The wisdom on offer out there seems boundless and overwhelming. To be honest, I'm personally not up for most of it. I don't mean to belittle those who are seeking answers, and finding them. There's nothing wrong with that and I admire it. Whatever works to help anyone cope is totally okay, as I wrote here.
I see many people proclaiming how past adversity has taught them to cope now and I don't doubt it. Some of us have endured serious long-lasting trauma and adversity before. Some of us have lived with anxiety for a long time, and may nevertheless have managed to be high-functioning. We have tried and true coping mechanisms that helped us get through those experiences and will help us get through this too...right?
Again, I have no problem with this either. Some of us are uniquely equipped to handle a situation like this. Old coping mechanisms and ways of surviving are at the ready, and spring into action.
So if that describes you, great. One thing I've written about (here) before the pandemic was how those who have survived trauma and adversity can be "heroes" by helping to guide others. That resilience is not illusory. It's real and if you have it to draw on right now, you have every right to be proud and tell the world about it.
But, on the other hand, at least for me, my superhero-trauma-coping-abilities are double-edged. They come with a heavy cost. As I've written before many times, my experience of trauma includes great strength/knowledge (which can help me to cope sometimes like a superhero), but also deep vulnerability (which can make a time like this even more difficult for me than it may be for others who don't share that preexisting vulnerability).
For a long time, I tried to emphasize my strengths to the exclusion of my vulnerabilities. Because I demanded it of myself--and because my profession seemed to demand it of me (as I wrote here). I wasn't even always aware that I was doing it. In many ways, I acknowledged my own vulnerabilities more than many of my friends and colleagues. It's not like I pretended to be superwoman, but I wasn't prepared to fully face (and feel) the ways in which I was especially suffering and vulnerable, and there was a cost to this, as I explained here. That cost resulted in me putting my life on hold for a long time, and I don't know to what extent I'll ever be able to recover from what I lost as a result.
But a year ago, I decided that had to change. I was never going to heal (or even continue to manage) if I didn't find a way to truly face my suffering: the ways in which I wasn't always (or at least wasn't only) a hero, or an ultra-resilient tough-as-steel warrior. I was also a vulnerable human being. No amount of resilience and heroism can change the fact that as humans we have great vulnerability in the face of terrible situations and events.True coping, for me at least, is inherently uncomfortable sometimes, because it has to embrace and balance those two sides of the equation and the ways they have played out for me in my own life.
I was in the process of learning to embrace, or at least face, my vulnerability. That meant admitting that I had a problem (without surrendering my understanding of the ways in which I was and remained strong) and seeking help in ways that felt safe and right to me. It was a journey I began more than a year ago that I knew wouldn't be easy. I'd been putting it off for so long for a reason: because there would be no quick fixes, and it would render me extra-vulnerable at times as I proceeded along it.
I didn't want magic pills that made the pain, shame and intense experience of my own vulnerability disappear. I wanted to do the hard work because my feeling was (and remains) that the only way to truly reconcile my strength with my suffering/vulnerability is to walk that difficult path of truly facing something that has the potential to overwhelm me--albeit carefully and with support.
Enter the pandemic: at a time when I hadn't finished that journey. I was just at the beginning and had important steps that were imminent and have now been put on hold indefinitely.
So now what? Do I launch into my tried and true coping methods, many of which require me to set aside the keen sense of my own vulnerability that my healing journey required me to face because maybe now it's just too much for me on top of everything else? I've done that before and could perhaps do it again and be really good at it.
I fear the consequences of doing so, but maybe it's necessary. I really don't know.
It's why my greatest fear, given where I am in my own journey right now, is "over-coping," and losing the connection to my own suffering and vulnerability that is so essential for me to heal. I don't want to be so vulnerable that I succumb to the added pressure and stress, but I also don't want to lose the benefit of those hard-earned steps I've taken and backslide to a point where true healing becomes even more distant. I'm not sure if it's a road I can start on again anytime soon if I lose the fragile-seeming progress I had made.
