WHAT was learned about trauma in Dunblane has helped heal other places across the world touched by tragedy. The families at Sandy Hook in Connecticut, where twenty children and six adults were shot in 2012 and the people of San Giuliano di Puglia where a kindergarten collapsed during the earthquake of 2002, have been helped recover following what was learned in the aftermath of the atrocity. As Philip Dutton, a now retired consultant clinical psychologist who helped at Dunblane, says: “I have passed what I learned from Dunblane to communities around the world. Sandy Hook invited me there because of my involvement with Dunblane. I’ve got an accumulation of information which was in its infancy in Dunblane. It’s grown since. Basically people have taught me things. The traumatised individuals taught me.”

Dutton was the only NHS full time experienced child clinical psychologist specialising in trauma who worked with Dunblane families. When he first caught sight of the reports on television, he recalls his response was not so much shock, as the desire to help, and that he immediately went to the school. “I was directed,” he recalls, “into what I think was the canteen next to the gym along with many other professionals who went there to help.”

One of his key messages is that survivors can get better. Even those who received no treatment at the time, can, if they are still suffering years down the line, resolve the worst symptoms of trauma. “Decades on, you can still deal with it. But the longer you leave it the harder it is. Twenty years on from Dunblane there are people I know that have missed having their trauma treated. Some people stay hurt and might even feel worse.”

Not everyone, Dutton says, needs therapy. “After a trauma, there’s a percentage of people who will recover naturally. With a simple trauma such as a car crash, some people walk away as if nothing happened. Others might develop post-traumatic stress disorder from it.”

At the time of the Dunblane shooting, he notes he was working mainly with play therapy and had just been introduced to a therapy called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR). With one of the Dunblane children that he worked with, he recalls, he spent a year doing play therapy, only to find that it had helped just a little. “He was still not right. He just wasn’t a changed person. He’d done an amazing picture of a racetrack and everything that happened in the gym was on this race track, but he never ever (like many children) would talk about the gym. There were dead bodies. There was sticky blood. There were crashes. Every element: smoke, noise, it was all there. So I asked if I could do EMDR using his picture of the racetrack.”

After six weeks of EMDR, he notes, the child was “back to his normal self”.

Dutton is currently working on a book on how communities can heal. For him the answers don’t, however, lie solely in therapy. In fact, most of his message is about the need to re-establish consistency and predictability, to stick to simple daily routines, and to not, as a community, stop talking to each other. Routine, he says, is particularly important for children. “Because if the world’s crashed around you and your friends have died, there’s no safe place. Unpredictability is the biggest source of fear for children. So if your parent says 'I’ll pick you up at 4 pm' and is there at 5 pm, you feel you can’t trust the parent. You can trust nothing if you can’t trust your parent.”

He also warns against giving into children’s difficult behaviour following a trauma. “Even though it’s natural for a child to misbehave, to test boundaries after trauma, if you let them stay up later because you feel sorry for them or you allow them to behave aggressively, re-enacting trauma, because you understand they didn’t mean it because they’re distressed, you’re actually rewarding them and programming them to keep their distress.”

In Sandy Hook, he says, he approached things with a lot more confidence. “With Dunblane all I did was treat people who turned up at my clinic. With the other places I was able to talk to the whole communities, invite them in, give the parents advice in groups. I’d learned what I needed to do so I had a lot more information to give.” And what was that advice? “That the way of getting better is therapy if needed, but, beyond that, parents need to be strong and look after themselves. And do make friends. Your natural tendency will be towards isolation once you’ve dealt with the anger and the fear, and there are ways we can encourage and help each other”.