Anouchka Grose - Radical niceness will see society through the coronavirus crisis
We’re living through a
time of national, and international, crisis. Our systems are falling apart,
we’re being separated from friends and loved ones, frightened and unsure as to
how life may be about to unfold. “Reality” seems to lurch from one worrying
scenario to another. Information and advice keep changing — nothing holds fast,
except the idea that something, everything, is going desperately awry.
As a psychotherapist
who is used to working with clients who suffer from climate anxiety, I’ve
become familiar with people’s fantasies and fears about the breakdown of life
as we know it. Many of us have been hearing, and speaking, for years about the
risks of societal collapse due to extreme weather,
and the resulting disintegration of the systems that hold society in place —
not to mention the devastating effects on nature. However, few of us
suspected that so many of our gloomiest predictions would be so suddenly
realised, albeit for another reason (although pandemics are actually very much
on the list of climate-related
concerns). Like climate collapse, coronavirus is a threat to our
livelihoods, our social lives, our health, our certainties.
Psychological trauma,
which is one way to think about the effects of what’s going on today, comes
from a combination of an extreme event and its difficult aftermath: “trauma”
literally means “wound”. We know we will all be wounded in different ways by
the pandemic, and suffer different losses. Our recoveries, too, will follow
different paths. However, we can make choices now about how we act, and it is
very important to our future recovery that each of us will be able to live with
our actions afterwards. Doing the “right thing” — insofar as we can know what
that is — is of the utmost importance.....