So all that is just to say that for me coping is a complicated concept. I've heard some say that those who have experienced trauma and mental health issues seem to be coping "better" and that's entirely possible in many cases. Yet it's also undeniably true that many who have experienced trauma are not coping "better" and it's not necessarily because they aren't as strong or advanced in their resilience. If this pandemic had happened at a different stage in my life, at a less advanced (for me) stage of healing, I likely would have coped heroically with it. Yet now it's highly triggering. That's not to say those who are coping well are less advanced. Some may have truly done the hard work of healing and have learned important lessons to help them endure this and are in a genuinely good place.
But for me healing doesn't mean not being incredibly vulnerable to events of massive significance like a global pandemic. It means finding the right balance between my strength and vulnerability both as an individual and as a human (the vulnerability inherent in being a human in a world filled with dangers we often can't control). It means strengthening the parts of me that allow me to be both strong and vulnerable. It is not a destination but a lifelong process that can sometimes be very painful and difficult.
My complicated past gives me important tools to help me succeed in being resilient in the face of great danger but also renders me especially vulnerable in many ways. The key to my own "resilience" (a word I've learned to kind of hate, though I understand it works for many others) has been to try to maintain an ongoing curiosity about where I am on that spectrum and try to find ways of coping that don't erase one side of the equation in favour of the other. I've learned that sometimes when I think I'm coping like a superhero, I'm really just numbing myself to the reality of the situation in ways that may serve me now but might not serve me later. If it helps, great. There's no inherently wrong way to survive in the face of a dangerous situation. But it's also okay to abandon a method of coping if the cost is too great.
All the above is really just a long-winded way for me to say that regardless of where you are on the spectrum--feeling strong and coping well, or intensely suffering and feeling especially vulnerable--it doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong or less advanced than someone who might be handling it differently. We're not competing with others or with ourselves. To state just a few possibilities: Some of us will learn important lessons from this. Some of us may just go into a sort of numbed-out state to get by and maybe unlearn some of the lessons we thought we knew before. Some of us will go back and forth between over-coping and feeling overwhelmed.
I have no idea what the answer is for me. Quite frankly it changes daily. It's also entirely possible that I'm overthinking it (something I'm told I'm prone to) and I'd be better off proceeding more on instinct.
But all I want to say is: it's not a contest. One thing I know from my own history is that I can never tell how well I've coped, or how "resilient" I've been, until more time has elapsed and I can see the role a particular response played in my overall journey. There may be a science to it, but many of us don't know what that is, and it probably differs for those of us who are differently situated. So let's just do the best we can, with an open mind about what works and doesn't, so we can retain the flexibility to adapt our approach as the weeks become months, and once we are ready to emerge from this and rebuild.
If you're doing great and baking more bread than you could ever hope to eat, that's great. If you're feeling intensely triggered, maybe even falling apart, and need to reach out for help from friends and/or professionals, that's okay too. It may be exactly what you need to get through this.
Wishing everyone well in their particular journey,
Crystal
As always, please note that I am a lawyer, not a mental health professional of any kind. I have no expertise in trauma or mental health. Also, please note that any opinions and views expressed in this blog are solely my own and are not intended to represent the views or opinions of my employer in any way. For more information about the purpose of this blog, please see here and for a bit more information about my personal perspective on this issue, please see "my story" here
I am very grateful to have received a "Clawbie" Award for this blog (which reflects the importance of this topic): https://www.clawbies.ca/2019-clawbies-canadian-law-blog-awards/
For some of my external writing on this topic, see:
- https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/opinion/a-more-inclusive-discussion-on-the-impact-of-trauma-on-lawyers-mental-health-is-needed/276166
- https://www.cbabc.org/BarTalk/Articles/2020/February/Features/Speaking-Up-About-Trauma-and-Mental-Health
- https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/opinion/changing-the-conversation/326240
Double edged sword indeed. Take care Crys.
ReplyDeleteThank you --you too!
Delete