Eric Nelson, Westmont Downtown Lecture: "Stress, Loss and Uncertainty Amid COVID 19"

[Music] good evening my name is mark sargent and i serve as a provost of westmont college it's a real pleasure for me to welcome you to this downtown lecture even though we're not able to meet in the university club as we normally do we're always grateful to be able to share with you some of the faculty and staff and the intellectual resources of westmont college and i always enjoy these sessions i enjoy the interaction and i hope even during this time of the pandemic that you will be able to experience a sense of connection to to westmont at this time i'm happy also to give my greetings on behalf of the westmont foundation which is a co-sponsor of these events and we've been privileged to be their partner for many many years in hosting them before i introduce tonight's speaker i would like to mention that we will have another lecture this semester and that will be on november 19th and enrico manlepig uh who is a professor in our economics and business department will speak on his research on decision analysis and he's done a lot of work with santa barbara community partners and we'll share some things about the work of his decision lab and how he helps organizations work through complex choices and come to decisions so i hope you're able to join that tonight's speaker is dr eric nelson who is the director of our counseling center at westmont he joined us in 2015 after serving previously as a counselor at pepperdine university and then with the department of veterans affairs eric is a westmont warrior but he's also a ucsb gaucho because he graduated from there with his degree in psychology and then went on to complete a master of theology degree and a doctorate in clinical psychology from fuller seminary eric did not choose easy years to begin his career at westmont he joined us at the as the director of the counseling center just in time for a fire for a debris flow and of course the the current pandemic and so normally a counseling center has to deal with plenty of stresses that are in the lives of students while they're going through their transitional years but we've added these significant disruptions and challenges and eric has been a guide not only to students but to our entire community at westmont helping us adjust to some of the challenges cope with some of the challenges and i'm sure you'll get some sense of his spirit as he works with those things there's much that i admire about eric but i'd like to just mention a couple themes right now eric is a very skilled interpreter by that i mean that he can take scientific knowledge uh social scientific research and translate it in a way that's very very accessible and practical for a popular audience he has a way of doing that without a hint of condescension and without losing any of the intellectual quality and substance marvelously gifted in interpreting for us what are some of the practical ways in which we can respond to challenges and you always know that it's richly informed by research that he is doing he's also very honest straightforward and upbeat he does not shy away from talking about the difficult challenges but he always does so in a way that inspires confidence that if we are true to our best selves that we can overcome the challenges we can work through them and we can be individuals that not only survive but individuals that flourish as you'll see he's got a warmth and a graciousness of personality that uh is is one that's very hospitable and and welcoming and helps inspire a sense of hopefulness even in the midst of challenges in short he only informs but he equips people uh he may tell you that the road ahead is a little bit uphill but somehow when i talk to eric i always feel it gets a little leveler as we keep talking and we keep working so it's a great pleasure for me to introduce you to you at this time dr eric nelson the director of our counseling center well uh thank you so much mark i really appreciate that introduction i i feel to be a privilege actually to be introduced by you in any time that you want to introduce me anyway just just sign up please uh thank you for those very kind words i'm really glad to be able to connect with you this evening though i would prefer to be in person i am so glad that westmont is continuing on with this tradition and that even though a pandemic is here here we are and we are continuing what we're doing uh so tonight this is going to be it's going to be an academic lecture in ways but i can't also help myself i'm a clinical psychologist by training and this is the work that i do and so in ways tonight might feel like a little bit of an intervention in your life uh it's a little bit intended to be that way but that's that's the way i work these are the things that i talk about these are the conversations that i have with people in the work that i do here on campus so glad to be here with you today tonight the title is stress loss and uncertainty amidst coven 19 cultivating a mindset to endure prolonged global distress lots of words for that title but the one word that really sticks out to me is that word prolonged and when i was thinking about this title that's the word that really stood out i think back to where we were to where i was back in march of earlier this year and i saw all of these things happening i saw the numbers going up on the charts for it was happening here in the states and i thought this is terrible but i also thought i can do this i can do this until june we'll wrap up this school year things will get back to normal oh how little did we know back then how little did we know when we were attempting to close our borders and keep the numbers out how little did we know how much we would be impacted by all of the the massive changes that are happening in our globe in our society and all around uh my goal tonight and that this is the second part of the title is cultivating this mindset my goal today is is to push us in a direction of of being reflective on how do we think about how we're going to manage this time how are we going to think about how we cope how we respond and and even learning from things that we've done in the past that may or may not have been helpful uh regardless of how you look at this a pandemic is terrible and i'm not trying to dissuade anything from that the pandemic is a terrible thing to have to go through as a world but there are unique unique ways there are different ways of how we respond that might make this a little bit more tolerable a little more survivable for us i do think that many of our ways of responding to pain and suffering historically actually sometimes makes our pain and suffering worse in the long term so i'll talk a little bit about that tonight so how are we going to do this i'll i'll have some slides that come up and you'll be able to follow along on some of the slides but a general overview of tonight is going to be where were we i'm going to start with where were we before the pandemic because that is an important place to start this is not the pandemic didn't happen and we had a neutral blank slate for what was going to happen and how we were going to respond so i'm going to look at where we were before the pandemic and what are the factors before the pandemic that were contributing to the