It’s been 4 years since Covid came and changed our collective lives forever. You remember – schools and offices closed suddenly, and we all stayed home for so long. We thought it might last a few weeks, remember? But then weeks turned into months which turned into years….
Sometimes it feels hard to remember that the shutdown happened at all. Sometimes it feels hard to remember what things were like before it. We are generally focused on other things now, but I have no doubt that you have your own Covid-related story to tell, whether it is of a terrible loss, or of tremendous help you gave or received. As terrible as things were, it also felt like a time when we all came together, when there was a new sense of community that we sorely needed. Remember banging pots and pans at 7:00 every night in support of the health care workers? I was so happy to have something concrete to do, as feeble as it was, to help a community emergency.
And now there are so many other emergencies happening around the world. I wanted to share 2 resources.
I donated this week to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that serves meals to people affected by disasters of all kinds. They are active in Gaza and in the Ukraine, but they also recently helped people affected by the earthquake in Japan and wildfires in Texas. I don’t know much about them, but they have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, and I love that they are focused on helping people with immediate needs.
For those who are addressing personal trauma, I have a very different kind of resource.
I received an email from Karen Millon out of the blue a few days ago. I was familiar with Karen’s work from her book, An Amazing Divorce: What you Can Do for Yourself, For Each Other, And for the Children to Achieve It. But I was not familiar with her podcast, Healin, and listened to several episodes throughout the week. She interviews professionals who approach childhood trauma in different ways – I’d only been familiar with talk-centered therapy as a way to deal with it. But Karen’s podcast explores other modalities that I was only vaguely aware of, like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). And I was particularly interested in her interview with Dr. Aimie Apigian about “The Biology of Trauma.”
Thinking about Covid made me think of the term “collective trauma.” Here’s to our collective – and individual – healing, as well.