When systems fracture we find each other again
Disasters temporarily strip away the status quo, revealing the deep human drive for connection, compassion, and shared resilience
In the days following Superstorm Sandy, a friend of mine who wasn’t a disaster responder, didn’t work in emergency management, and wasn’t particularly prepared for what happened set up a makeshift soup kitchen in a battered taco restaurant in the Rockaways with his then partner. They had been living on a houseboat in a marina on Jamaica Bay, and I had just been out to visit them a few months prior. I remember my friend telling me he was going to start selling soup on the boardwalk, which I thought was absolutely bizarre because who wants hot soup at the beach? But it ended up being premonitory of what was to come.
When trains were back up and running following the storm, I headed out with some supplies. The Rockaway Taco kitchen had no electricity. There was no official direction, no formal authority granting permission. (The Red Cross and FEMA had famously showed up in the Rockaways very late.) There was just the very human, very ordinary need to feed people. So they did. And others joined in. While I Was there, people showed up bringing vegetables collected from donation drop-offs at farmers markets in Manhattan and Brooklyn. People self-organzied, stirring pots, cleaning stoves, and delivering soup down washed-out streets.
I remember standing there, amazed by the way people identified what needed doing and just did it without waiting for someone to tell them how. Without waiting for a system to catch up. The storm had moved massive amounts of sand into the streets and washed away houses, but it had also, somehow, cleared the way for something else to emerge: a fierce & immediate relationality. A refusal to leave each other behind.
Rebecca Solnit calls this phenomenon disaster utopia or sometimes disaster Buddhism—the way catastrophe can pull the best of our humanity to the surface, in stark contrast to the isolation and disconnection of daily life. I used to think that I was drawn to disaster work because there was some unhealed part of me drawn to the chaos as a familiar way to re-experience the uncertainty and fear of my childhood. But, actually, I think I love this work because of the ways that, after a disaster or similar massive rupture, bullshit falls away (at least temporarily) and we are drawn to act on our deepest values of compassion and mutuality. I have been moved and reshaped by directly experiencing this kind of temporary disaster utopia time and time again.
In this series, I’ve been outlining what are called the Hobfoll Five - five elements of early trauma intervention that must be addressed to reduce distress and promote recovery after disasters. In disasters, where people often feel unsafe, powerless, isolated, and overwhelmed, these five guideposts help restore a sense of agency, belonging, and possibility. By focusing on these elements, we can not only reduce suffering but also strengthen community resilience and support long-term recovery.
In this post, I’m writing about Efficacy, our felt sense of agency: I can do something. I can have an impact. We need to have an embodied sense that we can have an impact on the world outside of ourselves. Disasters often rob people of this sense of agency and knock their locus of control out of whack. We find ourselves feeling overly responsible for things that were out of our control, and helpless to impact the things that are within our control.
Disasters and other traumatic experiences shatter our sense efficacy. With disasters, the scale of destruction, the randomness of who is harmed and who is spared, the slow and often inadequate response from institutions, can leave people powerless. In this vacuum, many turn to shame and self-blame to regain a sense of control. They can ruminate and obsess:
I should have left sooner.
I should have known better.
It’s my fault I didn’t prepare better.
As I teach when training Disaster Mental Health Response teams, these kinds of thoughts can actually be protective. Because a person may feel they are taking responsibility for their part in what happened, and that if it was somehow their fault, then they can do something differently next time and prevent it from happening again. While this self-reproach can be destructive, it ALSO helps a person avoid feeling the shame of powerlessness. Shame offers the illusion of control in the uncontrollable. It’s a somatic reflex. An attempt to put the body back into coherence by telling ourselves a story in which we could have prevented the harm. But in reality, this can compound the harm, cutting us off from ourselves and from the very relationships that can help us heal.
Some people react to experiences of powerlessness by dominating others. From the perspective of politicized somatics, however, reclaiming power after trauma isn’t about domination or control—it’s about coming back into right relationship:
With our own bodies.
With each other.
With the more-than-human world.
True power isn’t “power over”—it’s power with. And here’s where disasters can serve, paradoxically, as thresholds for this kind of collective power. Over and over, I’ve seen that when systems fall apart, people instinctively move toward each other. They organize soup kitchens in taco restaurants. They form human chains in floodwaters. They gather on porches, share what little they have, and find ways to act—together.
These small acts of care are not just comforting (though comfort is an important part of psychological first aid!). They are embodied efficacy in action. When people take tangible steps, they restore not only their own sense of agency but also the social fabric that holds communities together. Collective action helps regulate overwhelmed nervous systems, shifting people from freeze or collapse into movement, connection, and possibility. In this way, resilience is not an individual trait, but something grown between us in kitchens. It is the shared work of making it through.
Grad school was when I first started unpacking my own ancestry’s relationship to disaster resilience and this specific kind of collective efficacy. Historically, Sicilian and Southern Italian communities have woven collective efficacy into their social fabric, particularly in response to environmental upheaval. After the catastrophic 1693 Sicily earthquake, survivors didn’t just rebuild their Baroque towns. They did so through communal labor and shared decision‑making, reinforcing a sense of joint purpose amid trauma Ethnographic research in rural Southern Italy shows that groups often mobilized local cooperative networks rooted in kinship, land stewardship, and mutual aid in order to manage risks like landslides or flooding. These practices fostered awareness, trust, and social knowledge that increased community resilience over time . Anthropologists have documented that these rural co‑ops weren’t merely economic arrangements. They embodied democratic self-governance and solidarity, establishing relational infrastructure that could be repurposed in times of crisis. These practices reveal that efficacy in Southern Italian culture isn’t just an individual trait. Efficacy, in the Hobfoll sense, is grown in the spaces between people through shared labor, rituals, and embodied cooperation that, over centuries, have formed the backbone of communal survival.
As the climate crisis accelerates and disasters grow more frequent and severe, this ancient truth of resilience being something that forms from our collective efficacy, grows increasingly important and clear. We are living in a time when the heroic myth of individual survival is being stripped away by intense weather events, revealing how much we need one another to not only endure, but to heal and adapt. The small acts of care I witnessed in the Rockaways, like those practiced for centuries in Sicilian villages, remind me that the heart of disaster response and collective trauma writ large is relationship. In the face of rising tides, literal and metaphorical, the task ahead is not to rebuild what’s lost. It is now time to strengthen the webs of relationship that carry us through collapse, knowing that it is together that we build the strength to face what comes, to change with it, and to begin again.
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