‘We need hope-scrolling right now, not just doom-scrolling’

The last weeks have been intense and harrowing. The second wave has hit the home of many, leaving families destroyed, loved ones gasping for breath and the survivors grappling with despair and hopelessness. As this surge slowly ebbs, we are left in a sea of death and bereavement, overwhelmed with what's more to come.How do we work ourselves out of this despair? How do we find the strength to pick ourselves at a time when our energies have been drained and our faith in institutions has been vanquished?Meenal Baghel interviews Sonali Gupta, clinical psychologist and author of Anxiety: Overcome It and Live Without Fear, to understand how to cross this personal and collective grief, what separates trauma from grief and if it is possible to build hope and resilience in this time of loss and despair. Excerpted:Q) Many of us today are experiencing a powerful meld of emotions, of anxiety, fear, helplessness and anger. Are these all separate emotions or just various forms of grief?The deaths that are taking place are causing people a complex grief. People are being left wondering what they could have done differently, if the death could have been prevented, and if there was a paucity of resources and a systemic breakdown of our health care. This time the complex grief also has trauma in it.Q) Can you explain this complex grief and trauma? Isn't all grief traumatic?The trauma we are seeing today comes from an incident that overwhelms us and is also unexpected. This is putting our system into a continuous state of hyper arousal, where our fight flight freeze response is triggered all the time. Today with the Covid situation, you are not only grieving about your loved one struggling, you're also thinking about trying to help them find a hospital bed, oxygen cylinder and who all you can call for help. You are continuously in a state of shock, but also trauma, because you feel there's nothing in your control. Trauma is when you feel everything around you is slipping away. We are not experiencing post-traumatic stress as yet, we are living the trauma every day now for the last 30 plus days. We are in the trauma phase. We are nowhere close to hitting that post traumatic stage. Right now people's bodies are suffering because of it. Whether it's the frontline workers or patients, the trauma is being witnessed in nightmares, sleeplessness, feeling wired, all the while dealing with a situation completely out of their hands. And all resources seem to be crippling in all possible ways. medium nocaption82884090Q) Many of us have lost our ability to sleep. The heart is constantly racing and resulting in fatigue. What does one do in a situation like this?I think the first thing to learn is to figure out what calms you down. And look at physically engaging in activities that slow us down or that calm this response. That one doesn't need to be wired. Linked to this is also something called 'vicarious grief', when we are looking at what is happening to people around us, whether they are our friends, family, or even absolute strangers - as we are all connected to one another, part of a larger ecosystem - and that if it's happening to others, it can also happen to us. To address one's sleep concerns, one has to ask ourselves whether that vicarious grief has deepened in you. Is it overwhelming you? I think the belief that when we are catastrophising, thinking of worst case scenarios, or when in the midst of the pandemic, we believe we have no choice, we are helpless. We need to tackle these beliefs when the trauma hits. Some people may not be sleeping because that's the only thing they can control. Q) Can you tell us collectively, as a nation, having gone through what we have, where would you place us in the spectrum of grief?Collectively, as a nation, we are still grieving. And the trauma and the grief are not done yet. So, my assumption would be, a lot of people are not even processing what is happening to them right now. This is the state where we are fighting a logistical battle. What I do see is that whenever this ends, There will be enough people having break downs, which means their symptoms will start showing up then. These will start showing physically and emotionally, which will entail people taking massive life decisions, changing the way they are leading their life, if they haven't already done that. My other main worry is that it will leave people with a feeling of cynicism and disillusionment and a feeling of purposelessness. I think this is going to be dangerous as a nation if we are left with that at the end of it.Q) One of the most ravaging aspects of Covid has been the kind of breakdown of our very fundamental sense of security, safety and trust. How do we deal with this?There are several kinds of trusts here. One is the breakdown of the trust at the micro individual level within the family and then there is the breakdown of trust at the macro level when it comes to the country, government and the lack of resources. There is also a third kind of breakdown, of the trust within yourself. So we are talking of a micro, macro and personal sense of trust. A lot of people are being also left with a survivor's guilt because they feel they didn't do enough. One would be able to deal with the individual where the self trust has been broken when you can't trust yourself. At the micro level, I think, in the years to come, the family will have to look at this again. This is not something you just put a lid on. But that's what most people are doing. They are saying, the worst is over, let's not talk about and let's just quickly move on. But nobody is moving on. There is resentment, there's a feeling that you shouldn't have gone out, you shouldn't have taken that such and such decision. Families will have to address the elephant in the room and talk about it and talk also about the fact that no one really knows how this happened. And if you do know, how then do you build a safe space within the family. What does it mean to repair... We all as human beings are capable of rupture and repair, that's how we work. And we'll need to do this consciously within our families and also the work organisation, because that same pattern is repeating at work itself well. At a systemic level, in the years to come, whoever governs us will have to build resilience by being accountable, by building those disaster management plans and by working with the citizens to foster trust again. medium nocaption82884138Q) Is there anything we can do at this point practically, given the overwhelming nature of what we have gone through, to find hope and resilience?First things first, I don't think we have a choice to not find hope and resilience. We have to find newer ways to figure out what gives us that. The first step would be in enjoying and savouring micro interactions of ours on a daily basis. Happiness, joy and resilience is experienced in micro moments, because you don't feel joy the full day. The small interactions and connections you had with your parents, colleagues, friends, close ones, use that as an anchor to move on. We've been speaking of late a lot about 'doom scrolling'. It's also important to consciously engage in 'hope-scrolling'. For me, watching movies or series that is filled with hope, or finding even real life stories where something miraculous takes place is a form of hope-scrolling. And we need to build space for that in our daily life as a conscious mindful activity.You can listen to the Times of India Podcast with Sonali Gupta here.