9/11 Survivors Find Healing by Helping Others

When Lolita Jackson fled the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, her colleague Tom Swift stepped back to call his wife. He never made it out, leaving Jackson and their friend Doug Brown struggling with an impossible question: why did they survive when he didn't?

What happened next defies what many expect from trauma survivors. Instead of being consumed by grief, Jackson, Brown, and their colleague Nancy Karole Kennedy each found a surprising path to healing by dedicating their lives to helping others.

Jackson left her lucrative finance career for public service, eventually joining the mayor's office to help train city employees who would assist Hurricane Sandy victims. She also pursued her passion for jazz, performing on stages from New York City to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Brown discovered his calling by volunteering as a reading tutor for elementary students. The work transformed him so deeply that after a few years, he left finance entirely to work full-time with literacy nonprofits.

Kennedy remembered the Red Cross volunteers she passed while fleeing the towers. "I wanted to be a person running in instead of a person running out," she said. She became a disaster-response volunteer and later worked for the Red Cross itself.

Now Kennedy serves as director of development for a cancer center where many patients are 9/11 survivors and first responders who became ill from exposure to debris and toxins. "I'm a kinder person than I was before," she said. "It made me more compassionate."

The Ripple Effect

Psychologists call this phenomenon post-traumatic growth, the measurable ways people rebuild themselves after catastrophe. Richard Tedeschi, executive director of the Boulder Crest Institute for Posttraumatic Growth, says one of the most reliable pathways through trauma is helping others.

Experts emphasize that finding meaning through service doesn't erase the pain. But believing you've learned something from the worst day of your life can restore a sense of agency, says Eranda Jayawickreme, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University who studies post-traumatic growth.

"You don't feel like this passive victim of the cosmos," he explained.

Twenty-five years later, Jackson and her friends remain close and continue healing by sharing light and goodness with others. As Tedeschi puts it: "When people go through something that seems horrific and impossible to live with, it's not the end of the story."

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