Why aren’t we talking about our collective trauma?
It’s like it never happened. The pandemic. The lockdowns. The masks. The vaccinations. Border restrictions. Children who only saw masked adults. Death. Vaccine injuries. Medical staff and the intense protocols they had to follow. New mothers giving birth alone. People dying alone and saying goodbye over video. So much trauma. So much pain. And NOBODY is talking about it. We are in a state of denial pretending it never happened. And it’s going to turn into a disaster if it’s not addressed.
2020 was the worst year of my life, but it had nothing to do with the pandemic. I was relatively protected in Tasmania and Western Australia where the border rules were some of the strictest in the world. I’ve been able to unpack my trauma of that year with the help of quality psychologists and I feel like I’m in a good place with it. I’m still angry about being coerced (bullied) into taking an untested medication and we will see the effect it has on my body, and I’m working through that. But when I look around, people seem to joke about ‘covid’ or ‘the pandemic’ and never have a deep debrief into what happened, how it affected them, and if they feel they have healed from that time.
I have big concerns; about children, young people, and society in general. We all experienced a significant collective trauma and there was no debriefing, no restoration, no time of healing offered for it. We are seeing record numbers of teachers leaving the profession - is it because of the unresolved stress we faced during that time or the traumatised children whose behaviour in recent years has become unmanageable? Is their behaviour a direct result of covid trauma? I think the questions have to be asked.
According to experts: “Following a critical and life-changing event, individuals often struggle to regain a sense of normalcy and safety, which can impact their mental health.”
We haven’t debriefed. We haven’t made sure people feel safe (particularly children). We haven’t done any of the things known to help people after trauma. We are so busy dealing with trauma-informed practice for individuals that we forget that we all lived through a once-in-a-century event (we hope).
Over and over again, the literature says there needs to be debriefing after a critical incident. If the pandemic wasn’t a critical incident, then what was? We all experienced various levels of traumatic response to it.
We are in denial. We are unwilling to have important conversations about how those years affected us. Many are just “getting on with life” or “getting back to normal” so the trauma is brushed under the carpet leading to social dysfunction and chaos. If I think about intergenerational trauma, I fear the outcomes in the future if we don’t deal with this now.
I’m not a psychologist, but I know children and young people. And they’re not okay - they’re scared, they’re angry, they don’t feel safe in the world. We need to have conversations about what happened and help EVERYONE to process this scary and polarising time in our lives.
I hope this article helps us to begin the conversation and start the healing process.
~ Alyssa
References:
The Seven Steps Of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing To Support Trauma Recovery | BetterHelp
