Andrea has been on top of this virus situation better than almost everyone.\u00a0 She is keeping her physical distance, engaging in hobbies, developing new ones, working remotely, staying in touch with friends \u2013 again remotely \u2013 exercising, and eating well.\u00a0 Yet in session and at her job the cracks are beginning to show.\u00a0 One of the issues that brought her to treatment was a tendency to react with great timidity, inner rage, and feelings of being picked on when dealing with coworkers and superiors.\u00a0 This could be very destructive as she works as high level support for even higher level business people; a large part of her job is dealing with difficult, stressed, and at times unreasonably demanding bosses.\u00a0 If she reacts in kind she could of course lose her position.\u00a0 For the first time in a while she found herself quick to react with her old defensiveness, going into the state of seething anger that used to be more of a constant in her life.\u00a0 As result of this tension, Andrea\u2019s initial good adjustment to the stress of the COVID virus has begun to falter; she found herself forgetting to eat, snapping at bosses over email\/text although fortunately stopping herself before hitting \u201csend\u201d.\u00a0 Even when one superior was actually commiserating with her, in a collegial, way, she reflexively experienced it as accusation, almost snapped back in anger.<\/p>\n
Brandon has been dealing with some elderly relatives for many years.\u00a0 These are the people he grew up with, he knows them well, their neediness and how they \u201cguilt me\u201d.\u00a0 He has usually not fallen into the trap of believing he can and must fix everything for them.\u00a0 Yet as the COVID story has developed, he\u2019s become alternately hopeless and enraged with them.\u00a0 From the outside, we can see he\u2019s dumping \u2013 blaming \u2013 his own very understandable COVID-related feelings of anxiety and helplessness on his family who are just doing what they always do; we can see he\u2019s falling back into old ways of reacting \u2013 feeling pressured and guilty, and expressing these in irritation \u2013 rather than face the unwieldy existential worries we all now struggle with.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t see it, couldn\u2019t see how self-destructive and unnecessary his reactions had become, until in session he got the whole story out.\u00a0 Some of these relatives are complaining to him about their breathing problems, pains, fears about the virus, yet they continue to meet each other and with friends in person.\u00a0 Brandon knows better than any of us how unlikely it is that anything he says to his relatives will change their behavior; as to their worries over their symptoms, he\u2019s not a physician so even if they were listening he can\u2019t contribute much on that topic.\u00a0 He knows all this, but seemed to have forgotten it, and he was raging with that same boiling anger we all have when someone \u2013 as he put it at the end of the session \u2013 \u201cmakes me feel useless and invisible; they\u2019re looking at me, nodding as I talk, but if I suddenly disappeared or turned into a gorilla they wouldn\u2019t blink\u201d.\u00a0 In the heat of the virus stresses he forgot it all and like Andrea got caught up in the old script from when he was much younger, much less aware, and much more helpless.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m hearing from some people that their online meet ups, virtual cocktail parties and such, are beginning to feel empty, flat.\u00a0 They say the idea initially seemed good, but now the meetings are leaving some feeling vaguely frustrated and sad, sometimes lonelier than before; like Andrea, some people report becoming (or seeing others become) slightly paranoid, prickly, defensive.\u00a0 One person commented that her friends seem more superficial than before, that her boyfriend for example seems to have \u201cpulled in; he smiles and says the right things but his attention span is cut in half; when I pay close attention I see he hasn\u2019t really heard what I\u2019ve said, and that\u2019s why after our last conversation I spent the rest of the night feeling extra isolated and scared \u2013 couldn\u2019t figure out why, I thought I was getting paranoid, like every sound in the hallway was the virus approaching\u201d.<\/p>\n