emotional health that our nation was experiencing that the western world was experiencing that our globe was experiencing and then i'm going to talk about where we are now what has been the impact of coven 19 and how does where we were in the past relate to where we are exactly now and and the way i think about it is it's the equation is additive again we we have to take where we were and then we have to add a pandemic on top of it again there was no blank slate uh when the pandemic occurred so it's going to be important to know where we were and how that's informing where we are now and then we're going to move on to where will we go so or and it's in ways the where will we go is kind of a there's a decision point in that how are we going to continue to choose to respond with what's going on for us you may notice when i talk tonight i'm going to use a lot of weeds we this we that what am i referring to i'm referring to wheeze as we as a world we as as a society we as the united states we have santa barbara we as uh westmont community we in our families we in our relationships and even uh well maybe not the we inside of our own heads but even how we internally manage these things uh inside of our own heads on a day-to-day basis so we'll be talking about some of those things let me give you two quick caveats before we jump on into some of these things uh let's not be fooled the pandemic is the pandemic coven 19 is the pandemic that we're facing i'm also recognizing right now and also want to state that there are other pandemics that are going on right now in our society such as what some may call the pandemic of of racial injustice that has been afflicting our nation for quite some time and the response that we've been going through in this period uh another one and i haven't necessarily heard people talk about this as a pandemic but in ways i might feel like it is but the uh political situation that our nation is facing right now with the the complete opposition and vitriol that is going on right now so there are other huge factors that are impacting our emotional health right now and in ways what we talk about today though i'm focusing on the pandemic those will be included indirectly in these talks about how to manage the second caveat i have for you is that i know that coming wherever you're at coming this i don't know where you are i don't know how this has impacted you individually how this has impacted your family maybe it's just been lots of major inconveniences or maybe there's been some serious loss that you've uh faced inside your your family or your community my recommendation is just just be you wherever you're at and i hope that as we talk as i talk through some of these things today that you can be reflective on ways that you've seen yourself respond and those around you respond to this pandemic all right so let's go ahead and let's jump in to where we were i want to spend some time talking about how things were at pre pandemic from an emotional standpoint things weren't necessarily great before the pandemic came along and when we're in this place now where we're at i often times find myself in a lot of people as well we look back oh man if we can only go back to how things were before we want to kind of reach back to the past how things were we want to spend time together we want to be able to go out to eat we want to be able to go to a coffee shop or go to the movies we in a sense idealize the normalcy that was in the past it almost you know the way we're kind of nostalgic about the past it almost reminds me of and this is a ridiculous example but but how when we have a ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend someone that we're dating and we oftentimes look back to the past when we're maybe lonely after a breakup and we think man things were really good back then i really missed those times back then even though we forget about all the difficulty that also came with that difficult relationship from the past so i feel like it's important to look at really where were we before this pandemic when we look back to wanting to go backwards to where we were we oftentimes forget the painful elements that were a part of the past we idealize the past and we want to go back there so uh in ways that there is a new normalcy now to where we are living there's a new normalcy to wearing a mask i think about when i go around now in the beginning of the pandemic i would forget my mask all the time now i never do if i don't have my mask i feel like there's something like i'm missing something very critical uh we watch you know i'll watch a movie these days and i'll see people congregating together and i'll be like wow remember when we used to do that that seemed so long ago so it makes sense that oftentimes we idealize the past and want to go back however long before the pandemic i would also i would often have conversations with folks when people find out you're a clinical psychologist they come to you oftentimes and say what's going on so before the pandemic i have lots of people come and talk to me like what's going on with the emotional health in our nation what is going on with the kids these days why are they seeming so anxious why are the adults seeming so anxious and so overloaded and so stressed out and a lot of times people would use the word epidemic people would say hey i feel like we have an epidemic of emotional health problems previous uh to the pandemic occurring technically there wasn't an epidemic of mental health issues an epidemic oftentimes implies exponential growth in terms of emotional health issues it's not quite the case however when we do look back previous to the pandemic there were a lot of issues and anecdotally i imagine many of you would agree with me you know i go to a cocktail party and that's the question that people want to ask why is this happening what's really going on why are people so anxious and upset these days what i want to show you is uh and i have some slides here to talk about that shows it reflects a little bit of where we were before the pandemic came apart or came to us here so and these are slides from the national alliance of mental illness and these are some statistics about where things were at before the pandemic and as you can see here it says you are not alone that one in five u.s adults experience a mental illness one in 25 of u.s adults experience serious mental illness so that's where the mental illness is so significant causes dramatic impacts on that individual's ability to function and have a job and have relationships dramatic problems next out on there 17 of youth between the ages of 16 and 17 experience in mental health disorder what are some other things here within any 12 month with and you can see on this next slide here that the 12-month prevalence of any mental health illness that that within a 12-month span 19 of adults will report experiencing a mental illness and if you look down that chart it goes all the way up to 37 of lesbian gained bisexual adults will report feeling or experiencing a mental illness at some point within a 12-month period that's a lot of people it's a lot of people for a supposedly very developed nation uh when we look at this chart here of of what is what are the mental illnesses that we see by and large it has to do a lot with anxiety when we look