COVID-19 Forced Us Into Something Unexpected: Collective Grief
This feeling isn’t just cabin fever or anxiety or depression. Here’s what it really is.
This piece has been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of days now, and I’m glad Harvard Business Review published an interview last Monday with David Kessler, an expert on death and grief, to shed light upon what the human race is experiencing because of COVID-19. He said:
“Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different… The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”
Our counseling services have been unusually busy with inquiries especially after the Enhanced Community Quarantine was declared on March 17 here in Manila, Philippines. People have been reporting feeling extremely anxious and depressed, and, while we know the main culprit, most couldn’t understand the complexity of this situation.
Grief, broadly speaking, is the emotional response to loss. This is more commonly experienced and easier to identify when we lose someone (a loved one, especially) who has passed on.
However, there are many types of grief. We also experience grief when we end a relationship, regardless of whose decision it was. We encounter it, too, when someone we are close to decides to move forward to another stage in his or her life even when they are physically still with us, much like what a parent feels when their child gets engaged.
Collective grief.
Collective grief is common in group settings, such as in a community, village, or nation as a result of a catastrophic event like war, a terrorist attack, the death of a loved public figure, or a natural disaster.
In this case, what are we grieving?
David Kessler said, “We are grieving the loss of normalcy.”
We’ve lost our routines. We’ve lost our plans. We’ve lost our flow. We’ve lost our days. We weren’t prepared for the death tolls, the strict mandate to stay home, the feelings of fear, desperation, and uncertainty.
This situation is a massive disruption to our lives.
Studies have proven that having a routine provides great support for mental health, specifically for people with anxiety, depression, and other affect-related conditions. When we more or less know what to expect, it is easier for us to manage emotions, moderate our impulses, and refrain from overthinking.
We used to know how to act (or at least we knew what was expected of us) and the roles we were playing at certain times of the day. For example: I was aware that I was a mother at home from 6 to 8 AM, a fitness enthusiast in the gym from 8 to 10 AM, a business owner at my studio from 11 AM to 4 PM, and a mother and a wife back at home from 4 PM onward.
I’m sure you have your own structure, too, in terms of expectations and the roles you play.
Subconsciously, routines help organize our mental and emotional capacities; however, in our current situation, all these roles have gotten interrelated with, even indistinguishable from, one another.
Imagine you’re about to take a work-related video call, while also sensing that your mother needs help in the kitchen. In the background, your nephew is crying and your sister is yelling. You close your door, heave a desperate sigh. All you want to do is to attend an online yoga class right now.
This can all be happening virtually and in your head, too; you don’t have to be living with all of your friends or family members to feel the same overwhelm.
We also had plans before this quarantine happened. “I was going to celebrate my retirement/birthday/our anniversary with family this April,” or “I was supposed to start my new job this month,” or “I had planned on going to [insert event here] with my friends.”
Suddenly, poof.
The opportunity is gone or has been deferred to a later, indefinite time… which leads us to the other type of grief we are experiencing: anticipatory grief. (Kessler detailed this in his interview and you can hop over to the HBR page to read about it.)
We know that something is going on, but we are unsure how this is going to affect our lives next month, or maybe even tomorrow. What makes it more difficult is that we are against a virus: we can’t see it attacking us, we don’t have a cure yet, and we don’t know if what we are doing will actually have an impact against it. Everything is uncertain and open-ended, and the best world leaders are also struggling to help humankind.
Most of us are familiar with psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This isn’t the only framework supporting grief, but it provides a general overview of it.
We expect to go through this experience in a linear, organized way, but the truth is, that’s not the way it works. One day we are at peace; the next, we feel angry or depressed again. Unfortunately, there’s no set timeline to getting to the acceptance stage. It can take us a year or a decade before we can move on with our lives with ease, consistency, and a clearer sense of flow.
What can we do?
On the first week of quarantine, I watched myself and everyone else run around (inside the house, quite literally) like a headless chicken. I noticed people (including myself) breaking down on the 7th or the 8th day. Now that we’re on our 11th day (Manila, Philippines) and on our second work week on Enhanced Community Quarantine, I’m seeing even more mixed responses to this situation.
There’s no right or wrong way to feel at this point, but there are things within our control that can help us and the people we care about. These can improve our mental (and physical) well-being, as well as our loved ones’.
Validate the experience.
Grief is an intense feeling of sadness, and when it is expressed and acknowledged by others, it can be cathartic.
Identify and name your emotions — giving it a name makes it easier to feel and deal with it. Particularly helpful in this exercise is using the emotion wheel.
Knowing that you and others are experiencing similar pains can help you accept the feelings and start to work through them. Denying yourself of mourning or masking grief with coping strategies that invalidate the feeling may be beneficial in the short term (e.g. when you show up for work as if nothing happened), but to start healing from it means that we might need to actively talk about what we have lost.
Practice compassion and empathy by listening to other people share their experience, too, and learn ways to validate their truths as well.
Be aware of your negative coping styles and switch to a more positive or productive one.
Coping mechanisms are used to manage stressful situations, and without mindfulness, we might resort to maladaptive ways to cope. Some of the unhealthy coping styles include shutting off the world (isolation), unhealthy self-soothing (binge-eating, drinking, drugs), seeking excitement or an adrenaline rush (lashing out on someone, unsafe sex, or texting a toxic ex-lover), or self-harm.
Find support through people and friends, or through remote counseling instead of (further) self-isolating. You can also try relaxation and self-soothing techniques by joining an online yoga or guided meditation class, sitting in nature, or listening to feel-good music. Make the situation lighter or less stressful by looking for a more positive perspective (memes do it for me) and share it with someone you care about. You can also sublimate and do productive things that can distract your brain from the overwhelm, such as cleaning your closet, doing high-intensity interval training, or, like what I’m doing, writing. (My Medium has been dormant for 3 years, and now I have 4 entries in a span of 10 days.)
Recreate your regular days or make new routines.
Whether you’re working at home, just stuck at home doing nothing, or serving your community (THANK YOU) at this time of COVID-19, having a schedule and a routine can benefit us immensely.
Treat your days like your old regular working days: you wake up at a certain time, take a shower, dress up for work, maybe put on a little bit of makeup and perfume. Set a time to log in to work, take a break, and log out of it. You can also create a new routine especially when the change you’re experiencing is drastic. Communicate with the people in the family your spatial needs that can support your setup, and thank them for helping you out.
If, on your regular days, you’re not tuned in to the news every 10 minutes, learn to manage the amount of time you spend on social media and the news. Always wear a skeptic’s hat when receiving unverified information.
At the end of the day, none of these things can guarantee that it will be easier for us, but let’s keep trying.
Let’s acknowledge what everyone is going through and not sweep it under the rug. It’s time to be compassionate towards ourselves and each other. Let’s find meaning and purpose in our days instead of giving in to fear and further isolation.
