Lola’s murder affected the whole of France. Since Friday, this macabre affair has been omnipresent in the media, picked up by politicians, so that humanity is sometimes relegated to the background.
But behind this story, a broken family is going through a most difficult ordeal. If mourning is a feeling that most French people have already shared, it turns out to be much more insurmountable when the facts are of such atrocity.
“The next few days will be hard” entrusted the parents of the schoolgirl to our colleagues from BFMTV. Indeed, the family must now face the three stages of traumatic grief.
The first of these is astonishment. In cases like these, the family is “mown by the atrocity. The emotion is so enormous, unbearable, that it amazes” the person who is the prey, analyzes Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist and author of Hypersensitivity: how to make it an asset?
If this first stage can last several days or several weeks, the one that follows is that of denial. When a loved one is removed in such a cruel way, “we do not realize what is happening, a defense mechanism rises”, explains the expert.
Once the denial has passed, comes the stage of anger. “It’s a moving episode and very hard to bear” which gives way to disarray, sadness and a feeling of injustice. However, this is the last stage of traumatic grief.
Between political recovery and massive media coverage, it is, in any case, difficult to miss this affair. But how can Lola’s family react to all this? For Johanna Rozenblum, the persons concerned “protect themselves from the media”. Indeed, she explains that, when it comes to her child, witnessing such high media coverage, seeing her name appear in political debates, her story repeated over and over, can “add trauma to the already existing trauma. “.
This is why families regularly have the reflex to isolate themselves in the countryside, far from everything, to protect themselves. This is what Lola’s relatives did, who took refuge in a village in Pas-de-Calais, out of sight. As BFMTV reports, they are staying away from television screens for the time being and are no longer answering the phone.