to the past depression was was far more prevalent but now anxiety has really taken center stage for what people are dealing with and there is a significant impact that the that mental illness that emotional health issues have on our society uh we see and i'll note a couple of these things on this this screen here but there's 20 percent of people who are experiencing homelessness also have a serious mental illness uh so i'll skip over this one 70 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have at least one mental health condition so there's significant implications based on some of these things uh one in eight of all u.s emergency department visits are related to mental and substance use disorders one in eight when i think about the er i think broken arm maybe someone's really sick no a large percentage of those have to do with mental illness and these are emergencies these aren't just like i'm not really feeling well these are emergencies that are happening in terms of our world depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide that's that's substantial and depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy one trillion dollars each year for lost productivity so i think it's an understatement to say that uh that mental health emotional health was was challenging before the pandemic came along what else is all that i'm not going to throw tons of more data at you but but i'll just say uh and i have another slide to discuss this uh pre-pandemic findings for the youth we do know that there was increasing prevalence in mental health disorders for our youth uh from they did some research from 2009 to 2017 and we saw a 52 increase in depression for youth within a one-year period and i think the actual stat was it went from 8.7 up to 13.2 percent of youth in the study within that window of time similar and even more dramatic for for young adults a 63 increase and they their numbers went from 8.1 percent to 32 percent we're reporting an increase in depression so definitely there's an increase in what's going on with adults we see a little bit more of a stagnant prevalence so not as dramatic but we also see that in suicidal ideation thoughts of suicide wanting to end one's life that is increasing those numbers were 3.77 percent of in this study that was done in 2012 they went back in 2017 those numbers increased to 4.19 it's 10.3 million adults who are regularly having thoughts about not wanting to live it's really really significant again safe to say that there was a lot going on before the pandemic happened for us to be where we are at right now so you know again as we go back to that question i talked about you know i'll go to a cocktail party or whatnot and people will say what's going on here why is this the case there are a host of reasons but i want to talk about one in particular tonight because i think this one will inform how we choose to respond now uh when we talk about uh the etiology of the mental health landscape like why is this happening i'm gonna build off of of uh an individual name named philip cushman um and i believe that when we look at at some of his theories about why things are the way they are it's going to give us a step to be able to think about what we can do when things are really bad right now and all this is difficult because you know as our nation has developed you would think that with all these technological advances that life would be easier i think about it even with my cell phone i think my cell phone it's got i got all these great apps on it but why is my life just more and more complicated that's oftentimes the way it is for our emotional health as well so let me jump into this idea uh from philip cushman he calls this his theory is the theory of the empty self so in order to understand where we have been in the past it's good to know about this theory about why things might be the way that they are and previously before world war ii back in the day uh identity individual identity how someone saw themselves was formed and informed by community so an individual knew themselves in their relationships to other people and so people individuals would identify themselves as like a son or a father they would identify themselves as as a citizen of a nation and that's where they got their identity from they would understand themselves as as a religious uh individual who was adhering to a certain community of believers that's there were communal goals and those communal goals the affiliation that's what gave people their meaning as it was the people that they were with but the landscape started to change through the industrial revolution through the post-world war ii economy the landscape started to change and different values in the nation started to rise up values like industrialization uh where we saw that the that society started to push more for producing and producing and producing and building and building and building we also saw a lot of urbanization where people are leaving the farm or leaving the rural communities moving to the cities to be a part of this growing production we saw secularism starting to rise up in those times where there was more of a question about tradition and more of a question about previous thoughts of all this kind of communal uh sharing of ideas let's understand the individual what the individual wants and needs and then that leads of course right into individualism where people became hyper individualistic that pursue yourself pursue your dreams pursue what makes sense and and means things to you and this combination of factors according to philip cushman led us towards this individualistic self and how can we describe the individualistic self the individualistic self seeks personal fulfillment in an internal process personal fulfillment through an internal process so i become fulfilled in my life by filling myself up with other things whatever that whatever that might be uh for a lot of us it's career or personal advancing that i am who i am by by taking on these different roles and by consuming these different things to make myself feel better it becomes more about my own individualistic identity and what's fascinating in this time is at the same time while the focus left the community and became more about the individual that this is right at the same time when things like advertising and self-improvement started to to really expand we saw at the same time since post-world war ii uh electronic and print media going you know the technology was advancing so quickly and what started to happen was the economy started to roll forward very quickly and that individuals began to see themselves growing by fulfilling their own individual needs there were industries like cosmetics and the diet industry and the electronics industry and even the self-help industry and people were starting to find hey if i reach out to these things i temporarily feel better if i look better this is great and so things began if i do these things i will feel better about myself that's where the push started to go and what phillip cushman contends is that this leads us ultimately to an empty self this is a hyper individualistic consumer-based fulfillment that is ultimately insatiable and unsatisfying and in a sense because it is very consumeristic as we know when i'm hungry i eat something i feel