Healing of Emotional Scars a Part of Riot Recovery Job : Counseling: Therapists try to help victims overcome fear and hopelessness. Some resist their assistance.

Within hours of the April 29 jury verdicts that plunged the city into turmoil, Sandra Cox was on the phone to social workers and fellow psychologists. As the burning, looting and killings were sweeping through Los Angeles, she was worrying about the emotional fallout that would soon settle over the ravaged city.

“We have to do something,” she entreated again and again. As a result, 18 therapists and other volunteers mobilized in the wake of the riots to offer crisis counseling in South Los Angeles.

“We figured we’d do this about three weeks and that would be that,” Cox said.

Four months later, the group is not only still working but also has expanded into a team of 60 professionals, community activists and student workers who are trying to tackle the emotional--as opposed to the physical--recovery from the unrest.

Their Coalition of Mental Health Professionals is one of several programs working with riot victims, their families and residents to address the riots’ lingering effects--the stresses felt by merchants who are contending with endless delays in getting government aid, by residents who were dislocated by the destruction, by minorities who are disillusioned with the American dream.

“We’re finding general depression, powerlessness, hopelessness. People are unable to see a way of pulling their lives together,” said Norma Cook, director of a Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health project that is overseeing 46 crisis counseling programs paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Funding for the programs--dubbed Project RESTORE--has already topped $4 million, and the county is seeking an additional $8.4 million to extend counseling services for nine months.

More than 18,000 residents, business owners and disaster relief workers, reporting problems such as agitation, depression and anxiety, have sought help since May through the project’s 24-hour crisis hot line and counseling programs based in schools, community centers and churches.

In Pico-Union, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and other areas, mental health professionals have encountered a range of situations that include:

* A Korean man, beaten by looters who destroyed his small shop, who thinks about burning black-owned businesses in revenge, then killing himself.

* An elderly African-American man, unharmed during the unrest, who fears the riots will recur any day. He refuses to leave his house and speaks to a therapist only by phone.

* Latino families who report that their children are afraid to walk to school alone or leave home at all, afraid something will happen while they are gone.

In the wake of a disaster such as the riots or recent hurricanes, feelings such as depression are natural reactions to trauma, said Calvin Frederick, adjunct professor of psychiatry at UCLA and an expert in post-disaster crisis counseling. “There’s nothing pathological about them. They will pass in most cases as people begin to reorganize themselves.”

But the healing process could be longer and more complicated for riot victims. The man-made destruction can leave victims with intense feelings of anger, resentment and hostility, Frederick said.

And even though fewer people and a smaller geographic area were affected by the Los Angeles riots than by the hurricanes, riot victims are more likely to harbor feelings of vulnerability even months after the disaster, said Halford H. Fairchild, a social psychologist who lives in South Los Angeles.

“Hurricane Andrew is not likely to happen again, especially in exactly the same place,” he said. “But the burning of a community where people are doing murder, arson and larceny on a massive scale, that’s much more volitional. There’s a probability it will occur again.”

Mayra Potter, a Guatemalan immigrant whose Hollywood store was emptied by looters on the second night of the riots, cannot shake the feeling that she is no longer safe in this country. “My life can be destroyed in seconds,” she said. “The police say, ‘There is nothing we can do.’ ”

She and her husband have replaced some of the plants, pinatas, and stuffed bears that were stolen from their tiny flower and gift shop. But they are far from recovering the financial and emotional security they had achieved during their 10 years in Los Angeles.

Potter fears eviction from her apartment because the couple have yet to receive federal emergency rental assistance. After four months they are still going from one bureaucrat to the next, seeking a response to their application, she said.

“No one helps. I’m so tired. Every time I go back to my apartment I feel sick,” she said. Business is way down since the riots, and suppliers who extended credit so she could restock her store are calling for their money.

But despite her emotional woes, Potter has not sought mental health counseling. Her priority--as with most of the riot victims who have contacted Project RESTORE for help--has been trying to get the financial help she needs.

Koreatown businessman Jay Rhee is also struggling alone to regain his mental equilibrium.

Rhee is trying to re-establish his importing business, which was burned and looted, but he feels his life is still in disarray. “Physically we can recover, but I can’t recover from the scars of the riots, deep in my heart. I saw the burning, the looting, the shooting, and I was so scared. I will never forget it.”

