LEWISTON — Joanna Stokinger, the lead advocate navigator for the Maine Resiliency Center, loves the taste and smell of pumpkin spice. But, she said, she knew when pumpkin spice goods came out for the season that “we were getting close” to the one-year mark of the mass shooting.

She’s talked to people who have come to the center who started to feel anxious when the temperature dropped and the leaves started falling, she said, because “the cooler weather and walking on crunching leaves reminds people when they had to run outside and it was cold. They had to run on crunching leaves.”

People who have been traumatized react very differently to these and other things, including hearing or reading the call to be “Lewiston Strong.”

Some people are just neutral about it, according to Danielle Parent, the resiliency center’s director. “A lot of people aren’t from Lewiston and people think this has had a much broader impact beyond Lewiston,” so they tend to disregard the Lewiston-specific callout.

But, when survivors and families members see the phrase they think they’re supposed to be strong and they can’t always be that, so the center’s advocates tend to stay away from the word “strong.” Instead, they use the word “resiliency” which has connotations of strength, Parent said, but “resilience is a thing that gets built” over time.

But, then, Parent said, wearing a “Lewiston Strong” sweatshirt is “more about being identified as being part of a community and being embraced by a community than that they’re feeling ‘strong.'”

Monica Linder, a victim advocate at the center, often wears a “Lewiston Strong” hoodie outside work and “when people compliment me I really love it, but when I’m wearing it I wonder when I’m not supposed to be wearing it.”

The center’s events coordinator, Ashley Lawrence, recognizes “there’s community in the ‘Lewiston Strong’ term,” and that people often take whatever words and strength they need to get through complex grief and trauma, and that the process is different for everybody.

But words really can evoke powerful reactions for people working through trauma.

“Brave” is one of those words.

Many survivors have told Stokinger that “I hate when people tell me how brave I am. I’m not brave every day and you see me when I’m there doing life. And, if you really think I’m brave then I’m not being seen.”

For others, the word “anniversary” is troubling because it typically has positive undertones of weddings and other celebratory events “and many people don’t feel positive about the word ‘anniversary’ in this context,” Parent said, even though it is the dictionary-correct definition of something that happened exactly one year ago.

For Parent, who said advocates see 400 people a month come through the resiliency center, “there’s a sensitivity for us” in the words they use and how very much words may impact the staff and the people they’re serving through the healing process.

An image that is always well-received, according to Lawrence, is the shape of the state of Maine with a heart over Lewiston. “That’s always good.”