Article: Happy 1st Birthday to the Pandemic; How we’ve experienced collective trauma without our self-esteem buffers
At the time I’m writing this, the Covid-19 pandemic has been raging on in the UK for what feels like a life-time. Google tells me that the first confirmed case “arrived on 31st January 2020 (11 months, 2 weeks and 5 days ago)” (Wikipedia, 2021). We are hurtling at an alarming speed towards the first anniversary of the virus infecting someone in the UK.
Casting your mind back to pre-Covid life feels like a mental workout. So much has changed, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine leaving the house without your arsenal of hand sanitisers, masks and wipes. Watching a film or TV programme where crowds of people are crammed into a bar, shaking hands or hugging is jarring to watch. For those that have been working from home, leaving the house to go to work seems an alien concept. There are so many examples of the every-day routines and rituals that we have all had to change, adjust or refrain from completely.
But more than this; there are the deeper, relational effects of social distancing and the three lockdowns that we have endured as a nation. Prior to lockdown measures, the Understanding Society Survey found that 8.5% of people in the UK answered that they were often or always lonely. Covid Social Study data collected between 21st March and 10th May 2020 showed that this number had risen to 18.5% (What Works Wellbeing, 2020). You’ve probably heard a lot about loneliness in the media throughout the pandemic and it’s adverse effects on people’s mental, psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing.
I think loneliness is just the tip of the iceberg.
A less-talked-about symptomatic phenomena of the pandemic has been the existential trauma that it has caused us all. Often trauma is talked about from a neuroscience-heavy, biological perspective. This is useful, and we also need to understand the existential context of trauma; how it impacts our relationship with life, death and the meaning we make from them. Dr. Robert Stolorow talks about “the absolutisms of everyday life”: The things we feel we know to be true about the world, and whose validity is not open for discussion. Like saying “see you later” to a friend, or “see you in the morning” to your child. These statements and the way that they are not questioned helps us to experience the world as predictable, stable and therefore safe. Stolorow says that “It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the world”. (Stolorow, 1999, cited in Stolorow, 2015)
If, like me, you were born and raised in the UK, we have grown up in a first-world country, where we can mostly rely on the safety-net of a welfare system and healthcare that is free-at-the-point-of -use, and where most natural disasters happen somewhere else, to someone else. A global pandemic causing at best, severe disruption, and at worst, death and first-hand trauma would have seemed incomprehensible to many of us just over a year ago. The absolutism that we can say “see you later” to your parents as you leave their house to return the next day seemed undoubtable. The absolutism of living in a country not threatened by a potentially fatal virus and economic peril was taken for granted. Until we got here; where the things we took to be absolute were shattered and the unquestionable “truths” were ripped away from us. For these last 11 months, 2 weeks and 5 days, the whole population has had to face the devastating realisation that nothing is certain, and very little is within our control.
So the existential picture is not looking great, and thus is changing the way that we see ourselves as individuals. The absolutisms deluded us into believing that we were in control of everything, and that we lived in a part of the world that was invincible, impenetrable and omnipotent. During this pandemic, we have had to face just how wrong we were. Ouch. To add salt to our collective wound, we have also had to cope with the shattering of those beliefs without the usual “buffers” that help us to continue on with a solid sense of who we are. I call them self-esteem buffers because they are the things in our lives that we use when shit hits the fan, and they remind us of who we are, and that we’re OK. Our buffers used to be work, socialising, partying, physical connection with friends, family and lovers, school/university, shopping, getting beauty treatments, going to the gym, spa days, playing group sports, and many other things. Even if we were experiencing a collective trauma anyway, the gentle chugging along of our absolutisms in the form of these buffers would be reminders that we are OK and the world around us is OK. Not having these buffers to gently nudge against as we slide down the slippery bowling alley of Pandemic Life means we just keep gathering speed, crashing painfully into everything, feeling bruised and injured.
If there is one thing you take away from this article, it’s that this is a collective experience- it’s happening to all of us. Some people still have some buffers in tact, and this can make a rough journey gentler. Others have had less buffers than ever before and are feeling every bump and scrape. It’s all relative and it’s all valid.
References:
Stolorow, R. (2015) ‘A phenomenological-contextual, existential and ethical perspective on emotional trauma’. To be published in Psychoanaltyic Review 102(1), February 2015. Available at: https://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Stolorow-R.-A-Phenomenological-Contextual_Existential.pdf. (Accessed 19th January 2021)
Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. (2004, July 22). FL: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved January 19th 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom
What Works Wellbeing (2020) How has Covid-19 and assocaited lockdown measures affected loneliness in the UK? Available at: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/COVID-LONELINESS-2020.pdf (Accessed 19 January 2021)