good but soon later i'm hungry again and i must consume something again to feel better and so he talks about that this has created a systemic empty self or a void where we consume we consume we consume but we nonetheless the emptiness prevails and so we just have to keep on consuming to feel better about ourselves and maybe that's how we look who we're married to the job that we have maybe we feel bad and so we eat or we distract ourselves we consume to feel better to feel okay about ourselves we're constantly seeking individual fulfillment but not finding it so we keep on pushing it i see this a lot in college students who are constantly seeking who am i what is my identity i must find who i am and so they seek and try to fill themselves with all these experiences which is not necessarily bad but the focus again is filling this empty void and unfortunately uh and i tell this to a lot of students i work with once you find out who you are you oftentimes go on and then the emptiness comes back when you're in your mid-20s and like now who am i and what am i who i'm what really defines me so very very critical and and what what uh phillip cushman would say is that we are societally constructed to be a disappointment to ourselves because that then feeds us need to constantly be filling ourselves up uh there is an author an article i read recently by aaron fried is the name of this individual and he works with a jewish organization and he was using philip cushman to talk about philip cushman wrote these this concept of the empty self back in the 90s uh the 1990s and this author came in and said and this is a great quote he he made philip cushman's ideas relevant for now he says one can't help but note the pervasiveness of the empty self as described by cushman that it may be even greater in this century now than in the last with all of our online hyper marketing of consumer goods the constant emergence of new technological gadgets the diminishing face-to-face social contact in favor of social media and the reported increase in narcissism all of that which has been said to relate to the concept of the empty self so uh in ways we are continuing to fill ourselves up in ways that that leave us not prepared to handle the real life stresses fundamentally i believe because of this intimate into self that we experience we just aren't equipped to handle major pain major suffering when it happens and what i mean by that is that this emptiness is real that we feel and what we are inclined to do in our societies when we don't feel well we do something about it we fill ourselves up with something we take a medication we do an identity we have an identity crisis and we try to find ourselves in a whole new different thing we just don't do well with negative emotion when suffering happens which makes sense i don't like to suffer either but we oftentimes find ourselves in these cycles of doing things to help ourselves feel better we avoid our emptiness by by constantly consuming and we've cut off ourselves from negative emotion because we don't like it uh when i look at millennials you know in individuals who are maybe in their 40s and younger that age group 40s and younger how i see this playing out they don't like negative emotion i don't either i'm a millennial myself and so what we do is we numb out we distract ourselves we consume these things to numb out those pain the pain that we don't want to experience and sometimes it works you know when i binge watch oh i don't typically bend but when we watch a show or whatever it is or even an hour of a show i definitely do that it feels great we feel a little bit better even if we've been really overwhelmed but when the rubber meets the road when things get really hard that doesn't really work as much like in a pandemic for individuals like generation x and older individuals we actually see similar patterns where they don't want to deal with the negative emotion either they've learned the same they've been raised in the same kind of uh economy of of of self where they fill themselves up and what i see in older adults or generation x and above really is that there's a lot of pull yourself up by your bootstraps don't don't sit in that emotion don't cry uh life is hard but you got to just keep on moving you got to be stronger all those messages of shutting out and just moving on and moving forward so filling ourselves filling that empty self didn't work in the past where we were in the past emotional health was was troublesome and we had this empty self when we tried to fill it up didn't work that is still present now and that's what i'll transition to is is where are we now and what have we seen in terms of the impact of covid on our emotional health uh well here we go systematically we've seen increased levels of stress increased levels of loss and uncertainty in our nation stress has been all sorts of directions from financial security we know financial insecurity is one of the most stressful things that we experience at any time in our lives there's been a lot of financial insecurity these days there's also the stress of the daily drag of adjustment of constantly adjusting to these small things there's also the parenting complexities if you have kids or you have older kids young kids doesn't matter all these extra complexities i think about all the zoom calls that i've had where there is another staff member or faculty member shooing away their kid in the background and trying to juggle taking care of a five-year-old getting a five-year-old to do their own zoom call while you're on your own zoom meeting or i think about this is a ridiculous one but i think about my own self and my own practice i i have a private practice and i run it in my garage and i i was in the middle of a session and my cat who also hangs out in the garage just came over and bit me right in the middle of a session which is a ridiculous experience but these are all of these things i'm in my garage my cat bites me these are all the things that we carry and it's a summative effect of all these different weights that we're carrying so there's a lot of excessive stress and then there's loss and loss is ugly right now we are grieved some people are grieving very significant losses and i'm talking about loss of loved ones but not just that loss of time with people loss of uh significant moments like graduation weddings funerals sports which are important which help us get by sometimes by being able to distract ourselves with sports even even death where people have been dying alone because of the pandemic because we can't they cannot be exposed to anyone else uh there's isolation and social confinement there's a lot of loss that comes from not being able to see people so we're grappling with loss and we're also grappling with significant uncertainty there's very much ambiguity about the future when are we going to return to normal i've just given up uh anticipating when it's going to be because we really don't know there's uncertainty about the fear of death for self or for others there's uncertainty that comes from the news it's so dramatic um so polarizing it's hard to know really where we're going and what's actually happening so these are some of the main factors that are impacting where we are now and as we'd expect uh there are many ways that this has impacted