The ‘New Normal’: A Grieving World
With all then restrictions being lifted and lockdowns officially coming to an end there is a sense that life is returning to ‘normal’. But let us take a moment to really reflect on the time that has just passed and recognise that we are all in the grieving process. Grief is a process and it occurs when we experience transition, change, bereavement or loss in our lives. Some of us may have been lucky enough to have only experienced one of these things but some of us may have experienced all and maybe several times over during the span of the pandemic. Framing our collective experience of the pandemic through the lens of the 5 stages of grief may help us to navigate through the myriad of confusing emotions you are currently feeling or are yet to encounter.
Denial: you might find yourself saying “oh, I wasn’t really affected by the pandemic” or “my life didn’t actually change that much”. If those messages resonate with you I would implore you to take some time to really reflect on your experience and to question if are you using denial to protect yourself from fully acknowledging the impact the pandemic has had on your life. When you start to challenge those thoughts you may find you come in contact with some strong emotions. One of the biggest parts we maybe in denial about is how we view other people. For the duration of the pandemic, over a year and half, we have been continuously given the message that other people are dangerous and could be carrying a deadly virus that could kill us! Social isolation mixed with hypervigilance means we have all been living in a constant anxiety or fear response. The thing to acknowledge about these responses are that they are physical and emotional so you can’t logic yourself out of them. Denial is, sometimes seen as, the first stage of grief because when we take a hard look at ourselves we start to open the door to the other emotions of grief and that takes courage.
Anger: Anger arises when we feel a sense of injustice, unfairness or when we have lost a sense of control over our lives. COVID just wreaked havoc on a global scale and posed a real threat to our lives and the lives of those we care about. And we are allowed to feel angry about that! Maybe your life has changed on many levels: you lost a loved one (or several); you lost your job; you lost faith in your government and leaders; you realised that you were not all that happy with your life before the pandemic and now you feel stuck. There is a lot to be angry about and it’s natural! The problem is anger gets a bad reputation as it is, usually, connoted with negativity and harm but any emotion can be expressed in a harmful way or have negative consequences when expressed. Anger can fuel liberation; action accountability; provide protection and drive change. Don’t fear your anger: make space for it, honour it and find a safe way to express it.
Bargaining: When faced with the overwhelming anger and fear it’s natural to try and bargain with yourself, a deity, or the universe, to try and regain some sense of control over your life. Maybe your not religious but find yourself praying or maybe you feel survivor’s guilt when you compare your experiences of the pandemic to others. Guilt and shame tend to live in this stage. It’s common to take on a greater sense of responsibility which can sound like this “if I’m a better person I will be safe from COVID” or “no one I know died so I should count my blessings and help those people who had it worse than me”. Be wary at this stage because you may take on more than you can emotionally handle out of a disproportionate sense of guilt or a need to escape feeling helpless. As with all great disasters, we are about to enter a period of great uncertainty as we do not know what the long term effects of the COVID pandemic will have on the world or our individual or collective lives. I’m not saying don’t help others: I’m saying don’t sacrifice your emotional wellbeing out of a misplaced feeling of guilt. We are coming of the woods but we still need to find our way through this new world on the other side and that may ask more of us than we could ever have imagined.
Depression: sometimes the most misunderstood of the all the stages because of its overuse in our everyday language today. I like to view depression as what happens when we have been emotionally overwhelmed for a prolonged period to of time. It’s a form of dissociation where our bodies and mind shut down because it’s exhausted and needs rest: it’s a protection mechanism that says “if we keep this up we won’t survive”. For the duration of the pandemic we have all been hypervigilant, forming habits around cleanliness and being hyper focused on our health in general. Some of these habits may have become compulsive and you now find yourself locked you into a continuous loop of health anxiety. Anxiety is our bodies way of getting us ready to react to a threat to keep us safe and anyone who have experienced intense anxiety will know how physically and mentally exhausting it can be! The human body wasn’t designed to stay in a prolonged state of being primed to act. There is a reason why depression and anxiety come as a package. Depression is the bodies way of anesthetising you. It isn’t an illness or a sign there is something wrong with you: in fact it’s saying that there is something very right with you!
Acceptance: this stage is sometimes seen as the final stage of grief: the stage that finally marks the end of the torture. But I think this is a potentially harmful way of viewing it because you may find yourself (or others) putting pressure on you to “just be ok” or “to get past it”. A kinder way to view acceptance is to see that it represents movement. Maybe you had a lot of time on furlough to reflect on your life and had time to indulge in some introspection. Maybe you got COVID and survived; maybe you no longer care about your job anymore; you might have realised how not caring for yourself harms you; you might have realised that you have outgrown some of the relationships in your life or you no longer want to be in them. Ultimately, these questions are forcing you to ask who are you now? When you question your sense of self (even in part) it can have significant impact on you emotionally and you may now be wrestling with the big existential questions in life. Acceptance is more than the cognitive acknowledgement of where you are in life now it’s the felt sense that you are different now. Stopping to accept you are lost can give you the breathing room to look back and the strength to start to navigate the unknown ahead.
Self care is vital at this time and finding the time to look after yourself mentally and emotionally is going to help soothe the anxiety and help to build resilience. However, If you have found that you have really struggled emotionally or you can identify with some of the stages above then consider embarking on some counselling. Person Centred Counselling is particularly well suited to the grieving process because the focus is on providing a space where you can be with, and process, your experience of the pandemic.
With great change comes great grief and with that comes great opportunity. All of humanity has been given an opportunity to reflect on our place as a species and ask “were we happy with the way things were before?” Amidst the destruction wreaked by COVID the soil has been laid to plant the seeds of tomorrow. We are all forever changed. So, maybe we shouldn’t view “returning to normal” as the thing we need now. Instead, maybe we need to be brave enough to let go of “normal” and to let yourself grieve.
By Gavin McDonald