I am not exempt from this.\u00a0 In consultation with my financial advisor, I found myself interrupting a lot, grousing impatiently that things weren\u2019t clear to me, in short behaving, feeling, and sounding as I did when I was about 12.\u00a0 (I apologized but let me do it again here:\u00a0 Sorry, pal \u2013 my inner child took over!)<\/p>\n
What\u2019s going on?\u00a0 Two things, at least, and they feed each other, making the whole situation worse.\u00a0 First, everyone is more scared, stressed, uncertain.\u00a0 Under such stresses, most of us become less available to others, shorter in patience and ability to sympathize as well or for as long.\u00a0 As we saw in Brandon and Andrea and, yes, me, we also tend to regress, to feel and behave as we did when much younger.\u00a0 Meanwhile, it\u2019s those same bad feelings that make us needier.\u00a0 So you have a kind of perfect storm.\u00a0 Everyone\u2019s a bit (or a lot) more frazzled and prickly, everyone turns with a bit (or a lot) more need for emotional sustenance to others who are themselves less available to give that sustenance.<\/p>\n
Second, many of us aren\u2019t admitting that this is happening, inside and between us.\u00a0 Brandon and Andrea, above, felt more exposed and shaky, but fell into blaming others for it.\u00a0 I did the same thing.\u00a0 Doing that of course drives others away which only increases our underlying sense of isolation and shakiness.\u00a0 In some of the on line gatherings people may try extra hard to be cheerful and positive, even as they give lip service \u2013 often in a glib sort of way \u2013 to the difficulties of this virus situation, such as lack of control, social isolation, economic anxieties, losses, etc.\u00a0 But this defense of denial, of forced gaiety, is brittle.\u00a0 The efforts to avoid the bad stuff always deplete a person\u2019s inner resources and thus their availability to actually hear from and share with others, even if on the surface they\u2019re trying to do just that.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s missing is taking a moment to stop lying about what\u2019s happening to us internally, to be real with ourselves and each other about all those unattractive, unflattering, uncomfortable, unwieldy feelings that come with this new normal.\u00a0 When you take that time, you\u2019ll notice that although COVID is new, the feelings being triggered are not.\u00a0 Quite the contrary, they pepper most of our lives:\u00a0 Loss, fear, lack of control, feeling unsupported or worse, anxiety over the unpredictable, loneliness, \u2026\u00a0 But we humans, particularly us boys, like to think we get over all that.\u00a0 Let me put this more simply:\u00a0 I see us feeling scared, sad, lost, shaky, and not wanting to admit it, thinking all those feelings will go away if we buckle down and focus on the next project.\u00a0 Sometimes that works, but only in crisis.\u00a0\u00a0 Dissociation has its place \u2013 you don\u2019t stop to explore your feelings during the battle.\u00a0 But as any combat veteran will tell you, the feelings come back to bite you when you\u2019re off the battlefield.\u00a0\u00a0 As survivors of childhood trauma know, all the accomplishment in the world doesn\u2019t kill the deeper anxieties, nightmares, or depression. \u00a0The cure is to go through them.<\/p>\n
Let me take a moment to emphasize that I\u2019m not discussing external reality even of this very real threat to and change in all our lives; I\u2019m talking about inner experience.\u00a0 In daily reality, we have ways of handling the situation, we have brains and other inner resources to cope with external demands of it and even with the feelings of isolation, fear, lack of control, and of course loss \u2013 two wonderful people I know died of the virus last week within a 12 hour period; believe me, I felt slammed.\u00a0 The problems come when we don\u2019t acknowledge that sense of begin slammed, and especially when we don\u2019t attend to other, deeper feelings and memories triggered<\/u> by current events.\u00a0 That triggering of older problems, older hangups and unprocessed experiences, is what causes the real problems if we try to ignore them, to reason them away, to skip over or push them down; that\u2019s when we slip into old ways of feeling and acting, as we saw in the cases above (me included).<\/p>\n