our our community there are findings from early studies that are showing that there is a very significant emotional impact on people right now give you a couple stats here i think these are important a kaiser family foundation tracking poll found that this was done in about mid july was that 53 percent of adults in the united states report that their mental health was uh negatively impacted due to worry and stress over the coronavirus 36 of those individuals talked about difficulty sleeping 32 percent had problems eating eating too much not even enough because of all the anxiety and stress 12 reported excessive increases in substance use another 12 percent uh worried about excessive stress that made it so they were unable to function as well as normal we're also seeing that there's a significant impact on women that there's a bigger impact on women and and some of that people think uh is due to some of the unique uh dual roles that women have where they're oftentimes working this is not always the case but working a career and also doing a lot of the the uh raising of the children as historically has oftentimes been the case that's particularly impacting women with small children we've seen stats that sheltering in places may have made things harder for people we have seen that covid is not an equal opportunity pandemic that there are some people that are experiencing tremendous loss obviously but there are certain groups of people that are experiencing more loss than others i talked about women i've also taught people that have lost their jobs in this time there are also individuals who have had financial insecurity in the past or low-income individuals are experiencing even more so threat about their own ability to provide food for their families so those who were maybe suffering or struggling before are doing so even much more so it's not an equal opportunity agent of distress so we know that cobit is making an impact but what what is unique about this you know why why is it the case why are we experiencing it in the ways that we are and again this is going to help us think about how we respond to this we know it's making an impact a pandemic is is a natural disaster and a disaster is something that causes a disarray in our lives that's what it does and no amount of planning or preparation can prepare us for for a disaster right like i'm sure we in california we fortress our buildings with earthquake proof rebar or whatever it is i'm not a structural engineer but we do things to try to uh protect ourselves but but but nonetheless the disaster occurs and it overruns even our preparations we think about that with fires and floods and hurricanes uh to better understand the pandemic though sometimes it can be helpful to look at some of these other things that that our nation has faced even recently we look at things like 9 11 and when 9 11 happened one in 10 adults in new york city showed signs of major depression after uh immediately after 9 11 and for some time afterward not just the day after but for some time afterward 25 percent of individuals in new york increase their substance use after uh 9 11. we've seen that similar kind of findings with even hurricane katrina i mean there's a significant impact of natural disasters on us what natural disasters do we're in our our our lane doing our life and it completely upends everything of course it's going to be difficult but there is something that's unique about our pandemic about what we're dealing with a pandemic is in and of itself uniquely taxing because this is just not a one-time event a pandemic is an ongoing threat so it's like having an earthquake within having an aftershock every single day and any day for months on end afterwards the there is an ongoing perceived threat there is an inconsistency in information and i'm not this is not any comment about the news in and of itself but we really just don't know what's happening and people are trying to figure it out but we really don't know right we really i think that's if anything this has showed us our human frailty so we really don't know and then there's this significant uncertainty about the future we're trying to rebuild but you know after an earthquake it's clear we need to rebuild that building right now what what more is going to be the fallout and oftentimes the fallout right now is invisible we don't really know what it looks like but it's more like stress and financial issues which are a little bit more difficult or a lot more difficult to repair than a building you know itself so it makes sense that this is impacting us and there's a uh a clinician by the name of see if i can remember ann mastin she's a psychologist at the university of minnesota she talks about this she has this concept of our surge capacity you know i used to work at circuit city over here on state street back in the day when it used to be there and i would sell tvs and i was all about you know we always had to sell like this surge protector you know case there's electrical storm surge would you know could fry your tv if you don't have a special plug and uh and what happens is as humans we have in a sense that search capacity we can handle when things are bad in a moment but what's happening in this time and i'll let uh i have a quote from ann massen here that this emergency phase has now become chronic it's normal in situations of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and feel ups and downs to feel like you're depleted or experience periods of burnout in this time this assert our normal surge protector is fried at this point because it just keeps going on and on and on this is not an acute situation this is a prolonged one so before i i move us in a direction of oh well now what now what do we do here let me just recap where we've been it's a lot of information i want to make sure we're on the same page uh before the pandemic emotional health in the u.s was it so great in the western world it wasn't so great looking at philip cushman's work uh even though there's been lots of technological advances in ways we've cultivated an empty self a self that responds to the emptiness we feel by consuming more and consuming more and ultimately this is unsatisfying this is unfulfilling it doesn't satiate our needs and what happens then is that when there are deep stressors that happen or deep problems or sufferings we just don't have the capacity to be able to respond well in those times when things are really hard i can go get a burger maybe feel good for an hour but i'll tell you what in the pandemic that burger is just not lasting as much as it could in the past so that's what's happening we consumed to fill the void and now we're in this very difficult season where we're coping with these unique elements of what a pandemic is so what what do we do well and even before i talk about what we do we know even there's been some some studies that show that people are are understandably going back to filling themselves up there's some research that is showing that that people are tending to cope with the pandemic by behaviorally disengaging by distracting themselves by binging netflix binging social media um we've even seen i think this is fascinating we've even seen issues with with high achievers high achievers are people that oftentimes fulfill their own need to