#2: COVID-19, trauma and moving forward from a reality of advisories and orders
In conversation with investigative reporter Rachel Dissell.
edited by Febin Mathew
You can also listen to this issue on the Minor Feelings podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Saavn.
Last week, we looked at the US ICE order informing F-1 and J-1 visa holders, constituting a majority of the international student community, that their visas would be revoked if classes were to go online in the fall. This would have affected universities, students, US immigration, and the economy as a whole, but this week, we were relieved to hear the order was rescinded after barely five minutes into a hearing. Never thought we’d say this but, thanks Harvard.
What’s deeply fascinating and equally worrying is the rollercoaster of emotions around the swift announcement and taking back of a directive as harmful and terrifying as this. Are we to forget this ever happened, brush it off and move on? Does the slapping and rescinding of an order in a matter of no time discount the uncomfortable emotions that came with it? And as Dr.Chang said in issue #1, have we lost, and are we going to lose a lot of possibilities to fear and anxiety?
As we try to move forward from this order, we are still living under the shadow of COVID-19. The collective trauma we suffer from in this time of uncertainty, what with ill-thought advisories, social opposition and being robbed of our usual coping mechanisms, has maintained its pallor. So in this second issue of Minor Feelings, senior journalist Rachel Dissell, previously with the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 18 years, and a former fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, joins us. We talked covering COVID-19, the language of trauma and how people are finding ways to prepare from the psychological fallout of this pandemic. Here’s her latest tip sheet at the Dart Center. You can listen to the whole interview here, on the Minor Feelings podcast.
Q: Could you tell me a little, as far as your observations as a journalist who works a lot on trauma, about how we’re all coping in this new reality governed by advisories and orders that most of us would normally never see in one lifetime?
Rachel Dissell: One thing I was thinking about as a reporter after you reached out to me about this podcast was that we spend a lot of our time asking people to talk about how they feel. In my job as a reporter I have covered a lot of stories that have to do with trauma from a significant life-altering event. We think a lot about how to have those conversations. I’ve also talked to people about things like systemic trauma, about how things over time have affected their life decisions. And when COVID-19 happened, I realised that this is a conversation we’re having constantly in ways we didn’t expect and it’s hard to process all those feelings as rapidly as they are happening. One thing that makes it difficult is we have so much uncertainty right now. Information, alerts and news and science is coming at us fast, and all of it is coming at us in this uncertainty of, we don’t know when things will become steady again – you don’t want to use the word ‘normal’ or ‘normalise’, because a lot of the things are amplifying things that were already going wrong. That layer of uncertainty is playing over everybody’s lives in some way or another, the circumstances of each person are unique, but the uncertainty for all of us in having to make decisions is not unique. It’s hard to talk about because in conversations I’ve had with people, they don’t want to keep bringing it up because it’s painful to not know what’s going to happen next. For some people it’s “Where am I going to get enough food to feed my family this week?”, and for other people, they were at the beginning of a new life, where they were getting their first job or attending college for the first time. And all of those things have been put on pause, I think that’s bringing up a lot of feelings that we don’t even know how to discuss and don’t have the language to discuss properly.
Q: I want to pick on one particular thing that you talked about, about language, not having the language to express that certain feeling. From your reporting and from the journalism that you’ve done, I’m curious to know the multiple ways in which people process trauma and express that trauma through a language that everybody can understand. How has that played out during COVID-19?
RD: I don’t know if we’ve really gotten to the point yet where people are expressing the long term language of how a trauma might affect them. What we’re hearing from most people right now is frustrations over the lack of choices that they have – either the lack of information or too much information to process. So people are reacting to each individual thing that comes at them. So what we’re hearing from people now is, “I’m exhausted,” or “Why don’t people understand,” or maybe on the other side of that, of people who are trying to find resilience, saying , “I’ve used this time to spend time with my family today, and we have a lot of uncertainties, but we’re getting through it one day at a time.” So people have language to talk about this based on whatever experiences that they’ve had.
