May 26, 2005

Personal Triage

During wartime and periods of disaster, medical staff perform triage ("tree'-ajjjj) on the multitude of patients they must treat. Triage is derived from the French trier, meaning "to sort." Triage is a method of decision-making that gives critically-injured patients the best chance for survival. In concept, the doctors treat the most severely injured first, and those whose injuries are less severe, and therefore who have more time, are treated later.

When you are deep in a period of personal disaster, with many problems occurring at once, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the multitude of serious items that need your attention. Your stress level is extremely high, and your resources extremely low. In such a state, you need immediate personal triage.

The most life-threatening conditions need to be dealt with first. Sort out for yourself which problems can have the most serious consequences, and try to deal with them first. High on the list would be your personal safety. If you are in danger of bodily harm, to yourself or those you care for, that needs to be solved immediately. GET OUT! You might think that you have nowhere to go, or that leaving your situation would cause more problems than it solves. I know that feeling of despair. We think that we can manage the status quo, and that if we make any kind of change, we are opening ourselves up to even more danger, or perhaps personal ruin, humiliation, or ridicule. Make no mistake about this, if you are already living in a climate of threat, sooner or later that threat will come to pass, and your ability to make any decisions about the situation will be gone completely. Those other consequences can be dealt with, but bodily harm is much harder to overcome.

Taking action opens up more choices. Think of it as applying dynamite to a log jam. It may seem like a drastic step, but in serious situations you don't have time to finesse the logs apart one by one without disturbing anything else. Once the jam is cleared, you can deal with the more manageable debris.

If getting to safety is your most important task, contact a helping agency in your community to assist you. Two good ones are the United Way, and the Salvation Army. They will have people to help you sort out what to do next. If the threat of harm is reduced and removed, you will have more resources left to apply to other decisions that must be made.

Personal triage can help you out of all types of disastrous situations. Focus on what is most urgent or impotant, and deal with that. In other words, put out the biggest fires first. Pretty soon the rest of life will seem a lot more manageable.

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