be important or whatever it is to to keep achieving they kind of get depend on achieving it's hard to achieve sometimes in a pandemic when lots of things come to a halt and so we're seeing an emptiness come from that as well with a lot of people there's some studies that are starting to show that so it's a difficult season uh how now do we respond to this how now shall we respond uh and and how and i want you to think about this too how do we respond for ourselves how to respond for our relationships our family our organizations we aren't designed to handle this prolonged distress but what are some things that we can learn even today and how we're going to respond to some of these things so where are we going and where can we go right now it's about finding a different approach to stress loss and uncertainty knowing what we know that has not worked how can we respond in ways that reflect a more adaptive mindset one of the best places i feel like we can go is to go to the past is to look back on what people have done historically in the past uh things are hard now they are but people obviously in the past have gone through tremendous adversity tremendous plagues and catastrophes and one of the areas i feel like we can really learn from that we don't oftentimes think about is the concept of laments and laments and if you're unfamiliar with lament lament is you know a short definition of it is it is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow and a lot of us these days are unfamiliar with that term laments it's it's oftentimes tied to religious texts you oftentimes see it in religious texts that word lament which i find interesting because oftentimes when we try to figure out our own things in our own power and it doesn't work we oftentimes go back to our religion or our traditions to try to understand how to deal with things so it makes sense to me that that lament is the part of oftentimes found in faith uh context if you're unfamiliar with the concept of lament or what that means you're not alone i did a presentation a few weeks ago for a group of individuals and i was talking a lot about laments and i was saying limit this and limit that and eventually someone out of it was like what are we talking about what is lament what is this this concept and i was like oh okay well yeah i'm happy to enlighten you on what lament is and then i try to give a definition and it was bad and i just i was i don't think i really fully grasp this and i think that has a lot to do uh uh with our context and where we're at um interestingly enough you know this this presentation i gave was was to a christian group and uh within christianity within the bible what we see is there there are numerous points of lament in the bible but rarely does this kind of transfer over into christian practice uh there's a book in the bible called lamentations we know that the book of psalms is 70 70 of the psalms which is the book in the bible uh as many of you may know is uh are lament psalms they have lament in them rather seventy percent of the psalms have laments in them so lament is something that is oftentimes overlooked even within religious and communities so it's my contention that as a psychologist and what i've been seeing and what i've been working through what i've been reading lately that i believe that lament is one of the most adaptive ways that we can respond to this global pandemic that we're in and that's whether you have a faith background or not you don't have to have a faith to be able to lament i think it's uh equal uh it's a thing that all people can experience because our society hasn't done well approaching pain and suffering one of the best places that we can learn about how to suffering is probably not learning you know getting tools from where we're at right now but let's look let's look in the past about how other individuals have dealt with with pain and suffering and one of the best places i feel like we can go to is the psalms as i mentioned to you before and if you're unfamiliar with the psalms the psalms is a book in the old testament it's very frequently utilized and used within christianity uh and it is a compilation of songs it's compilation of prayers and there's a real rawness to it because in the psalms and you read it closely there is just a lot of raw emotion of people who are going through trials and tribulations and speaking it and voicing those concerns uh and i'm going to be using when i'm talking about the psalms right now i'm going to be talking about walter bruggeman he's i'm going to be using some of his ideas he is an old testament theologian as well and he draws on paul recur who is a french philosopher and so he draws on on some of his work as well and when we look at the psalms the psalms are about israel and we see the israelites going along in their in their life and they go through different periods of time they face different things of adversity and they're going along and that is in a phase of what what uh of what brugerman might call orientation they're oriented to life things are going okay things are things are normal and then bad things happen as they frequently did in the ancient world as they do now and then that pushes these israelites into a phase of disorientation where things are not wrong and ultimately what we see in the psalms is they eventually get to a place of reorientation i'll talk a little bit about how that might apply to to where we're at right now i'll unpack this a little bit right now orientation is for us to be or what orientation was like for us was life before the pandemic normalcy that is our phase of orientation uh it's our homeostasis that we had before the pandemic came along it wasn't great things were hard but it was normal that's what we experienced day in day out that was our our orientation as as brugerman would call it and then bad things happened for us a pandemic occurred disorientation ensued and understandably we have yearned to get out of it our employees are our empty self that i referenced before we we were oriented we get disoriented and then we want to just go back to how things were at before let me consume let me consume let me go back to where things were at before with all the fear the anxiety that has happened the financial insecurity that has uh been a part of now and then what we see is uh reint reorientation as you can see on the slides here reorientation is what happens when we move forward after a crisis has resolved we are no longer the same reorientation is a different place than orientation which is interesting because i think that that in our context we oftentimes want to go back but when we look at the israelites we look at the book of psalms there is a desire to go forward there is in a sense a looking forward to the newness that will come after the season has passed there is a desire to move forward so we are not meant for disorientation i mentioned that a few times we're not meant for this place that we're in when there's pain and suffering we don't like it i don't like this it's not an enjoyable place to be it's a very difficult place to be these are not our comfort spaces we are creatures that want comfort when it's i think i feel like a few weeks ago it was like i live in no high and it was like 118 degrees or something like that it was very uncomfortable i