That is really as far as people can go. I was out in a neighbourhood, in Cleveland yesterday, where some non-profit workers were doing outreach, and were asking people how they were doing. I didn’t hear anybody the entire time we were walking around talk about anything one week from now, or two weeks from now, or anything about their futures. I think that’s interesting because people often like to talk about future plans, and it’s not something that they’re able to do right now. I think sometimes, being in a holding pattern is the best we can do, because if you let down your guard and start thinking about what the impacts might be on the future, those feelings can get very overwhelming. And the people that I have talked to that are thinking about that, they’re often very emotional. Because they don’t have answers about what will happen, what their lives will be like, whether they can go back to work, whether they’ll lose their business, and sometimes it’s easier to avoid those emotions in the short term.
Q: As a journalist, what do you think are some questions or points of view that are missing or falling through the cracks, particularly with regard to how we’re not sitting with these emotions of anger or frustration?
RD: So I’m a journalist who’s done a lot of reporting that has to do with data, and I’m a big proponent of using data and knowing what it means, but in this instance, I’ve really reverted more to my narrative roots, and tried to talk to people in situations and let them describe for me how things are affecting them specifically. So, I’m trying to stay a little bit away from, “Oh, tell me how that feels,” but more like “Describe your situation for me right now.”
I was talking to a woman today that runs a childcare center in Ohio in a rural area, and by letting her specifically get into the details of how the situation has affected her as a childcare provider, and as a person who’s also running a business that’s really struggling right now, it opened up these specific ways in which it affected her in terms of trying to balance caring for small children that need her social and emotional support, but also being exhausted because she’s working from 6 in the morning until midnight trying to do this job that it feels like nobody is understanding or appreciating how important it is right now. There’s not a lot of funding to keep her afloat, families have to work, but she has reduced ratios of kids that she can take in because of COVID-19.
But those kids need so much support when they come because they’re frightened by everything that's going on, and she’s trying to make it normal for them. And just hearing her describe that and being responsible for all that, I mean, you can just hear in her voice the emotion that was coming out. And she didn’t have to say how she felt, you could really hear it.
As a journalist it’s going to be my job looking at that story to demonstrate to people that policies and decisions about what money is spent is not just about these data points. It’s about people, like this woman, who is trying to do her best to get through this time but feels like her needs and the needs of the people she serves are not really being considered in the larger question, in the larger context of the situation. She’s wondering, “How will we survive this?” And so I think doing that is important, because I am struggling to figure out how to use data to show what’s going on now.
I also think that we're hearing this from folks that haven’t gone through this type of thing before, so a lot of people I’ve written stories about over the years – they’re not strangers to trauma. When I’m talking to them, sometimes it’s just the latest trauma in their lives, they’ve had many. And I’ve found that a lot of the people I’m talking to now, this is newer to them, to have all of these things happening, and in some ways, it can make it a little more difficult because they don’t have the same experience or coping mechanisms to know how to deal with it.
Q: We’ve seen people find ways to use technology a lot in their coping mechanisms as a response to all of this trauma that’s playing out. What are some very notable instances you’ve found in your life, in your reporting, that people are trying to make the most of, that can pave the way for healing in the future?
RD: One of the things I was thinking about is that we're using the word ‘coping’ right now, and to me coping in the way that I’ve thought about the word – it’s not a permanent thing. Coping is supposed to be a temporary way to deal with something – to calm, to deal with something until something more permanent can be done. So I think we’re all in this suspended state of coping right now and we haven’t been able to get to what would be a more long term processing of what’s going on. Early on, during COVID, I was laid off from my job in April and I was doing a number of freelance things, things I could do to keep myself busy and afloat, and I ended up doing a series of stories that weren’t really news stories? They were more utility stories about funerals and planning and grief and loss because everything had changed right about then. People couldn’t have funerals, they couldn’t go into hospitals and say goodbye to loved ones. So I ended up talking to all these experts about grief and loss and coping, and one of them told me that everything we’re doing right now is a stop gap. Everything is temporary. It doesn’t mean that it replaces what we need to do. So she said, temporarily they were doing grief counselling for people over the phone or over the computer. But that was not a replacement for the in-person contact they would have with people where they really would work on their grief and loss in a hands on way. And she said, I’ll do this because we need to do it this way right now, but I need people in my office sitting across from me so we can process these things together because it just doesn’t happen the same over a computer.
