Pandemics R Us

Trying, for the fourteenth week in a row, to figure out how I’m going to navigate this pandemic/quarantine/new normal. To be honest, most of what I hated about my life disappeared when schools and workplaces closed. I hated the highly-speeded mornings with lots of tears (some mine, mostly the kids), the need to have every moment structured and planned to ensure “efficiency,” and never having enough time to make everyone in the family happy. I’m doing my best to check my privilege every day. For a huge swath of our planet, I know COVID-19 does not mean more homemade bread, early cocktails, and more leisure time.

Still, I’ve been feeling “stuck off” (a.k.a., depressed) for several months now, and that’s not the best place to be when I’m trying to launch a new counseling and consulting business. It all started last summer when I “retired” from my position as Clinical Director of a university counseling center. I told everyone that I was doing it so I could “chase my dreams” of building something of my own.

Yeah. That’s bullshit. The truth is that I was trying to wake-up from a nightmare.

I had spent the past 20-ish years working in university counseling centers, and I really did love that work (still do). I strove to be the therapist I needed in college, and I NEVER stopped relating to what the students brought to their sessions. When students would say to me, “I shouldn’t be this sad; people have it way worse than me,” I would counter, “Comparison is the thief of joy…and healing.”

When I quit my job at the university, every counseling center in the nation was having the same conversation—how do we help so many students who present with significant symptoms of anxiety and depression? As clinicians, we just couldn’t keep up with the surge that started after 9/11. So, we lost students. At best, they dropped out of school or were suspended because they couldn’t make the grade. At worst, they died by overdose or suicide.

In the college counseling world, the “virus” was overwork, overwhelm, and out-of-control fear about…everything. Students were crying out for help, screaming that the status quo was hurting them. We (the counselors) couldn’t simultaneously meet the demand AND do the outreach necessary to flatten the curve of cases. It sucked.

Moreover, we didn’t have the gear we needed. In mental health, the most critical Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is time. Time to consult, time to metabolize and release what your student just told you, time to reorganize your schedule when you’ve just had too much, and time to rest. As anyone working in an ER right now can tell you, you don’t get that luxury when people are suffering at a rate that no one on the outside can comprehend. I’m pretty sure this is why so many nurses and doctors are posting pictures of themselves, battered and bruised, terrified and exhausted. “See us! Don’t look away! We’re suffering, too!”

My plan for my new business was to help the helpers. I wanted to provide support to those who feel abandoned and invisible in these roles, particularly the mental health providers. And even more than bearing witness to their pain, I wanted to validate the moral injury that their jobs were causing. You know, that feeling of anger that bubbles up when you realize that an injustice is occurring? That distress you feel when you’re being asked to do something that goes against your fundamental values? That sadness you feel when you listen to story after story of people hurting people? That’s moral injury. Yes, we signed up to do this work, but no amount of training prepares you to do “more with less” for a lifetime.

Now I feel stuck because I don’t quite know how to help without sounding like a complete fraud. It was easy for me to help students trying to get through college because, thanks to some amazing mentors in graduate school, I had healed a lot of the wounds I suffered during that period of my life. I didn’t feel like I was in that war zone in my head anymore, and I could authentically say, “It gets better.”

I just don’t know if I can say that to my fellow helpers right now. It doesn’t take a fortune teller to know that a mental health shitstorm is a-brewing as a result of this pandemic, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. More than ever, people will be calling on helpers to give them their Top 10 Tips to Restore Hope that My Life Won’t Always Feel This Hard. I have a lot of protective factors that buoy me along in life, and even I’m combing the internet for wisdom and comfort. Right now, I’m not sure I’m an expert at any of this. 

What DO I know for sure?

• I know that when people feel like they can’t control their environment, they sometimes become irritable, restless, hypervigilant, can’t concentrate, and struggle with excessive worry and insomnia.
  
  Just googled it—that’s anxiety.

• I also know that for other people, extreme environmental stress makes them feel hopeless, apathetic, extremely sad, and they might start to perseverate about the meaninglessness of existence.
  
  That’s depression.

• I know that the more we try to obscure and judge our distressing feelings, the more debilitating these feelings usually become, and a pandemic doesn’t change that fact.

• I know that accurately identifying our feelings so that we can respond appropriately protects us from causing further harm to ourselves and others.

• I also know, “It’s the RELATIONSHIP that heals,” and that applies to both the wounded and the healers. (Thanks, Irvin Yalom.)

So, for those of you come to me for help, that’s what I will offer. A relationship. And in the context of that relationship, I will validate you up and down for feeling morally injured by your fellow humans. And if the uncertainty of the post-pandemic world is making it difficult for you to heal some of your past wounds, I’ll do my best to help you learn new ways of relating to the world. And if in doing that work, you can start to forgive your fellow humans, awesome.  And if your healing inspires my own, well, that’s truly a win-win.