Again, because we\u2019re all more shaky nowadays, the danger of ignored inner experience can accelerate in a vicious cycle as we move through a world which is more threatening and in which people may be less available to us.\u00a0 So, like Andrea almost dumping on her superiors, like Brandon pulling away from his relatives and feeling helpless and irritated, like me dumping on my financial advisor, when we regress we tend to pass it on which adds more stress and triggers to the next person.\u00a0\u00a0 That is to say, the shit rolls down hill.<\/p>\n
Andrea really is being pressured more unreasonably by her superiors, because they too are scared.\u00a0 Suddenly she is getting less gratitude for her extra work, more demands that she do the impossible, more irritation when she cannot always comply.\u00a0 Not noticing this simple reality because of her own blind spots, Andrea reacts by feeling self-doubt and loneliness and persecution, which she tries to avoid by blaming everyone else.<\/p>\n
But in reality Andrea, her bosses, me, most of us can with some effort handle this crisis and whatever it brings to our particular doorstep \u2013 the stressed bosses and relatives, the changes and restrictions to our daily lives, the anxiety of getting sick, even the loss of people we know.\u00a0 And there is lots of help out there to do it \u2013 websites, advice from many experts, guidelines for emotional stress and daily living, etc.\u00a0 But we fail to engage our brains and coping skills when 1) we don\u2019t let ourselves notice and acknowledge just how lost or scared we feel, and especially when 2) those feelings trigger deeper, older feelings we have tried to push away or thought we were beyond.<\/p>\n
By the way, an important added stress here is that the restrictions on our lives are losing their novelty.\u00a0 As one patient put it, \u201cfor the first week it was kind of an adventure, now it\u2019s getting oppressive.\u00a0 And scary.\u201d\u00a0 And for that first week or so this man was coping rather well; now he is beginning to show some of his old symptoms and he\u2019s having some trouble concentrating.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s to do?\u00a0 First, as we all know, do all those things that our physicians and others are advising.\u00a0 Take the time and effort to eat properly, get some exercise, stay in contact with others, find ways to contribute if you can, find hobbies and projects to fill your time, turn off the news after you\u2019ve heard it, use the solitude in fact as a springboard to explore whatever you\u2019ve not had time to before, follow a schedule, don\u2019t spend the day unwashed and in pajamas, and so on.\u00a0 But when these fail it\u2019s time to take that moment to notice what\u2019s happening to you inside<\/u> \u2013 what fears and fantasies are lurking, what feelings, images, memories are bubbling up just outside of your awareness, and what physically is happening in your gut, chest, shoulders, breath, etc.\u00a0 This is not easy for many of us.\u00a0 We have deeply built into our personalities a strong tendency to avoid \u2013 to resist<\/u><\/a> \u2013 awareness of difficult inner experiences.\u00a0 First, as children we have to escape such overwhelming experiences because they really can flatten us.\u00a0 Second, looking at our evolution you can see how resistance is adaptive.\u00a0 Back when we were swinging through the trees and later living in caves, there wasn\u2019t much room in life for self-reflection.\u00a0 Stop and dwell on your inner state and you might get eaten.\u00a0 We boys especially have been selected, and now socialized, to go out and solve things, not to explore unflattering, ungainly, and often very difficult to articulate inner experiences.<\/p>\n But that is precisely where the answer lies.\u00a0 In all the cases I described above, the cure comes when we can take that step back and notice \u2013 feel, if only for a few moments \u2013 what we are going through.\u00a0 If you\u2019re having a real world problem, whether a high pressure job or the COVID-19 crisis, these can and must eased by real world solutions, the coping strategies posted all over the internet these days, most of which are very helpful.\u00a0 But when those solutions don\u2019t work then there is more going on.\u00a0 Something is being triggered in you that is closer to the core of your personality, the way you\u2019ve always been, even if you were able to avoid it until the current and very big trigger of this virus.<\/p>\n At that point the cure is the opposite of everything I quoted as healthy coping.