Another person told me that they were having a real struggle with funerals, because when things were done virtually, or people didn’t get to have their regular mourning rituals, that things still felt very unresolved. So they were trying to come up with ways that throughout the year as the situation changed, that people could still walk through that process they normally had when they lost someone. When they were surrounded by people and surrounded by support. So they could take those different steps in healing that weren’t really happening at this point, even though we were trying really hard to find ways for them to happen. So that really told me that this is going to be a long term thing, people will have things that they do not fully deal with right now, that 6 months, a year or two years from now will probably bubble up and come down crashing on us. There’ll be this collective wave of unresolved grief and loss, that we tried to cope with but weren’t really able to because of the situation that COVID presented us – being isolated, trying to interact socially, but maybe not being connected emotionally as we need to be to do that kind of work.
Q: We have a section of people who are equally important to the country, who’re against masks, who’re against the way we are currently functioning, and the way we have to function in order to contain the spread. Is the response of the anti-mask movement, how they choose to not abide by these rules and advisories and guidelines - are these responses of trauma more than anything else to coping with this brand new world that we have?
RD: Well, as a reporter I’m always hesitant to make a definition of what all people or why all people are doing something because I think there are probably different reasons. There’s probably a set of folks who don’t want to be told how to make a decision of how to keep themselves safe, and that may be about political beliefs or personal beliefs about freedom, and there’s also folks who might be thinking, “This doesn’t really apply to me. You’re not trying to make things safer for me.” Or they may have a distrust in a system that hasn’t had their health or welfare in the best interests for a long time. I mean, I live in a community where half the population is black, and when I talk to people about this, they often show some suspicion as to why they are being told to do things.
I think that they’re looking to public officials to explain this but they have different levels of trust. And so, I think we have to consider how people are taking in these messages before we decide the reason they are doing something or not doing something.
I also had a conversation online with an individual who has some disabilities, that make it very difficult to wear a mask, and they pointed out that a lot of the guidance on masks has exceptions for people with either breathing, lung or certain heart problems. So I think we have to look at the greater good for everybody, but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore people’s individual situations and reasons for making decisions.
Q: Is there anything you want to add that you think is important for people who’d be listening to this later to think about when they think about COVID-19, trauma or coming to terms with their feelings?
RD: I think that we have to acknowledge that we’re all just doing our best right now, we’re so focused on the day to day decisions that people need that acknowledgement when we get through a day, see what's worked for us instead of what hasn’t. And when I have been in communities that already have had a lot of trauma, and talking to them about my reporting on COVID, one thing I’ve heard again and again is that we cannot focus just on the stories of how difficult, or how horrible or how painful or how traumatic this is. It’s really important to acknowledge that, but if we do not spend as much time talking to people about their resilience, and not just in a surface way, but really telling the stories of how people used the resources they had to help others in the community, to stay connected, to get through things, not just in a policy way – of hey, unemployment exists, or food banks exist, but really what people did to help each other and get through a time like this. We’re kind of doing a disservice if we don’t ask about that as well, and we’re kind of adding to that collective trauma by only focusing on it. If a problem got solved in a neighbourhood, how did it get solved, who did it, what did they have to do? Was it difficult, ok, what did they have to do? And I think asking those kind of questions is really important as well because as journalists, especially when there’s fewer journalists and lesser capacity to cover things , we always tend to go toward the stories that are tragic and traumatic, and we don’t spend time on the aftermath, where things and people start to heal and can talk about how they got there, what got better, and how they fix things.