles. Last winter was their wettest winter ever. Crazy weather, and lots of conversations about global warming, but all I know is that these fires are still ablaze but there seems to be some hope on the horizon. 

I was born there in 1957 and saw my city drastically change. Still, I love the place and am intimately tied by friends, family, and of course the Dodgers. I know LA inside and out. I not only drove a taxi in Los Angeles but cleaned the swimming pools of people throughout all the burn areas. Yes, I used to clean the swimming pools of the rich and famous, and to see their hillside homes now leveled, has had me feeling numb.  

Wildfires aren’t anything new there, but not to this magnitude. Malibu had a devastating fire ravage the area when I worked at a luxury residential treatment program there, back in 1999. Fires don’t care if you are rich or poor and remind us that we are all human. 

I’ve found myself going through the same stages of grief that were spelled out decades ago by Kubler Ross. First is Denial, next is Anger, this is followed by Bargaining, then Depression, and finally Acceptance. For me, I think I am at the sadness (depression) stage but find it hard to accept that my city has been leveled like scenes of WWII.

Before moving up to the Seattle area, I worked at a crisis center in Long Beach, California. When faced with a situation that is more overwhelming than what people can tolerate, a crisis will take place. Then, it is important to take care of your physical needs. When all thinking goes offline, it is time to slow down, rest, eat natural/healthy food, do light exercise, and maybe use relaxation tools. It isn’t uncommon for people to feel numb and dissociate, which basically means to simply fade out. So, taking care of housing, food, etc., helps you survive until the brain kicks back in.  

People heal. Even from the most difficult tragedies, people are very resilient. In working at the Mental Health Urgent Care Center for 11 years, I helped people get through crisis by teaching them tools and skills, and above all, showing them how to apply love to the part inside of them that went through the difficulty.

People are people, no matter if they are rich or poor. I learned this as I treated the ultra-rich and famous in Malibu. You would think that people who had it all would be able to withstand anything, well, recently I heard about someone I treated there 20 years ago finally dying from a liver ailment because they never got that behavior resolved. And they were a star on one of the top television shows! Because that facility had many slips through the cracks, I wanted to open up my own facility, have a real program that the clients followed, and help each other along the way. In Malibu, the facility was only 12-step meeting driven and the underlying issues at the core of the substance use were not addressed. 

I hear many people say time heals, but this is wishful thinking. Time doesn’t heal, we heal when we apply love to that shocked part inside of us. To do so we need to make ourselves the primary priority and give ourselves time to grieve. If we don’t, the recovery process lasts much longer.

When people enter treatment, I remind them that we cannot heal them, but they can heal themselves and we were there to support their efforts. People don’t heal us. We heal us. The healing in our program is different in this regard. We don’t beg people to forgive us – we forgive ourselves after processing through the problems we addressed mentally and emotionally. After doing so, forgiveness flows naturally.

I think therapy is a process of unlearning. There are so many slogans and belief systems that work against us. If we keep focusing on the worst-case scenarios, emotionally it feels like that worst case is actually happening and we create real panic! I ask clients to live in a backward world. For example, focus on the best-case scenarios, love themselves first and then others. Plan for the best and if tragedy hits, have faith in your future self to take the needed action steps. This forward-thinking has had incredible success.