Moving Forward

Moving In

Your home has been repaired, renovated or rebuilt. Finally, you are ready to move in and start living your life as you did before.

Several organisations have developed checklists to help you with the move. For example, take a look at the helpful list on Energy Australia's website by clicking on the link below or search for 'moving house checklists'.

• Energy Australia

Creating a home

What makes a home? It seems like a simple question, but the answer is quite complex and can mean different things.

A home embodies how we live and how we see ourselves. Our space evolves when we focus on what makes us happy. We create spaces that meet our needs, lifestyle and is expresses our character. People are at the heart of your home.

A house provides shelter, but a home is where you weather all of life's storms — and revel in the sunshine.

The rituals you create

The rituals and habits you create in your new home and the traditions you keep with family and friends create fond memories — and get everyone looking forward to making more.

The smells of good food cooking

For many folks, a house isn't a home until it's been cooked in. So from the wafting aroma of slow-cooking stew to the mouthwatering smells of baking cookies, every meal you stir up in your home is nourishment for both body and soul.

The dings, scratches, flaws and the constant mess are a celebration of living your everyday life - different maybe to the one before because you are different, but a daily life nonetheless.

Pictures and Memories

Getting some new family photos up on the wall or some children's artwork can bring some warmth back into your new home. Get some new photos taken or printed and put them up.

Ask family and friends to donate an item or a picture or photograph representing a shared memory of you and them.

Choose your new furniture and decor

After the fire, you may have received some donated goods and hand me downs, which is a massive help at the time. However, as you start to rebuild your home, you may want to shop with your family and choose things you love. Or even trying to find old loved items similar to those that were lost.

Hold a Housewarming

Once you have moved in, there is nothing better to make it feel like home than reconnect with your friends, neighbours and family. It is also an excellent opportunity to give thanks for their support over your recovery.

Understanding Trauma

There has been much work and research on what constitutes trauma, how it manifests itself and how it can be treated.

READ MORE in the HELP & ADVICE pages, covering trauma-related reactions  - mental, emotional, physical and behavioural.  It may help you and your family make sense of these feelings and put strategies in place to resolve any issues.

Healing towards a resilient recovery has several steps that you may need help to get through.

Understanding Grief

Grief can oftentimes be misunderstood when affected by fire, and it can be an emotion that is not often associated with the loss of belongings and home.

Grief can sometimes be dismissed or disregarded because it was just your house and things you can reinstate after all. Your grief, if you are experiencing it, is real.

Understanding grief is an essential part of your journey through recovery.

Grief has seven recognised stages; you can read more about them by clicking HERE.

As with the effects of trauma, it is wise to interpret the stages loosely and expect individual variation. There is no neat progression from one stage to the next. You may experience yourself going backwards and forwards, or stages can coincide, or out of order.

READ MORE in the HELP PAGES.

Post-traumatic growth

Post-traumatic growth is defined as a positive psychological change experienced due to a struggle with highly challenging life circumstances (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996).

The concept of post-traumatic growth offers hope that there is the potential to bounce back after trauma and become an even better version of yourself than before the event.

Accepting your new reality, finding meaning in the trauma and forming new beliefs about yourself and your world is the foundation to building a deeper appreciation of your experience and benefiting from it in a way that you may never have thought possible.

Steps to strengthen post-traumatic growth:

• Have a problem-solution coping style: you take steps to find answers and solutions to the many problems. This promotes better outcomes and dispels feelings of helplessness.
• Surround yourself with positive support: a positive social network of family and friends who can support you on your journey if you avoid people who dwell on your journey's negative aspects and keep going back to the event.

At this stage, you may experience a new sense of the preciousness of life, a clarification of goals, along with a renewed commitment and motivation to see them through.

Trauma, Anniversaries and Triggers

Anniversary reactions are a real and common phenomenon. Triggers are real. They are the annual echo of trauma.

Regardless of what happened, the anniversary reaction is specific, with invested emotions, and can be genuinely distressing. Responses themselves are as varied as the people experiencing them.

