Since so many people are telling me that they are avoiding the news these days, I’m hoping to provide some news you can use, here and now, including these headlines:
My panel discussion of providing therapy groups remotely during the pandemic went very well yesterday.
“Of my four children — well I guess now I’ve only got three — no one would’ve predicted that Lorna was having a hard time,” Dr. Philip C. Breen, her father, told Business Insider. “She would not even be on that list.”
As the pandemic has left millions under lockdown and triggered deep loss and widespread grief, medical workers and emergency responders like Mondello and Lorna Breen have faced the brunt of the crisis with grueling workloads, unprecedented stress, deep uncertainty, and a steep death count.
Medical workers are drawn to the profession to alleviate suffering and protect their patients. During the pandemic, however, the virus has in many cases robbed them of the ability to achieve either goal.
Laurie Nadel, a psychotherapist and author, characterized the coronavirus as an “equal-opportunity destroyer” that’s forcing frontline medical workers to go “mano-a-mano with mortality on a larger scale” than ever before.
There are ways to support workers in such high-pressure roles, but Dr. Shauna Springer advocates not calling them heroes. “There’s an invisible pressure that comes with that.”
“People are resilient until they’re not. And so people who are called out as resilient are often more reluctant to acknowledge human struggles and to reach out when they need help.”
For people who are resilient until they’re not (which can include all of us), that article advocates the healing powers of listening without offering advice and also doing things to lighten each other’s loads.
Do you see evidence of people who are resilient until they’re not in the images I captured yesterday?
I posted that last picture of that resilient tiger on my Facebook page last night with this caption: “She’s taking crisis calls.” I’m noticing, here and now, that it’s easier to be resilient when somebody has your back.
If you want to hear Anna and Valerie — both wonderful mothers of children with congenital heart defects — and also your daily blogger discuss our experience of COVID-19, click on the link in the previous paragraph.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed our world. And yet, our socially distanced world still has so much beauty, as I choose to see in my photos from yesterday.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed our world, but
The Year(s) of Living Non-Judgmentally 