The Collective Trauma of Covid-19
The way to get through these terrible times is to let them make you sad.
We have never been so alone together, nor so together while being vulnerably alone. The novel coronavirus had already wrought the conditions for extraordinary collective trauma.
Across the country and around the world, as we seek to avoid being traumatized by this tragic time, we must understand that trauma is not the same as suffering emotional upset, pain, fear, grief, rage or panic — not if we can move through those emotions, find ways of releasing them so as to return to a full, present sense of ourselves.
We are traumatized only when we become more constricted than we were before the event that induced the stressful emotions: when we remain fearful or embittered after the threat has passed, defensive or aggressive in the absence of present danger, in chronic pain when nothing in the moment is jabbing at us. The experience of genuine grief protects from trauma. “We shall be saved in an ocean of tears,” as the Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld has astutely said.
In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself in a state of partial denial. “What are they making such a fuss about?” I thought. “It’s no worse than the flu.” Yes, I sounded a little like the former U.S. president, who has elevated denial to heights of perilous absurdity. But over time, I began to notice a heaviness in my chest, a constant tension.
I wondered what that was about. As things go, I’m personally among the least inconvenienced by the social restrictions. My only agenda for these months was to be at home, writing my next book. In that regard, the lockdown was a godsend, an unasked for but helpful disciplinary measure imposed on me by fate. So why the tension? I soon recognized I was tensing to defend against opening to grief.
Something in me both understood and resisted accepting that, for better or worse, I was losing something. We all were losing something: a sense of security that, even if illusory at the best of times, we all cling to; a sense of normalcy, which, no matter how precarious, holds us in a world that appears familiar and in which we feel we know how to be; a sense of ourselves. When I finally allowed and acknowledged the grief and allowed, as best I could, the reality of the loss, the tension abated.
This is a discipline. When you notice any tension in yourself, take time to be with it, to accept it, give it quiet attention. Deeper, more authentic feelings will emerge. If you can, share those feeling with someone you trust.
Sitting with grief is necessary, but this always-difficult process is made yet more so by our current predicament. Touch is essential to human beings; it is the most elemental way of connecting. At times of grieving, the universal human custom is to gather, to mourn together, to embrace one another, to engage in keening, prayer, ritual, to eat together, to support one another in absorbing the loss. The virus has inhibited and limited the physical dimensions of grief. It claims its victims without warning, one by one, in isolation, without the solace of loved ones to ease and support the passing. After the death, mourners cannot physically comfort one another. Even funerals take place in eerie solitude. One of our challenges to avoid trauma is to grieve together, alone. People are finding beautiful ways of doing so, both in Nova Scotia and across the world.
These displays of collective grief remind us that we need not be traumatized — that is, constricted — by painful and fearful events now engulfing us. We can grow from them.
It is not too early to begin asking what the lessons of today’s catastrophes may be. One obvious truth being revealed is the unity of all life and, in particular, of all human life. Can we still we deny it, will we remain oblivious to it when this is all over — if it ever will be completely over?
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the ways in which this truth is too often obscured in our culture, reminding us of social fractures we have too long ignored. Across the world the most vulnerable and most oppressed and marginalized disproportionately succumb to the virus. The death rate among African Americans, for example, far exceeds that of the Caucasian population, signaling that the former bear the brunt of the physiological and immunological stress of inequality. Similarly, recent events surrounding physical and sexual abuses of females, highlight the deep misogyny embedded in this culture. How many women suffer daily, how many children traumatized, how many men blinded and hurt by the unconscious, hateful anti-female bias characterizing our society?
Grief is to be experienced, lessons to be gleaned from these tragedies. If we fail at that, trauma will be the result.
Gabor Maté is a retired physician and author. His next book, The Myth of Normal: Illness and Health in an Insane Culture will be published in 2021.
