Maybe you adapted better now in the third lockdown than the first. Maybe it was the reverse. How adaptive we are to this protracted stress of the pandemic takes on different emotional shapes and compensatory behaviours. Just like Kübler-Ross’ Grief Cycle roughly illustrated below [1], our emotions can fluctuate from despair to hope to anger, to denial, and so on. And this could be all in one day! What I hear from my clients is that grief never goes away, it is something that you live with for the rest of your life. Grief is not a linear process, it is not cyclical - it can be random and deeply subjective so see this as a useful framework. In the case of Covid-19, the stages of grief and emotions are all over the shop because we can’t rid of this virus. We don’t have control over it. We have hope when a cutting-edge vaccine arrives and feel anger when we learn that the distribution is stunted. We bargain with it, If the lockdown happened earlier then we wouldn’t be in this mess… but it does not change our current situation.

**1. Denial/shock**
**2. Bargaining**
**3. Depression**
**4. Anger**
**5. Acceptance**
***6. ‘*Meaning’*** is the 6th stage of Grief added by David Kessler (2019).

Taking our sh*t out on others

For some, adaptation is met with resistance – disbelief that their lives could be obstructed to such an extent that it creates anger. Anger percolates, it needs to come out somehow. But instead of being accountable to our anger, we project onto others. Typically people get caught in projection by the people closest to them - parents, children, or spouses - totally unaware. Your child who said the dinner you lovingly cooked looked disgusting as they dry heave. The partner who didn’t read your mind and littered the kitchen counter with used tea bags - for the hundredth time! The dumb neighbour who keeps parking in front of your house. It could also be the unlucky person in customer service - an IT rep, a county council clerk, the grocery checker, the post office, etc. All arrows point at someone who is in the crossfires of your expectations not being met.

At this point in time, three lockdowns and many months later in the UK, people have Covid fatigue and bend the rules as they see fit as a result of changing, contradictory, and mixed communication from state leadership. It creates disagreement and sows confusion pitting people even more against each other. Someone else is at fault for not ensuring the safety of care homes or for your children not being able to go to school. Or for even bringing this virus into existence! It must be the state, or the pharma industry, or some garden variety of conspiracy theories that are another kind of pandemic of disinformation and paranoia[2].

Drinking the Koolaid of conspiracy

In psychoanalytical speak, the inability to accept the pandemic’s existence, a Covid Denier, brings out our ‘inner child’ when we can’t get our way. More extremely, those who experience anger and defiance activated in the form of being a pariah who deliberately chooses to break the rules, do so as a kind of stress release (without consideration of our collective interdependence that forms family, community, and society).

Many of us do not respond to authority well telling us where and when and how we can move around and with whom. Especially for those of us fortunate enough to have grown up without a history of a totalitarian state. The rules do curtail our freedom and do limit our livelihoods, and our mental health. And yet, as junior doctor Jeeves Wijesuriya pointedly writes:

“This pandemic is gruelling. The measures to control it impinge on our quality of life, hurt our freedoms, undermine our rights. But to demand rights and deny responsibilities isn’t rebellion, it’s adolescence.” [3]

For most folks, skirting the rules is not done deliberately but rather out of necessity in order to survive. Thus, once again highlighting the great inequality of a pandemic of those who can afford to shield and stay protected and alive while others have to go out and work, often in unsafe conditions. Even when it means we are forced to adapt to potentially life-threatening conditions.

Physical health aside, our emotional and mental well-being has gone through many grief cycles. Your anxiety, confusion, grief, gratitude, loss of control and uncertainty, and so forth are real. We read the data - saturated with mental health diagnoses in the U.S. and in the U.K. Some of us adapt and some of us are broken. It is not about merely bearing down and surviving adversity, it is about how you adapt and respond to adversity.

What’s your story around adversity?

Consider your position in your family’s histories. Were there wars? Was there famine? Migration? Persecution? Loss? These stories and traumas that are passed down the family line shape our perception of adversity and adaptation. The old ‘blitz spirit’ is a cliché invoked here in the U.K. to encourage resilience during the pandemic. And yet, we are not being bombed every night, this is not wartime for the West, we can still purchase bananas at the shop, and hopefully, we have more tins in our larder to spare for our fellow neighbours in need. So the sub-text of rallying the blitz spirit is to get on with it for goodness sake!*. Your comforts and by extension, your ‘feelings’ are not needed now, luv. This brings us into a one-down position of feeling invalid, perhaps weak, and then guilt for complaining. ‘Others have it worse…’

*Incidentally, during the Blitz, there was one psychiatric study conducted on victims in the city of Hull [4], titled The Mental Stability of Hull, which was based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. The first-person accounts of serious PTSD are harrowing.

The invitation is to examine these legacies and come into awareness of our grief, our anger, and all the other host of emotions that have come up for us during the pandemic. When they are out of awareness, we can flail, project, or become avoidant. (Hyperproductivity is arguably also a form of avoidance). When we avoid our feelings, it creates more stress and contributes to a state of Empathic Distress. This describes when we feel distressed vicariously through other’s experiences and it can lead to a ‘compassion fatigue’ when our tank is too empty to care for others. When we are operating unawares and pushing our feelings down, it makes us less able to connect and be in relationship to others.

We need to be in awareness of the permutations of our emotions. Like everything else alive, we are changing. Describe why something was ‘not particularly pleasant’ (a common British euphemism for real ‘pain’). If you are known to be a skilled kvetcher (Yiddish for a great complainer), try to speak in the first person and name the feelings. Complaining is a pastime in cultures everywhere. We need to vent. We also need to be accountable to ourselves. How can we hold the anger and sadness and also the gratitude for being alive and to be loved and feel love. Holding both parts in awareness creates a generosity for yourself that you can extend to others around you.

Wherever you find yourself now, I hope you are safe. I hope you can hang in there during this final stretch and attend to your emotional expressions in constructive ways.

PS (I am considering writing a series exclusively on Anger down the road. Let me know if you’re keen).

On reflection

Where do you see yourself in the grief cycle now? Do you recall when you were in other stages of grief?

How do you respond to being told what to do? What are you in resistance to? Where do you hold resistance in your body?

How do you experience your anger with the pandemic? Do you project?

Have you come into conversation with people you know who are tapped into conspiratorially thinking? How has it impacted your relationship?

How do you respond to adversity? Do you tell yourself when times are tough to just get on with it? Do you have family members who take this life position?

Resources

Read: How to Stay Empathic Without Suffering So Much

Cherish: ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ by Viktor E Frankl (the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor)

Try: Are you stoic or just shy?

If you are reticent or an introverted type who doesn’t like to take up too much space, try to elaborate one more sentence on why you’re stressed out.
If you are a stoic type, who is skilled at complaining, try to describe the feeling you experience rather than simply rant.

Resist: the urge to suck it up, to get on with it, to push it all down, and be forward-thinking

Take: Some time out to shout in a room/Kung Fu some pillows/write that letter or some gruesome violent script (and not send it! x)

Sources

[1] https://www.ekrfoundation.org/5-stages-of-grief/5-stages-grief/

[2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-covid-19-is-revealing-the-impact-of-disinformation-on-society

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/01/healthcare-workers-covid-conspiracies-coronavirus-deniers

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/19/myth-blitz-spirit-model-coronavirus