Maybe you’re among the most fortunate in the coronavirus crisis — your loved ones are healthy and you’re sheltering at home.Yet you still feel emotionally bulldozed by the pandemic. Those feelings of uncertainty, helplessness and exhaustion may be grief, writes Marnie Hunter of CNN Health.
“A lot of people who I speak to, and I would include myself in this, we just feel flattened,” said Phyllis Kosminsky, a clinical social worker in Westchester County, New York, specializing in grief, loss and trauma.
“We’ve lost that sense of certainty, that sense of safety, that sense of predictability and so it stands to reason that all of that leaves us feeling dislocated and unsure about what’s going to happen next,” said Kosminsky, who is president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling.
With more than 120,000 Covid-19 deaths recorded globally as of April 15, people all over the world are grieving the suddenloss of loved ones, and the intensity of those losses is clear.
But grief can come from the loss of anything we’re attached to deeply: the loss of economic stability, the loss of our ability to move around freely, the ability to participate in life’s milestones in person.
“The grief that people have difficulty naming is the sense of loss that we have for all that we thought we were secure in — like the loss of the illusion that we’re in control of our lives,” said Sonya Lott, a Philadelphia-based psychologist with advanced training in treating complicated grief.
“We have to realize all those losses are grief, they are real grief,” said David Kessler, author of “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief,” which he wrote after the death of his 21-year-old son.
Read the full report on CNN here
Related article in Psychology Today
