Your Suffering Is My Suffering
Almost no one has escaped all emotional distress during the COVID global pandemic. Yet, we often feel like we are alone with our feeling; we are not. Our emotional DNA is the same, and your battle is not just yours alone.
The picture caption above warrants pause. Our emotional DNA is nearly the same for us all. It is hardwired. Replicated research has shown that that is global and has evolved universally — that the only thing that differs, the only critical variable is how we express it. This may or may not sound obvious to you, but this fact has never deserved more awareness as much as it has now — during the global pandemic that has now worn on for a year. Over this year, you very likely have felt at least one of these emotions and more — isolation, anxiety, depression, longing, rejection, despair, fear, pessimism. I could go on.
Those can be tough enough to handle on their own. But what makes it much more difficult is when you think you are alone in this battle. That you are the only one feeling isolated or anxious. Because you are far from it. The overwhelming body of evidence shows that emotional injuries are no different than physical injuries in that if something happens to you, it will manifest emotionally the same for almost everyone else. But also that they aren’t dealt with the same. If you break a bone in your leg so badly it cuts through your skin, that is obvious trauma. You see it and so too does everyone else. They take you to the hospital and it is dealt with and prioritized. The association with wound and then treat the wound here is 1:1 pretty much universally.
Not so with psychological ailments. Again, they manifest the same internally — in that respect no different than a broken bone does for us all. Yet we express and display this trauma across a wide range of spectra, and for many this means internalizing, dissociating, compartmentalizing. Indeed, for most, we are rarely willing to share our emotions. All of which means you do not see the injury in others, and others do not see nor can they connect with the injury in you. So you think you are in the fight alone, that your pain means there is something uniquely wrong with you. And within that thought there is often no healing.
What can you do about it? Hopefully realization of this fact is helpful, but for me, growth and well-being has mirrored wonderfully the work I’ve put in. I listen to hours of podcasts per week and read a great deal about mental health and living well. The above I largely learned deal through listening to psychologist, author, and thrice TED Talk speaker Guy Winch. Here is a great starting point.
COVID won’t last forever, but for sadly too many, the emotional pains will linger. Those pains can be greatly mitigated if you express them to others. Even more so when you see they are fighting many of the same battles that you are.