His loss has changed his family life as well. “Everything has been tarnished,” he said. “My wife is angry and fighting with me. . . . She’s very scared about going out at night. But I say: ‘This is my town, my home. I’m still fighting for it.’ ”

Rhee rejects the idea that counseling will help his problems, in part because of age-old cultural taboos against therapy. “I have to recover myself mentally,” he said. “I don’t believe in counseling.”

The mental health counselors frequently run up against such resistance and other obstacles as they try to guide riot victims through recovery.

Because many of the local programs focus on specific ethnic groups, the therapists find themselves facing different needs and reactions to the riots, depending on the culture and locale: the anxiety and anger of merchants in Koreatown, the cultural and economic isolation of Pico-Union, the unresolved despair and frustration in South Los Angeles, 27 years after the Watts riots.

Korean-American riot victims seen by the Asian Pacific Counseling and Treatment Center commonly display symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to Jiun Shin, counselor coordinator.

“They have insomnia, poor appetite, nightmares, fear of going out, chest pains, you name it,” Shin said. “We have lots of family problems, marital problems, lots of people drinking and reports of child abuse.”

Although the agency has hired 10 FEMA-funded counselors to concentrate on Korean-Americans, only a small percentage of those affected by the unrest have sought psychological help, and many have refused such assistance.

“People may be aware they have symptoms but they don’t think they should go to a counselor,” Shin said. “We have to teach them.”

As a result, counselors from several programs work the community, seeking out victims. Therapists from the Asian Pacific center go to churches where Korean-Americans gather to pick up food donations, while the Chinatown Service Center stations counselors at tables outside stores catering to Chinese-Americans in the San Gabriel Valley.

Because counseling is virtually unknown in Chinese culture, the Chinatown Service Center tries to integrate counseling with other kinds of assistance, such as helping out with government aid applications.

“If we were to say ‘Why don’t you come in and talk,’ most would say ‘What for?,’ ” said Larry Lue, director of counseling programs.

The center hosts a support group for riot victims, but only a handful show up each week for the two-hour discussions.

Talking may be one of the best ways to help the healing process, said Cox, whose group spends evenings meeting with riot victims at the Paul Robeson Community Center and weekends visiting “every community fair we hear of.”

By talking to people as they fill out questionnaires, “we . . . begin to walk them through what has happened and how it might have affected them,” said Nancy Jefferson, a psychiatric social worker who helped Cox form the coalition.

The insurrection exacerbated people’s existing problems, such as day-to-day struggles with jobs or housing, Jefferson said.

The team members try to reassure people that their feelings are normal. They “validate” the personal fears that are expressed and the unresolved social concerns, Cox said. “We cannot pretend . . . that everything is going to be all right, that this won’t happen again. We have to help them deal with their stress, deal with their conflicts and strife.”

At the recent African Marketplace festival in South Los Angeles, Nareshimah Osei stopped at a table the coalition set up near the brightly colored displays of clothing, jewelry and art. The 51-year-old photographer said he has not slept well since the riots, although he was not injured and lost no property.

“The tension level is very high,” Osei said. “You don’t know what people have in their pocketbook or their waistband. You don’t want to blow your horn to tell a person the light signal’s changed. It’s like you really hold back.”

When Cox spoke to a group that had gathered to hear about family mental health, several African-Americans asked questions that reflected a sense of alienation and confusion over what role they should play.

One man wanted to know how to cope with an education system that he said never teaches children anything positive about African-Americans. Another wondered what to say to his children about the police in the wake of the acquittals of four officers that sparked the riots. A third man asked: “How do we tell our children to look for justice in a courtroom that does not answer?”

“The reality is we have seen injustice in our country,” Cox replied. “One way we dealt with it was the insurrection. But that’s not everybody’s way.”

She tried to help them overcome feelings of powerlessness, offering the example of South African activist Nelson Mandela. “He said, ‘Don’t mourn; organize,’ ” she told the group.

Those kind of questions reflect a less obvious sort of psychological damage inflicted by the verdict and the riots: a questioning and loss of faith that needs to be dealt with.

Cox set up her coalition, she said, “as a way of taking our energies, our hurt, our feelings of betrayal, and putting it into a proactive way of dealing with the community. We all have to reach out and figure out ways of dealing with the problems we see.”