don't like that you know we don't like pain and suffering we want to go back and our empty self that we're constantly trying to fill up that's oftentimes what we're doing we're trying to go back to the way things were at before but what we see in the psalms is instead of this then in psalms we see it a little bit there is a desire to go back but but what we really see mostly in the psalms is that there is this desire to first of all acknowledge the reality of what is in the present to name the brokenness that's actually being experienced the the psalmist will name the reality of the present and they also act in anticipation of the newness that is to come they're oftentimes looking forward and i love the psalms because they're raw in their pain the pain is very raw they are not numbing out to feel better there's no indication that they're like oh this is too hard i need to go uh start smoking cigarettes or i need to go binge this or i need to go just disconnect from everything there's none of that they push in to the difficulty uh instead of consuming more to feel better they lean into that pain that they're experiencing aubrey sampson is uh an author who talks a lot about lament and one quote from her in one of her books is that lament minds the gap between our current hopelessness and the coming hope it minds the gap between our current hopelessness and the coming hope lamin anticipates new creation but it also acknowledges the painful reality of now and that's i think oftentimes what we fail to do because i think there's two things that happen when we actually do lament we connect with reality in our current state we want to not be in reality when things are difficult i want to shut them down i want to avoid them i don't want to deal with them you know it's the same thing like when i have a headache i want anything to get rid of that headache and that makes sense when i'm in pain i want anything but to be in pain but this pain right now is prolonged it's not going away we have to embrace the reality that we have to to take in the reality of it and that's lament will bring us into the reality of the situation and cry out for the difficulty of the reality that we are facing and the beauty of lament is because we're in reality it also pushes us forward to uh move forward to think about what's next and to where we're going and what's going to happen like that quote said from from that previous author limit minds the gap between our current hopelessness and the coming hope that things will be different the old way is just not working for us in the pandemic where we uh experience pain and suffering we don't like it we feel ourselves by distraction by all sorts of other things that you know it's just it's just a process that that's not really working out well for us we oftentimes fight to get back to where we were before because we want to go back to that normalcy but friends things were not okay back then they really were not until we embrace our honest helplessness that things right now are really a hot mess and that's one of the best ways to put it when we embrace that we're not okay that's where true movement can occur when we really embrace the reality of where we're at another quote from aubrey sampson when we can't live any minute longer with the pain when we're angry or when we're angrier or more disillusioned than we ever thought possible when we can't find the right words for our difficult emotions when our gnawing questions become too much for us to handle that's when we begin to lament we pour into that and we start looking also at the same time forward we voice it we experience it and and it and it doesn't mean let me let me also say this too this doesn't mean that we don't at times also distract ourselves distraction is not a bad thing i'm not over here to to hate on netflix later tonight i will probably find myself watching a little something on netflix after a very busy day that's not necessarily a bad thing at all um but but what it is is it's the it's the the purpose of it are we constantly running to something to fill that void of the pain that we feel are we not being in reality of how hard things are when you know when when things are feeling totally overwhelming are we able to sit in that and own that and be real with how difficult things are at for us it means uh for us that we put down our distractions at times and we recognize how we oftentimes try to fill up the emptiness of ourselves by consuming consuming consuming to feel better it means that we maybe just sit and cry or sit and have a moment of intense anxiety because things are really overwhelming and stressful sure i'd like it for none of us to be anxious but right now you know what sometimes our bodies are going to do that that can be a normal response in these times if we're feeling troubled i'm sorry if we're not feeling troubled if we're feeling okay by feeling like things are pretty fine maybe that's a good indication that we should lean in more into the suffering that's going on not to to keep ashes on ourselves or to to throw ourselves into a state of depression or something but that it's important right now to be connected to the suffering that is happening around us even if we in our own families or in our own lives haven't been us impacted in this it can be actually important uh to embrace this limit to to be real with the situation that's happening for our global community and also a lot of us deny the reality of what's happening so limit can help us to be honest with how things are really going on for us it means that we create a space to own how we're actually doing and we're not just running from thing to thing with the stressors of right now just from thing to thing to feel better minds that says that we own uh that this is really hard that we don't always know what we're doing and we don't always know where things are going and that's okay it's okay right now to really really not be okay it also means that i'm throwing a lot of ideas out here it also means that we avoid simplistic answers that we've relied on in the past we avoid simplistic answers a lot of times when these situations like pain and suffering comes up we want to chalk it up to some escapist thing of like oh well there's a bigger plan here apparently you know oh god's got this in the cards and we say these kind of simplistic things to remove that pain from us or the world's going to hell in a handbasket those things right now are not going to help us be connected to the needs that are present in the world when we resist the need to lament we we lose that that newness that comes that reorientation that occurs that the israelites that the psalmist were talking about in the book of psalms uh from that uh and from that from a psychological perspective is the beauty of lament lament leads us to action because we're too connected to the reality of the present to not respond to not do something about ourselves or to do something about other people lament pushes us into the deep water of pain where we have to look to the future we have to look to moving forward in this and we have to look to where what can we do now in this time when we embrace the reality of it so too when we see the pain when we feel it we're changing we move this this very much dovetails into one of the big things that i use in the