\u00a0 We are told what we can and should do to stay grounded in external reality, in the people around us, in family and friends and work.\u00a0 But now the cure becomes noticing and exploring your inner world.\u00a0 This can be very difficult to do alone; most people need a guide or if they\u2019re lucky a friend with an exceptionally open and attentive ear.\u00a0 Such ears can be hard to find in the best of times and may seem especially rare now when everyone around us has had their own lives shaken.<\/p>\n Jenny found herself sobbing in a recent session over the terror of \u201ceverything we love taken away.\u00a0 Everything!\u201d\u00a0 As soon as she said that out loud, she could hear her overreaction to current events, that the virus is causing real loss in the world but it is not the end of everything. \u00a0Jenny\u2019s more primitive horror is something being triggered by the virus.\u00a0 The current crisis in the world is reminding Jenny \u2013 unconsciously, until we talked about it in session \u2013 of earlier much more horrific times in her life when she really was desperately helpless and violently deprived.\u00a0 She grew up in a very frightening and unstable home in which eventually one of her parents was killed.\u00a0 She was taken from her other parent at age 4, told by her grandparents that \u2013 I kid you not! \u2013 she shouldn\u2019t whine, shouldn\u2019t grieve, should get over it quickly, in fact shouldn\u2019t even cry.\u00a0\u00a0 Jenny was living in a real horror where \u201ceverything\u201d really was taken from her and at a time in her life when she had no emotional, intellectual, physical resources to fend for herself or to comfort herself.\u00a0 At that age if you\u2019re told not to cry you go along; you make yourself nuts holding it all in \u2013 what else can a four-year-old do?\u00a0 You can\u2019t stand up to the adults who give you not only your food and shelter but your sense of what\u2019s real; a four-year-old can\u2019t say \u201cno, I\u2019m in a great deal of emotional pain, caused by real losses; I must grieve\u201d.\u00a0 She can\u2019t even think such a thought, and certainly cannot tolerate such despair without some emotional support.\u00a0 No, you turn yourself inside out trying to comply.\u00a0 Think of the kid in \u201cGood Will Hunting\u201d.\u00a0 Physically abused casually and intensely by his father, the young man years later can only feel his disgust and rage.\u00a0 The rest of his childhood experiences and reactions to them he shuts down.\u00a0 It\u2019s all that other ignored pain that constricts his life.\u00a0 While he denies feeling much besides anger and disgust, we of course can see that is depressed, discouraged, hopeless, and quite timid under his bluster, living a very constricted life despite his many talents and opportunities.\u00a0 It is only when he is able to remember and feel<\/u> the horror of those days, which he does in the climactic scene in the movie, that he can come out of his depression and disgust, can begin to avail himself of all that life has to offer him \u2013 genius level intelligence that will take him far in whatever field he chooses, a pretty and sympathetic Harvard pre-medical student who loves him.<\/p>\n Like the fictional Will Hunting, Jenny recovered when she remembered the old and real horror that was behind her current despair about the COVID-19 virus taking away \u201ceverything we love\u201d. \u00a0Once she became aware that \u201cOh that\u2019s<\/u> what\u2019s been hurting\u201d, she could much more easily handle the virus situation.\u00a0 Her adult self kicked back in with an attitude of \u201cI got this\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the pattern in a lot of sessions I\u2019ve had lately.\u00a0 If a person can chase down whatever is making them feel helpless, shaky, scared, the virus situation resumes being a real world adjustment problem with real world solutions, even if the \u201csolution\u201d is sometimes facing \u201cI don\u2019t know yet\u201d or \u201cthat person is gone and that hurts\u201d.<\/p>\n Again this process is not an easy one, although it tends to sound that way in print or as depicted in movies like \u201cGood Will Hunting\u201d, because everything in our DNA seems to make us resist it.\u00a0 As another patient put it to me \u201cit\u2019s not the virus that hurts; it\u2019s much worse.