Sometimes the mind remembers unconsciously. Like a spike in depression or PTSD, a psychological reaction can be triggered by weather, light, and other seasonal reminders like spring's first signs.

Survivor Reactions

Most traumatic events have a degree of randomness about the way they occur. For example, natural disasters, transport accidents, criminal incidents and other events occur without a particular relationship to the individuals involved.

When some people die or are injured, survival may depend on preparation, past training, experience or fast reactions. However, survival can depend on just where they happened to be concerning the danger for most people. Surviving and being physically unharmed does not mean a person is unchanged emotionally. Survival is often associated with complex emotional reactions, which cause distress and make it hard to resume life after the event

A DHHS clinician article is reproduced in the HELP PAGES and maybe helpful.

Defining a new normal

This can be both in the material, physical world and in the world of emotion.

Your physical world may look quite different. With a change to the arrangement of your home, you will be learning how to use your new space.

You may have rebuilt your home completely. However, all the furnishings are new; nothing has a memory attached to it except memories made since you moved into the new space.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle is expressed in both work and leisure behaviour patterns: in activities, attitudes, interests, opinions—values, and as allowed by your current income. Lifestyle reflects self-image or self-concept, the way you see yourself and believe others see you.

Through the recovery process, you have experienced so far, you have adopted a new lifestyle to fit the life you have established after the fire. It may be useful to list your work and leisure activities, attitudes, interests, opinions and think about the before and after.

This will help you understand how far you have come and what changes you like or dislike and decide where to go.

Acknowledge your achievements

A lot of time can be spent focusing on how off-track your lives have been since the fire and maybe even how little you think you have achieved.

Take time to reflect on your earliest moments, from your first awareness of the fire to the cleanup, to work through the anxiety, to re-establish your new home, to this very point here and now. You have come a long way.

Take the time to acknowledge what you have achieved and be grateful for your inner strength and the people who supported you along the way.

Gratitude puts situations into perspective. When we can see the good and the bad, it becomes more difficult to dwell on the past and stay stuck in it.

Understanding what we can be grateful for makes us more robust, content, strengthens relationships, improves health, and reduces stress.

For some, it is helpful to record your experience in writing or as audio. This is therapeutic and a lasting record of the event and a reminder of how far you have come.

Most people will never know how they would respond in the face of such trauma and adversity. You know. And you can be proud.

I don’t want to survive, I want to thrive.

Setting new goals to move to a new tomorrow

Goal setting is powerful because it provides focus. Goals help to shape dreams and hone intention into action to achieve what is needed in the future.

Goals are great because they help you to be forwarding thinking rather than looking back at the past. As a result, you have an opportunity to become a better someone while negotiating your new life goals.

When setting goals, remember to keep them SMART:

• simple
• measurable
• achievable
• realistic
• time-framed

A new identity

Identity is a collective term for the roles, goals, and values people adopt to give direction and purpose to their lives. Thus, identity forms a blueprint for how we conduct our lives and plan our future.

Read more in Help Pages

Helping Others

For some, it is important to give back to the community and people who helped them get back on their feet. You may start to want to help others in a similar situation.

Share your journey with others in similar situations and offer support and understanding that only someone who has experienced a house fire can.
You know what it is like, you know the dark moments, you know the moments of joy when you experience success.
Inspire others to keep going to that point in time when they, too, are thriving.

Studies indicate that the very act of giving back to the community boosts your happiness, health, and sense of well-being.

1. Lending a helping hand is the single easiest thing you’ll ever do in life that makes a difference and can have a meaningful impact. You never know; your single act of kindness could change lives in more ways than you could have fathomed.
2. You are now in the happy circumstance of having food, shelter and clothes – give to others who don’t.  Helping others promotes a sense of purpose and satisfaction.
3. You grow by giving , and selflessness changes you in a remarkable way.
4. Your health benefits:  when you give others, it sets a positive and powerful tone for the day and helps lower blood pressure.

Volunteering

Many organisations are only too happy to have you volunteer.   Search the web to find something that interests you.  These are some websites to visit to get you started:

• Council
• Red Cross
• Salvation Army
• Lifeline
• Asylum Seeker Resource Center