therapy that i deal with individuals uh i use this model called act i'm not going to go into details we're almost out of time here but act is very much about making space in our lives for pain we don't like pain we push it away but it's about making space in our lives for pain owning it and even while we do that we also then lean into those things that we do value that even though things are really hard these things are still important to me my family my friends my community my vocation my giving whatever it is my faith these are things that are important to me so i'm going to close by and this is something i do is just some of the work that i do uh i want to give us some some very practical tips i encourage you to think about maybe one of these or two of these that fits for you and these are some very practical tips that are going to fit in line with what i'm talking about of this let's not fill the empty south let's lean into the lament let's uh be richly connected to where we're at right now so what can we do practically as you can see on the slide here number one uh make space and pay attention to the pain not all the time again don't throw yourself into a heap of depression if you don't need to be there necessarily if you're not there already but but be present with the pain if you're having a really hard day take a step back man this is so hard this is so difficult i feel like i'm losing it right now own it name it claim it tell somebody else about it make space and pay attention to the pain as opposed to chasing your tail trying to do all these different things to feel better you have to create you have to create space for it because many of us lead so such busy lives that we just go through our days and and we don't actually think about the pain that we're going through we have to make space for it and think about it it's not going to consume you don't worry being connected to our pain in our lives is not going to it's not going to destroy us it actually helps us that's why people who have things like ptsd can't move forward in their lives without going back to the thing that has hurt them so much number two on here is radical acceptance and radical acceptance is not a it's not liking where we're at it's not giving up but it's completely and totally accepting what we're experiencing that we can't currently change the present even if we don't like our present we we just have to radically i'm just going to accept this for what it is and recognize that i just don't have control over a lot of things right now you know and i i have four little kids right now and let me tell you uh that is a daily reminder to myself when i go home and i'm spent and things are really intense i just have to go back to radical acceptance of this is hard i gotta and that helps me to take a breath that helps me to not fight against uh the things that are already hard and make them worse by fighting against them uh both and thinking what does both ann thinking mean both i'm thinking is basically just in this time we grieve the losses and it's okay to celebrate and good to celebrate the good things that are also happening i have had a lot more time with my family which is incredible which is a gift from a terrible circumstance so at times and i will tell this to people that that i work with that are grieving it is good to grieve and to dive into the pain that we go through and it's also good to recognize the good things that are happening around us to be distracted by our kids to be distracted by even a zoom call with loved ones these are good things both and it's okay to have good things happen right now to pandemic we don't have to feel bad about it be mindful of your distractions that's the next number four on here be mindful of your distractions again it's okay to distract yourself it can be really good you know i'm gonna distract myself later this evening like i said before like it's good to do that but be mindful of it are you constantly running from the pain in order to feel better but through distraction be mindful be aware and lastly expect less from yourself and express less exp uh expect less from others and this sounds this is like so counter-cultural to us right we're always like be your best self give 150 percent right now it's okay to expect less from yourself we are struggling and that is fine and so if it means you have to say no to something in your life if it means you have to own to sell you have to tell someone like a boss hey i'm not doing okay right now i need a little bit of space expect less from yourself but as you're expecting less from yourself also do it for other people for your spouse for your kids for your friends for your boss whoever it is expect less from other people people are fried right now and they may not say sorry after they've come and thrown whatever they're fried about right on your face but but if you can take a deep breath and not let their difficulty kind of flood your life in that moment and you could expect less from the people ultimately things could be a lot easier so let me close here where we were at before as i said clearly things were not okay before the pandemic uh emotional health uh in our nation was not our uh crown jewel necessarily there's a lot of things that have been going on and it seems like a lot of this has to do with this and there's no to no fault of anyone's but a lot of this uh progress that our nation has experienced where we have learned to feel good by focusing on our inner identity by building ourselves up by consuming things that make us feel better it's not all bad there are things positive things that come from that like ambition and careers and good things like that but that's what we were doing in the past and then we come to a pandemic where and as i said in the very beginning the key word is prolonged this thing is prolonged and so it's uniquely taxing on all of us and because it's prolonged our coping strategies in the past of consuming they're just not going to cut it they're not going to cut it they're going to let it lead us to feeling more empty more depressed more anxious all those kinds of things as we move forward into where we're at now moving forward means that we i think means that we lament we dwell in the difficulty of this yeah and we dwell in it not 24 7 but we we own it we own the reality of how things are hard even if it's minor things like your cat biting you in the garage and you're frustrated or you're frustrated in your family whatever it is we own the difficulty of the experiences that we're having we make space for those difficulties and we also look forward to where we are going we lean into our values and what we can control right now and the priorities that we have in our lives when we resist that urge to constantly be looking back i just want to go back to where things were at before now let's look forward let's look forward to how we can be changed and how we can grow in this time i think that's got to be a message for ourselves internally for our families for our communities for our world appreciate this thank you so much for your time have a good night

Channel: Westmont College

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Keywords: Westmont, Westmont College

Id: R_LEb68IUA0

Length: 58min 48sec (3528 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020