\u00a0 It\u2019s like some terrible horror movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s so bad that you can\u2019t feel it for long, you cry and cry and then it goes away really fast, can\u2019t even remember it\u201d.\u00a0 That resistance to staying with an uncomfortable feeling is why it\u2019s often very hard to do alone.\u00a0 There are some who perhaps can, certainly there are artists with access to these inner experiences who then produce wonderful expressions of it \u2013 paintings, songs, symphonies, poetry, acting moments.\u00a0 And of course there are some lucky people for whom a virtual cocktail party is enough to feel grounded again.\u00a0 But for the rest of us\u2026<\/p>\n So take that moment. \u00a0Breathe, sit, pace, but however you do it quiet yourself enough to ask that simple but oh so slippery question \u201cwhat just happened to me?\u201d \u00a0You may feel a welling up of physical discomfort \u2013 your stomach dropping, your throat or chest tightening, etc. \u00a0That\u2019s your limbic system, your instincts honed over the millennia telling you to dissociate, to flee those feelings and get back to \u201cwork\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s also your childhood brain (again limbic) protecting you because a child can\u2019t cope with such intense feeling.\u00a0 But that was then.\u00a0 Whatever\u2019s coming up won\u2019t crush you now, even though it may seem like it will. \u00a0And you\u2019ll feel better if you go through it.\u00a0 So instead of any distracting or agitation, breathe into<\/u> that discomfort.\u00a0 Counterintuitive but it works.\u00a0 (Any of you who ski may resonate with this analogy:\u00a0 When you first learn to ski a steep trail, you have to struggle to lean down<\/u> the mountain as you make your turns.\u00a0 Every strand of DNA in your bones says \u201cpull up! Pull up and away from the fall!\u201d\u00a0 But if you do that, the skis go out from under you, you\u2019re out of control, and soon you fall.\u00a0 If you lean down the mountain as you turn, contrary to all your instincts you go slower.)<\/p>\n If you can, find people you talk to about such things, because again it\u2019s hard to do this breathing into the pain by one\u2019s self.\u00a0 Nurture any friendships that provide a place for this.\u00a0 And if you can get out and do it in person in these scary times that is usually more powerful.\u00a0 You might incorporate some of the procedures 12 Step groups use to forestall the many slippery ways we have of avoiding productive self-exploration and self-expression.\u00a0 For example, no-one answers for 30 seconds after someone shares so that everyone especially the speaker can digest what\u2019s been said.\u00a0 Such quick answering can have the effect similar to what I said above about shit rolling downhill:\u00a0 The responder may be reflexively pushing out \u2013 unconsciously \u2013 his\/her own uncomfortable but necessary feelings.\u00a0 The responder thereby shuts down exactly the processing, the healing we gathered to encourage, in the speaker and the responder and anyone else in the room. \u00a0This is sometimes stated as a rule about \u201ccrosstalk\u201d: \u00a0No commenting on what the speaker said, no advising, restating, or other intrusions into the speaker\u2019s struggle to identify, articulate, and process whatever is disrupting their functioning and inner world.<\/p>\n When COVID-19 first came into our lives, as with any crisis, there was of course a time for dissociation, for pushing away one\u2019s feelings to take care of business.\u00a0\u00a0 Decisions had to be made, new routines established.\u00a0 But after you\u2019ve washed your hands, put away the supplies, disinfected surfaces, and everything else you can do to control the situation, if you don\u2019t come back to that basic question of \u201cwhat\u2019s happening to me\u201d, you risk becoming a victim of your personality quirks, your hangups.\u00a0 Catching the inner demons triggered by COVID, putting them into words, sharing them with someone else, these have left everyone I described above calmer and saner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Andrea has been on top of this virus situation better than almost everyone.\u00a0 She is keeping her physical distance, engaging in hobbies, developing new ones, working remotely, staying in touch with friends \u2013 again remotely \u2013 exercising, and eating well.\u00a0 … Continue reading