Returning to "normal life" after being in a war zone is seen by too many as a quick and painless transition. In reality coming home can be quite difficult for those experiencing it.

Fear is an emotion we all experience at one time or another, and its effects are important to understand when talking about disasters.

It’s a form of emotional reparation that goes by many names: poetry therapy, poetic medicine, and creative journaling, to name a few. And veterans of recent and past conflicts are using words to bear witness, find their way through horrific memories, and ultimately win their wars within.

Research suggests that about one-half of us will experience, in our life time, an event so traumatic, so disastrous, that it will meet criteria A for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Knowing that fact, then why is it that most of us do not prepare for disasters?

Parts 1 and 2 of this post gave several helpful tips on how to think in a disaster situation. This part reviews two important topics: understanding how disasters happen and how your behavior affects disaster situations. Here are a few tips for acting productively in a disaster.

A person's attitude has a lot to do with his or her chances of survival in a disaster. Here are some tips for productive ways of thinking that can assist you when disaster strikes.

Resilience is someting that most people need to make it through the rougher times of life.

Would you feel like you'd still like to be president after you have just been liberated from six years of captivity?

In China and Myanmar, the innate impulse to communicate through art, play, and imagination is emerging as children begin the long process of recovery. But what about those who don’t want to remember what happened or discuss the terror they have experienced? Some children are so traumatized they may never learn to be children again.

Disasters are upsetting for everyone, but particularly for children. Probably one of the most important factors in determining how a child adapts to a disaster relates to how the child's parent or other caregiver responds. Let's take a look at some ways children react to disasters and discuss some suggestions on what we, as parents, can do to help.

Words tell our stories, but art makes it possible to bear witness to them. For the children of Darfur, art became the unexpected vehicle for exposing the atrocities of violence, oppression, and genocide, breaking the silence through a visual vocabulary of war.

What are the emotional, existential and spiritual consequences of catastrophic phenomena such as cyclones, floods, famines, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other so-called acts of God?