Covid and Trauma. Psychotherapy will help
If you think of a mind as millions and millions of coils and pathways of glorious twists and turns, constantly regenerating and sprouting, bursting colors and sounds, music and life, then trauma is choosing 2 of those pathways that you can predict and memorize, staying the course, not veering or stepping foot anywhere but those 2 pathways where you can control the start and stop of everything, and the rest of the vibrancy and possibility blur to the background.
Trauma leads to a whittled down experience of life.
Therapy is about reworking the infrastructure.
A post Covid world
There is a silent decorum that maybe you are not supposed to talk about the pandemic that was. The masks are mostly off, life is humming again, the virus has done it’s job- multiplying and weakening, now people can say, Covid is just a cold, and people do what people do best: move on and try not to talk about it. Maybe it’s hard to remember the feelings states of early 2020, because here you are, you made it, you mostly survived, and life has returned to a normal you can almost fully recognize and you do the only thing you can do which is to work around the wound, and go on living as if that never.happened.at.all.
Trauma
If you are a trauma survivor, living through a global pandemic has undoubtedly reopened a familiar wound that might not be easy to name, but is internally known. You might barely even remember the before or the beginning because you are just doing what you have always done to survive: move on and try not to remember.
With the diminished threat of Covid, for some, it isn’t as accessible to remember that people died, people lost a life they relied on, businesses dissolved, marriages disintegrated, trajectories changed, the world shut down, and the economy was (and is) debilitated. For others, you might be someone who feels assaulted every day by the devastation of what you had to bear witness to. Regardless, every human alive, whether it was conscious or not, all had in common the same uncertainty: imminent death, sparing no one. Ignorance brought a resurgence of ugly hate and unspeakable violence. This was a collective world regression, one that allowed for the reopening and re-questioning the rights of women, the safety of children, and the ability to trust any and all. Because COVID taught you that, sure, societies should be stronger together, but instead everyone was the same kind of afraid. Once people entered into a state of fear, the boundaries vaporized. And then everyone began to harm each other as they assumed they were about to be harmed. A whole world being tested, but there remained a shared dim wish that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed (but it was worse) and that everyone did not have to know what was happening while it was actually happening.
If you are a trauma survivor, then living through a global pandemic forced you to remember being harmed.
The pandemic brought back the feeling states of a time when there were no boundaries, no trusted person to confirm reality, no certain information to rely on, no way to get safe, and having to live inside of volatility without knowing when and if it would ever end.
Enter psychotherapy
Up against such a mass casualty as a global pandemic, individual psychotherapy can seem small, self indulgent, ineffective towards any potential big change. Trauma expert and physician, Bruce Perry says, “Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.”
When you were a child, maybe nobody ever taught you that when the sky is falling and the world is shaky that your feelings still matter. They matter because talking helps to remind you about what is real, and when you know what is real you can make confident, intuitive decisions that you can trust and feel proud of. And then, and only then, can you begin to move through the world and feel in charge. If you are a helping professional, this is an essential task when working with someone who is coming to you for relief. When you make the investment in self exploration and looking inward at times of distress, you are not only giving yourself a chance to rework your interior life, you are freeing yourself up to be available to others who are in need. This is why clinicians who do their own self reflective work have a much deeper well of knowledge and emotional reservoir because they can place where everything belongs and are able to discern their own conflicts and unresolved pain from the pain of the vulnerable people before them.
When things are hard, talk about it. Knowing is a practice. Talk about it until you understand it fully. Talk about it until the feeling changes. It is natural to be hesitant to talk about hard things, especially those who may have never been in conversation with a safe person before. Sometimes talking about a traumatic memory brings about the fright that it will come alive and hurt you all over again. But it is important to remember that talking about the pain isn’t what harms you; it is what harmed you that harmed you. Good therapy does make it better.
Symptoms of Trauma
Symptoms of acute or more recent trauma can appear in clear, visible ways, such as:
Intrusive thoughts of the event that may occur intrusively or not in context.
Nightmares.
Visual images of the event.
Loss of memory and concentration abilities.
Disorientation.
Confusion.
