Trauma, COVID-19, and Brene Brown’s new podcast

These are certainly some strange times. My hunch is that you’ve experienced ebbs and flows of highs and lows, grief and sorrow, gratitude, and anger. I certainly have. Sheesh, last week felt like a tough year. Collectively, we are experiencing so much anxiety right now and this is to be expected. We are undergoing a global trauma, a pandemic…and we’re surprised that our anxiety has skyrocketed?

When I say the word “trauma”, perhaps what comes to your mind are things like sexual and physical abuse, natural disasters, robberies, rape, poverty, war, or serious accidents. And all of that is trauma. So is a global pandemic that has caused thousands of deaths, financial insecurity, and has had an overwhelming impact on the way we live our daily lives. What we are experiencing is a collective trauma.

And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, if it’s hard for you to admit that this is in fact traumatic, I’d ask you to get curious about what it is about the word that triggers you. Are you a minimizer and a bypasser? Do you think that we just need to all be positive and power through all of this? Is this collective trauma triggering your own unresolved stuff? (*I think the answer for literally all of us right now is a resounding YES, at least if we’re honest*)  

Trauma is a response to an event—it is not an event itself. Two people who’ve experienced the same traumatic experience (i.e.: you and your partner or family members right now) will have different reactions based on your own histories, your personalities, and things like available social supports and the availability of resources. Our culture needs a massive reframe about what trauma is and isn’t. Trauma isn’t just the big stuff, it’s the little stuff, too. Trauma is essentially the experience of being overwhelmed. In fact, our nervous system (the body) cannot tell the difference between a trauma and just being overwhelmed. They’re literally one in the same.

Trauma/being overwhelmed is fundamentally about being stuck in either a high-level or a low-level of arousal. In the psychology world, we often refer to that as our Window of Tolerance. Stress and trauma shrink or shorten our window of tolerance; in other words, it doesn’t take much to throw us off balance or into a state of hyper or hypo arousal (over or under-functioning). Healing/coping, then, involves expanding the window of tolerance so that you can tolerate distress and cope without shifting into a state of hyper and hypo arousal. And doing this work, this hard and uncomfortable and sacred work, is how we heal.

Let me pause. For literally all of us right now, we are being forced to look at this. We can no longer ignore the way our mind and body respond to hard things. We can no longer ignore how we over and under function as a way of life. I mean, you can do that. But I believe we were made for so much more than living in a state of constant stress and anxiety and/or withdrawal and disassociation.

Also, let me just say this. I am close to graduation, close to being able to call myself a therapist. And these past few weeks have been HARD. I have oscillated in and out of feeling totally anxious and irritated, and completely numbed out, frozen, and withdrawn. Those of us that are in the field of mental health are not immune to this stuff because it’s ‘our field’. This experience, this pendulation, is the essence of what it means to be a human and to struggle. Helpers and empaths and highly sensitive people struggle too, maybe more so, because we’re just more aware and attuned to this stuff. It’s easy to know all the facts about trauma— but knowing it cognitively and doing the healing work, restoring the mind and the body back to equilibrium and harmony, is hard as hell. It’s a practice. It’s something you commit to, and then re-commit to it over and over again. Because healing is a spiral, not a line.

If you know me at all, you know that Brene Brown is one of my biggest teachers. Her work has radically changed my life and perspectives. She just released her podcast—Unlocking Us—and it is brilliant and necessary. The first podcast is called Brene on FFT’s, which stands for Fucking First Times. And you know what is a Fucking First Time…us living in a global pandemic! So, thank you, Brene Brown for reminding us all.

In this podcast episode she talks about how we are anxious, uncertain, and afraid and how we need to own that. We have to, like I tell my client’s, ride the emotional wave. And, we have to learn how two seemingly opposite truths can both coexist. Like Brene says, we can be uncertain and also know we’re safe. We can be totally not okay and also know that we’re going to be okay. We cannot ignore what we’re all feeling right now. We have to name it to tame it. We have to say it to story it, to make meaning out of it. Look, NO ONE, is truly okay right now. We don’t know how to do this and it’s truly okay that it’s hard. We are all collectively grieving because all of us have lost something during this time, whether that’s a job, a vacation, time with family/friends, a wedding, or just the loss of personal space and autonomy. 

In the podcast episode, Brene also points out something really important, that needs to be said. She said something along the lines of this: denying your disappointment doesn’t make you strong, it makes you less kind and less empathetic. Look, the last thing we need is toxic positivity and denial that stuff isn’t hard right now. Gratitude and optimism and positivity are important, yes, but they’re not helpful if they’re taking the place of your negative feelings, or if you’re using these things to numb out or bypass or suppress the grief you feel. Darkness and light can coexist right now, and for always.

I hope more than ever, you are taking care of yourself and holding yourself in gentle kindness. There is so much circulating on social media about how to use this quarantine time as a time of hyper-productivity. And if that’s you, cool. But what would it mean if you actually slowed down? And hear me when I say that I speak that with so much compassion because I am still discovering who I am when I go slow, who I am separate from my work and achievements. It is so hard for me. And yet, it is so necessary that my body learns how to tolerate distress right now and still feel safe. It is so necessary for not just me, but for the collective. We weren’t created to be machines, to go at the pace that the systems around us have shaped us to go. We are creative, messy, and playful people—yet for many, it is buried underneath our trauma, it’s hidden behind our masks.

Can we let this time, this strange and uncomfortable time, remind us of who we are at our core, underneath the shell of what we do? Can we let this time teach us that we must learn how to surrender control and let go and heal? Can we let this time show us what we value and where, perhaps, we need to make adjustments? Can we use this time to reorganize our internal worlds, just as we are doing our external worlds? Can we use this time to make peace with ourselves, to practice self-compassion and grace?

I hope, for the sake of our hearts and for the world, that we can.

Go slow, name your feelings, ask for what you need, and take care of yourself and your nervous system.

In love,

Rach

This pandemic experience is a massive experiment in collective vulnerability. We can be our worst selves, when we’re afraid, or our very best, bravest selves. In the context of fear and vulnerability, there is often very little in between because when we are uncertain and afraid our default is self-protection. We don’t have to be scary when we’re scared. Let’s choose awkward, brave, and kind. And let’s choose each other. — brene brown