As I write Part 2 of Healing from Ambiguous Loss, the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 lockdown has come and gone. Many of us are reflecting on what the past year has meant to us, and the changes we’ve experienced, all the while looking forward to actually planning something more exciting than the next trip to the grocery store. Whether it is to keep hope alive, or simply to have something new to talk about in our zoom calls, Spring 2021 has us all keeping a keen ear open for any glimmer of an unrestrained life on the horizon. However, if you have read part one of this piece, you’ve likely already gleaned what my concerns are regarding boomeranging back to a “normal life.” Explicitly, I fear that if we hop back into “normalcy” without processing what we’ve been through, the “return to normal” will lack the pleasure and fulfilment that we’ve already projected onto it. If we mistake healing with the elimination of pain, we will have unfair expectations of what freedom will entail.

So, how do we process our losses, and move forward into our “new normal” integrating what we have been through with how we want our future existence to be? Without embracing the vulnerability of our collective ambiguous loss, we can miss a vital opportunity to strengthen through healing. In the absence of closure, the key to this healing is to make meaning of the events we went through, the sacrifices we have made, and the losses incurred. If we can make meaning from painful experiences, we don’t necessarily eliminate or forget the pain & loss, but we can give space for healing and peace to exist along side it.

One of the most prolific examples of meaning making in the face of extraordinary loss is Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, written in response to Frankl’s time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Frankl’s psychotherapeutic approach posited that finding one’s purpose in life, and devoting ourselves wholly to it, can reinforce our psyches against whatever life will throw in our path, and ultimately bring peace.

Three ways of meaning making can be particularly helpful as we emerge from our year of isolation and loss towards our “new normal”. These are moderating mastery, looking inwards for our purpose, and maintaining hope.

I think the process of meaning-making started for me a couple of months into the pandemic. Like many others, I was taking quarantine time to catch up on previously procrastinated-on tasks. Finding the prospect of a sourdough starter too daunting, I decided to update my CV. This led me to scroll back in my calendar a couple of years, to April 2018. Before my brain was able to register what my eyes were seeing, my body had already started to react—I noticed a flush of adrenaline and increased heart rate as I glanced at the chock-full calendar and busyness of my “before time” life. Every minute of every day was accounted for in a black and white Apple Calendar. “Holy Moly” I whispered to myself… “How did I do all that?” But the real question that started to stir in my gut, was not How I once did so much, but Why. When I sat with the “Why” of “why I kept myself so busy,” I didn’t really like the answer. My conscious brain started to realise what my unconscious mind already knew. For me, much of the busyness actually stemmed from insecurity. It stemmed from trying to solve internal problems by external means, something that I know as a therapist is not a successful strategy. Like many others, being over-scheduled was a way to tell myself that I was productive and therefore worthy. I was over-valuing mastery and productivity. Again, as a therapist I am likely biased, but I do believe that everyone who has a conscience has a seed of “I’m not good enough” somewhere in their psyches to which busyness is a sure-fire distraction.

It is a commonly held observation in the psychotherapeutic realm that anxiety has been increasing over time, most rapidly since the proliferation of smart phones in 2012. In these modern and electronically-connected times, we have been lulled into the idea that we should be able to control what happens to us. We greatly value mastery, and “conquering” any challenge that comes our way. Mastery can be helpful, except when things don’t go our way, or there is nothing that can be done about the problem. If we continue to value mastery above all else, we not only run the risk of over scheduling ourselves, more insidiously, we run the risk of thinking that our circumstances are a result of a personal failure, as opposed to a universal experience.

Mastery is great, if there is something to be done about a problem we are facing. If there isn’t, we can be paralysed unless we switch the lens from “what can do about this problem” to “who do I want to be in the face of this problem.”

To this end, if strength in the face of adversity does not reside in controlling our circumstances, it is in looking inwards and controlling ourselves. We get to decide who we want to be in the face of uncontrollable circumstances. Both meditation and mindfulness are useful tools that have the benefit of allowing us mastery over our inner world, which lessens the need to fitfully control what is around us. In the words of John Kabat-Zinn “You can’t control the waves, but you can learn to surf.” One of the main ideas that we have all experienced over the past year, which can be integrated to strengthen our emerging selves is: You do not need to know what is going to happen to you, you just need to believe in yourself, and know that you can handle it. Only the epidemiologists really knew what was coming for us prior to March 11, 2020. When most of us left our workplaces in the second week of March, we thought it would be for a couple of weeks. At that point, we had no idea what the year would have in store for us, and although aspects of it were really awful, we did adapt. Probably much better than we thought we could.

Hope is a word that is used a lot, but we often discount its importance in processing difficult emotions and events. We describe hopefulness as an emotion, but in the words of Brené Brown “Hope is not an emotion, it is a way of thinking or a cognitive process”, which means being hopeful is a skill that anyone can learn. Some ways of increasing our hopeful cognitions are to challenge ourselves to be grateful, to increase our interpersonal connection with others and to make sure we are taking care of ourselves. In stressful or hard times, this is easier said than done, but keeping these strategies “top of mind” can help centre ourselves. When my father was ill with dementia, one theme emerged through the course of his illness. The theme was that for every part of him that was lost, something was given. He lost his wit, but his temper went with it, and he became more docile. When he lost his eloquence, he communicated his love with more simple, yet straightforward words. Recognising this, and being grateful for unexpected gifts made the journey through his illness more hopeful and less dire.

We hope that our sacrifices during lockdown will bring more fulfilment and strength to our lives. This will give our sacrifice meaning. We canceled plans, wore uncomfortable masks, face-timed holiday dinners, worked at home, taught school at home, and conducted mental gymnastics akin to a risk-analyst every time our kids asked to leave the house. We have yet to understand the long term physical, psychological and economic implications of the pandemic, but regardless of what those are, making meaning from our experiences is important. It is important not just to help us process our losses, but to navigate what we want our “new normal” to be after the lockdown. It is now that we get to define what the legacy of the pandemic will be, and what version of ourselves will emerge in its wake.

Questions for contemplation:

Be aware of how you define your identity—has this changed over the pandemic?

If you are coming out of pandemic from the best part of yourself, what will that feel like?

Are there any behaviours or habits that need to change to support this?

Sources

Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss / Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl / Wherever you go, there you are by John Kabat-Zinn / The Gift of Imperfection by Brené Brown