Mood swings
Symptoms of childhood trauma or events from long ago sometimes appear with less access to the origin, such as:
Hypervigilance: You may find yourself feeling constantly on guard, living out your days with an expectation of being harmed, attacked, blamed, or criticized. Hypervigilance, a mechanism that is the body’s way of giving you warning of anticipated harm, for you acts as a baseline existence, being in what feels like a constant state of arousal, never allowing for you to relax because you never feel safe. This state of being affects not only your ability to relax and feel calm, but often interferes in your relationships, livelihood, and leisure activities.
Difficultly with closeness in relationships: When you have a history of being harmed, often by someone you loved and trusted, it creates a painful and skewed experience of the act of love in relationship. Mistrust and not letting your guard down became a protective method of survival. Vulnerability, a requisite in relationships, feels like a weakness that leaves you exposed. This push/pull experience often feels draining and subsequently you end up isolating and being alone to avoid the distress of closeness. All of this results in a polarized experience of relationships as either being too close and difficult, or isolated and alone.
Depression and mood instability: It is expected to feel hopelessness that you will ever have a life where these difficulties don’t exist. When you look forward, all you can see is what you have known and where you have been, and it’s hard to imagine love that doesn’t hurt or aloneness that doesn’t feel like abandonment and rejection. It is likely that the wound you have to build your life around created a context in which you had to live your life constantly avoiding ever having to re experience or remember this event or events, so there tends to be a limited, controlled experience of joy and happiness. Ultimately, in an effort to keep something out, you also greatly struggled to let something in, and this reductive way of living takes quite a toll.
Physical health problems: there is no denying that distress affects the body. Often you may find yourself having difficulties sleeping or staying asleep, early waking, nightmares. You might also find yourself with problems with your GI system (stomachaches, irregularities in bowel patterns, and cramping) headaches, body aches and pains that don’t make sense, and/or immune system impairment.
Struggles with anxiety and worry: Ruminations, obsessional thinking- these are all ways you have to tried to relocate feelings of helplessness and feeling not of control. You may find yourself with excessive worries about scenarios that make no logical sense and trying to use intellectual reasoning to attempt to master these scenarios, and find that nothing ever gets resolved. The anxiety can feel so unmanageable at times that you might feel a sense of going “crazy.” This feeling is also a state of being that you utilized since being a child to protect you from knowing what (or who) really was crazy, and also how “crazy” it was what was being done to you. Instead, you took on the role of being the “crazy” one and keep playing out this role with yourself over and over to keep your mind from remembering.
Fear of betraying yourself and your body: You may find yourself feeling sensations inside your body and begin to feel assured that you might have cancer or that you are dying. You may start to feel anxiety or panic and then feel assured you are losing your mind or are going crazy. These feelings, again, are a relocation (or a displacement) of where they actually belong, and it is a learned experience. If you feel your body is sick and become angry with your body for betraying you, it is protecting you from knowing who actually did betray your body. If you feel your mind going crazy and you feel angry at your mind that you feel you cannot trust, it is protecting you from knowing who really was the person who you cannot trust, and what set you up for the harmful experiences you were faced with.
Psychotherapy can help.
Once you observe and identify any symptoms you might be having, therapy will help you to make sense of their origin. These feelings (or symptoms) are not meant to be diminished or managed through external sources, as they were born as means of protection. The careful work of therapy is about developing a care, trust, and assuredness that in this space, you will not be harmed. And once that is established, you and I will talk about these methods of protection you carried throughout your life that are no longer working for you. The work goes slowly because these ways of being in the world have been with you for a very long time, they have grown up with you, and in a strange way, you have developed a trust in their effectiveness. They might feel part of who you are and what keeps you safe. It’s hard to believe that you don’t need protecting anymore when you constantly still feel in danger. It’s hard to believe that there could be life where your mind and body both feel safe. It’s hard to believe that you can end your suffering.
“Honey, may you also choose to give up the prison and do the work to be free. To find in your suffering your own life lessons. To choose which legacy the world inherits. To hand down the pain—or to pass on the gift.”
If you are interested in learning more about beginning psychotherapy, please feel free to contact me. I am happy to talk with you and answer any questions you might have.
