Healing Collective Trauma; steps to help yourself during the Covid pandemic. (Copy)
This pandemic has been a challenging time for so many of us. Fear, misinformation, fake news, and isolation have all increased the difficulty of the experience. The beginning of the pandemic was like our whole world system went into fight or flight/sympathetic activation. Thoughts and worries racing, trying to conserve resources and use them well, lots of energy and instincts to fight, argue, and rationalize. Or some people’s instinct is are to run away and simply not to face the issues. Others freeze and shut down as aspects of depression. We aren’t meant to operate in sympathetic activation all the time, it exhausts our internal resources and we don’t sleep, eat or function well.
It feels like most of us are currently depressed, dealing with anxiety or both. Which makes total sense. Human are social animals and needs things like physical contact, presence, emotional resonance, and other people’s nervous systems to connect to, as a way to regulate ourselves. If you are feeling depressed, tired, anxious, and exhausted you are not alone. Here are some of the things you can do to help alleviate the loneliness and isolation of the pandemic which greatly effect mental wellbeing.
Connect to another person. Call, zoom, meet in a park with masks and social distancing, take a yoga class online, watch a church service and interact, do something to reach out to others today. It is important for mental health to have what is called emotional resonance. It is the music that flows back and forth between two souls when they connect. When I am connected to someone I can feel the emotions and experience in his or her voice, and I can feel them feeling me. This is essential. Emotional resonance is so powerful it can heal trauma and the effects of PTSD. The vagal nerve has an aspect that flows into the heart. When an individual’s heart is open, it can be observed in the function of this nerve. That experience of an open heart is an important regulating aspect helping the body go from sympathetic activation into the more functional, calmer, parasympathetic activation. If a person in fight or flight can connect deeply with a person who in in parasympathetic activation with her heart open, then that back and forth can be deeply healing and foster nervous system regulation. This can happen by listening and speaking with another on the phone. You can feel the presence. Pick an empathetic person or organization to connect to. Something that gives you hope and renews your ability to generate faith.
Allow yourself to grieve. Grieve for the people who have lost their lives to this virus. Grieve for the changes that have happened in your world. This is a lot. So many people have lost businesses, jobs, finical opportunities, and their sense of security. Things have changed so fast. Give yourself times to cry, get angry, whatever you need to do to process all that has been going on. This is a profoundly lonely time. Pick healthy, or at least non-destructive ways, to express the emotions you are feeling. I can often be found “dancing it out.” One client expressed her anger in a safe way by placing dishes in a plastic trash bag before hurling them at the wall, in a way to honor and expel some of the anger she was experiencing. Just the act of allowing yourself to feel emotions is important. Feel whatever arises, it is ready to be acknowledged, felt and then it will release, dissolve, or transform. It is in energy’s nature to change and our bodies hold the wisdom of hundreds of thousands of years. The body know’s how to let go.
Take time to be inside your body. Go for a walk, get a massage, meditate, do a mindfulness practice. Take a moment to feel your heart. What does it feel like? What is the physical narrative happening inside your body right now? Insight Timer is a great app with thousands of guided meditation and music/sound healing that can be dowloaded for free. Go into nature and watch the cycles that continue undisturbed.
Show yourself loving kindness. Do one kind thing for yourself today. Make a favorite meal, take a shower, or choose not to beat yourself up for the next 30 minutes. If an opportunity arrises to be patient, kind, or compassionate with yourself; take it.