11/04/2020
Loss and COVID-19
Hello again,
My specialism in my counselling practice is loss and bereavement and I thought it may be useful for us to take a look at our current situation through the lens of loss. Loss is a universal human experience but we are often ill prepared for it. It is not much talked about and when it hits us, we can be unsure that what we are experiencing is “normal” and this may cause unnecessary anxiety.
We are currently experiencing multiple losses. We have lost our normality, both in our work lives and our personal lives. Our everyday lives are different and we feel the loss of connection. We have lost our sense of safety and security. We have lost things long planned for and looked forward to. As we look out into the rest of humanity, we realise the loss is much bigger than us. Usually our losses are very personal, maybe shared with our immediate circle. This loss is a collective one but also unique to each of our experiences. We will each be experiencing the losses in our own ways, forged by the unique blueprint of our lifelong experiences.
If we are experiencing loss, we may well be doing a certain amount of grieving. Grief is a process of adaptation and adjustment and although usually associated with bereavement , it is a process which we undergo in many experiences of loss. The first things to say about the grief process is that it is normal, it is exhausting and it is anxiety provoking.
There have been a number of phases or stages identified during the process of grief. For the purposes of this blog it many be helpful to consider the stages of grief first identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Research around grief and my own anecdotal evidence from working with clients indicate very clearly that these stages are not necessarily linear. In my experience, rarely linear. Not everyone will go through all of the stages, we may experience two together, some may last longer than others, we may skip over some, we may revisit some. They are general indications. There is no specific way to grieve or sequence to grief. Each journey is unique and normal to each individual.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It may be that you will recognise some of these in reaction to your current losses.
Denial – denial is a very useful defence when something happens that is beyond our comprehension or beyond our capacity to cope at this current time. Do you remember watching the news coming from China or Italy and thinking it wouldn’t affect us? That people were making a fuss about nothing? Thinking that we’d still be having that holiday at Easter? We played a game of national denial for a while – this was a mild illness that wouldn’t affect most of us. Some of us felt the dream-like quality of it, the unreality.
Anger – this brings with it strong emotions at the effects the loss is having on us. We may be angry at our enforced isolation, or being unable to isolate when others can, at having to adapt to new ways of working, of having to take on more responsibility, of the expectations on us, at what other people are doing (or not doing), at the government, at our family. This list is not exhaustive. What I do know is that the last time you ended up shouting at one of your family members for not hanging up the tea towel again, (tell me I’m not alone here) your anger was not about the tea towel. It’s never about the tea towel. We often have a tricky relationship with anger. We end up repressing it or we end up hostile and raging. Neither is healthy and both come from positions of fear and anxiety. Anger has to be experienced, the reason for it investigated and acknowledged so that we are in charge of what we do with it and can chose to let it go or allow it to mobilise us to make a change. Neither of these should damage us or someone else.
Bargaining – this is where we may have tried to strike deals with the virus. If we eat really healthily, exercise more, wash our hands every 30 minutes, isolate, do good deeds, join the national or local effort, perhaps it will leave us unscathed. If it leaves us unscathed we promise to live better lives, see our friend/relatives more, do all the things we think we should. Our national bargaining has been about staying home and following the social isolation rules. Of course none of these things are bad, but seen in the context of loss, some of us may see some of actions motivated by a sense of “bargaining”.
Depression – not in the sense of clinical depression but in the sense of our difficult days or tricky moments where we are overwhelmed by our sense of loss. Sometimes this is around our loss of knowing what to do, or feeling that we are not coping. This often brings with it fear and hopelessness.
Acceptance – Gabor Maté’s explanation of acceptance seems particularly pertinent to our current situation. Whether we chose to call what we are experiencing our “new normal” or our “current reality”, acceptance is part of the work of grief.
"Acceptance is simply the willingness to recognize and accept how things are. It is the courage to permit negative thinking to inform our understanding, without allowing it to define our approach to the future. Acceptance does not demand becoming resigned to the continuation of whatever circumstances may trouble us, but it does require a refusal to deny exactly how things happen to be now.” (from "When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress" by Gabor Maté)
I hope some of that has been useful for you to reflect on. My intention has been to try to normalise the sometimes confusing and scary emotions we may be experiencing. I am acutely aware that I have not yet tackled the subject of the bereavement that some of us may be experiencing in the days and weeks to come. I’m working on it.
Stay safe,
Warm wishes,
Alyson
